Sabah’s Ansari quits PKR

Tuaran PKR chief Ansari Abdullah is deeply disappointed that the party did not follow the “due process” in suspending him.

Queville To, FMT

KOTA KINABALU: Suspended PKR Tuaran chief Ansari Abdullah today announced he has resigned from the party which he joined 14 years ago.

In a brief statement posted on his Facebook this morning, he noted that he had decided to quit politics much earlier, but out of respect to the requests from friends, he withheld the announcement until today.

“I have lost faith in the party’s leadership. I am now suspended as a member without any time period. I did not receive a ‘show cause letter’. So much for justice and due process,” he added.

“I criticised the leadership since they were wrong in allowing 2/3 of the seats in Sabah to be contested under Parti Keadilan’s (PKR) symbol by non-members in the form of APS (Angkatan Perpaduan Sabah) and PPPS (Pertubuhan Pakatan Perpaduan Sabah),” he explained.

He went on to note that both APS and PPPS lost in all the parliamentary seats they contested and each won a state seat (Tamparuli and Klias).

Ansari, a practising lawyer, has also had a troubled relationship with other PKR members and leaders in the past.

In the run-up to this month’s elections on May 5, Ansari made a preemptive attempt the day after the dissolution of Parliament to push through the seven divisions’ list of candidates which included himself for the Tuaran constituency.

When his ‘proposal’ was shot down, he accused Pakatan Rakyat de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim of not being sincere in wanting to return political autonomy to Sabah when PKR rejected a move by him to nominate seven candidates to contest for PKR.

He said the rejection of three-quarters of the candidates proposed by the seven divisions in the Sabah west coast north zone, showed that the party’s headquarters was adamant about maintaining control of the state from Kuala Lumpur.