Another Sabah Umno leader says Gerakan irrelevant

Umno Supreme Council member Lajim Ukin is the latest senior BN official to criticise the party and its leaders for being demanding.

KOTA KINABALU: Gerakan leaders in Sabah are getting that familiar, lonely and unwanted feeling within the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition once again.

After coming under a blistering attack by a ruling BN MP in parliament in the past week, more senior coalition members are coming out in favour of pushing aside the weakened party from any direct involvement in Sabah in the next general election.

Umno Supreme Council member Lajim Ukin is the latest senior BN official to criticise the party and its leaders for being demanding.

Lajim, who is is also the deputy minister for housing and local government, said the party and its leaders in Sabah are in no position to demand to contest in the state in the coming election.

“Gerakan should concentrate on the peninsula and Penang … how can the party expand their influence in Sabah if they cannot even take care of their own areas?” he told a local newspaper Friday.

Lajim was responding to Kalabakan MP Abdul Ghapur Salleh’s comment that the party was a failure and its leaders chiefly concerned with their own careers.

Ghapur had on Monday urged Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak not to consider fielding Gerakan candidates in Sabah in the coming election that observers believe will be called anytime between now and early next year.

The Kalabakan MP said the peninsula-based party had no relevancy in Sabah as even Chinese voters, the community they focussed on, despised them.

Calling Gerakan a liability to the BN as a whole, Ghapur also mocked the elected representatives in the party in Sabah as “frogs” who had jumped form other parties so that they could retain their state Cabinet posts.

Warning to Najib, Musa

Gerakan currently has three seats in Sabah which the party gained without contesting in any election. Youth and Sports Minister Peter Pang (Karamunting) was the latest to join Gerakan early this year following Minister of Industrial Development Raymond Tan Shu Kiah (Tanjung Papat) and state Industrial Development Minister Au Kam Wah (Elopura).

Pang had offered to quit his state Cabinet posts after his resignation in September last year from LDP after its leadership declared that the party was finding it difficult to work with Chief Minister Musa Aman, who is also state BN chairman. Musa rewarded him for his support and retained him in his Cabinet.

Tan and Au joined Gerakan in May 2009 after the Sabah Progressive Party, through whom they won their seats in the 2008 election, pulled out of the BN in Sept 2008.

Lajim now claims that there are “too many parties from the peninsula in Sabah …” and such a situation could affect relations among BN component parties.

He warned Musa and Najib to think carefully about how they select candidates for the coming elections saying: “BN can form a government, not choose candidates or parties.”

LDP which had itself come under fire from Umno and a clique within Musa’s circle as well as Gerakan for its outspokenness, has supported Ghapur’s stand on Gerakan and the oblique challenge to Musa.

On Thursday former Libaran MP Akbar Kahan Abdul Rahman also called on Musa not to decide unilaterally or arbitrarily in selecting candidates for the next election.