No return for many-sided Jeffrey

The former vice-president has been in too many parties and has worn too many hats to go back to PKR.

COMMENT

Jeffrey Gapari Kitingan’s many sides have hindered his eagerly awaited return to PKR.

This is the party that comes closest to Jeffrey’s ideals on change and reform, albeit with a “big but”. Not even his brother Joseph Pairin Kitingan’s Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) can hold a candle to PKR

PKR’s Kota Kinabalu division chief, Christina Liew, who hero-worships Jeffrey, has virtually thrown in the towel after nearly a year of trying to persuade him back to the party.

More than once in the past year, Christina had PKR’s “three musketeers” waiting in Kuala Lumpur for her cue to fly to Kota Kinabalu for a face-to-face meeting with Jeffrey. There are no prizes in Sabah and Sarawak for guessing that the three are Johor PKR chief Chua Jui Meng, senior PKR Lembah Pantai activist David Yeoh and former Sarawak PKR adviser Michael Bong.

In the end, Jeffrey had been in too many parties, heard too many promises, witnessed too many “unsavoury” happenings, and been involved in too many activities to be confined to just one party. It is not for no reason that both friends and foes refer to him as the King of Frogs.

Even so, Jeffrey was willing to meet with PKR leaders Anwar Ibrahim and Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, but not to discuss his return to the party. He wanted to hammer out a framework of co-operation among opposition parties in Sabah and Sarawak, but to no avail.

Jeffrey wanted to meet with the opposition leaders from Peninsular Malaysia as their equals, not as a lesser mortal. This is line with his theme that Sabah and Sarawak are equals of Malaya in the Malaysian Federation.

The message from PKR through the three musketeers and Christina was that the Jeffrey-PKR meeting would be confined to one issue: his return to the party, and this time as Sabah PKR chief and Ketua Umum for Sabah and Sarawak. Jeffrey in fact had already been ketua umum for the two states when he was a PKR vice president..

When it appeared that there was no progress towards a Jeffrey-PKR arrangement, if not agreement, Wan Azizah, PKR president, stepped down as Sabah PKR chief and allowed the lacklustre and controversial Libaran PKR division chief, Ahmad Thamrin Jaini, to resume his former position.

The latest development is that two political parties—Parti Cinta Sabah (PCS) and State Reform Party (STAR) of Sarawak—both want Jeffrey to be their ketua umum.

The details are sketchy, but there should be something in the news soon, unless the Home Ministry tells the Registrar of Societies to hold back the certificate of registration on PCS. Jeffrey was supposed to accompany a PCS delegation last week to Putrajaya to collect PCS’s certificate of registration.

International theatre

Jeffrey can be the ketua umum of both the Sabah and Sarawak parties at the same time. That would be in keeping with the many sides of his character. He also heads the Common Interest Group Malaysia (CigMA), an ad hoc NGO, which works in the international theatre in association with Hindraf Makkal Sakthi, and, among others, the Borneo Heritage Foundation (BHF) and the All-Borneo Forum.

The man himself has no intention of forming a political party as long as Sabah is in Malaysia.

For starters, there is the delicate matter of Pairin heading PBS, a party he co-founded in 1984 but did not join until the state election of 1994, just after his release from detention under the Internal Security Act (ISA). Pairin is also huguansiou (paramount chief) of the Dusuns—including the Kadazan or urban Dusun—and the Murut, the original people of Sabah.

Furthermore, the Special Branch is unlikely to clear Jeffrey’s bid for a political party since he stands accused of plotting to pull Sabah out of Malaysia just hours before he was nabbed on May 13, 1991, under the ISA.

Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad himself revealed the plot at one time, but no one believed him. The thinking then was that Jeffrey paid a price for the PBS pullout from the ruling Barisan Nasional on the eve of the general election in 1990. This is the fiction that masks the reality.

Key Jeffrey aides readily concede that Jeffrey needed only 16 hours to make Sabah’s pullout from Malaysia complete. That was the time that Kuala Lumpur need to react with what military muscle it could muster. He was just mere hours from the countdown. Jeffrey himself neither denies nor confirms his purported role. He can only give an all-knowing smile.

Apparently, many countries in Asean—in particular Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore—as well as Australia, the United States and Britain were “unofficially” in agreement with the pullout “to take down Malaysia more than a peg or two”.

This version can only be confirmed by the likes of WikiLeaks, if it has access to such documents or by Jeffrey himself if he cares to pen a book on the subject.

So far, Jeffrey’s accounts on his ISA detention have raised more questions than answers. He has skirted around the issue.

Intense debate

What does Jeffrey want that PKR or other parties cannot provide?

Patently, Jeffrey is all about Sabah and Sarawak rights, which are not the focus of Peninsular Malaysia-based political parties. The Borneo-based political parties, meanwhile, are all too closely tied up with Peninsular Malaysia-based political parties to strike out on their own.

The debate on Sabah and Sarawak rights has been getting increasingly intense of late in the interior, largely through the efforts of the United Borneo Front, a NGO founded single-handedly by Jeffrey despite others claiming credit as co-founders. When UBF is not out in the interior, its activists and cadres are flooding Facebook and e-mails with its messages. There is a Borneo Spring in the making here along the lines of the Arab Spring.

Jeffrey’s aim now is to translate the across-the-political-divide gains made by UBF into seats in Parliament and the Sabah and Sarawak state assemblies. He needs only to snatch the Dusun seats from Umno and the Dayak seats from the Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu (PBB) for the state governments in Sabah and Sarawak to implode.

That would be the Third Force coming into its own and striking a balance between BN and Pakatan Rakyat.

STAR and PCS would be a start, but these parties need to work with and find common ground with the other political parties in the opposition. Jeffrey’s tragedy is that his own people often accuse him of surrounding himself with the wrong people.