SDs mean Shafie no longer trusts his assemblymen, says SAPP president

SAPP president Yong Teck Lee claims Warisan is the ‘ground zero’ of defections, with defectors from Barisan Nasional joining Warisan.

KOTA KINABALU: SAPP president Yong Teck Lee today claimed Sabah Chief Minister Shafie Apdal has lost the plot in “insisting” that his own assemblymen sign statutory declarations (SDs) in support of him.

Yong said the public revelation by some Warisan and Pakatan Harapan members of the Sabah legislative assembly that they had signed SDs to support Shafie as the chief minister showed the latter no longer trusted his assemblymen.

“It is unprecedented that a sitting chief minister, who claims to have a two-thirds majority in the state assembly, has to make his own assembly members sign SDs to support himself as chief minister,” he said in a statement here today.

“The only plausible reason is that Shafie believes that he has lost the support of his own assemblymen.

“Therefore, the existence of these SDs by government assembly members exposes the fact of major underlying problems in the Warisan-led alliance.”

Yesterday, Inanam assemblyman Kenny Chua had denied he had switched allegiance from the Warisan-Upko-DAP-PKR ruling coalition to the opposition by signing an SD.

Chua had said he had signed an SD but it was in support of Shafie and the Warisan-led government, and not anyone else.

Yong today claimed the “instability” of the Warisan-led alliance had been aggravated by the tussle to be the prime ministerial candidate.

He said at the national level, PH parties DAP and PKR supported the national opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim as the candidate.

“But in Sabah, the same parties support the Warisan president (Shafie) as the PM.

“It will not be long before this tension within PH and Warisan come to a final clash leading to the breakup of the Warisan-led alliance in Sabah.”

Meanwhile, Yong said Warisan was is in no position to complain about the prospects of its assemblymen leaving the party.

This is because, according to him, Warisan is the “ground zero” of defections. He said defectors from Barisan Nasional had joined Warisan.

“Indeed, the Warisan-led Sabah government is made possible only because of the defection of elected reps from BN.

“As Warisan has failed miserably to govern and its party president is obsessed with becoming the prime minister, it is no surprise that many of the assemblymen wish to reconsider their political stand in the light of the self-destruction of the PH federal government.”

Yong called on Shafie to deny that before the May 18 and July 13 Parliament sittings, the latter had personally tried to lure a number of Sarawak MPs and other parties to rebel against Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin.

“(Will he deny that) after the last general election, in which Warisan won only 21 out of 60 seats, the party and its representatives had offered posts to BN and STAR assemblymen to defect to Warisan?

“And that defecting assemblymen were also given ministerial positions (in the state Cabinet)?” - FMT