No Umno, BN, in officially registered GRS

 

Sabah chief minister and GRS chairman Hajiji Noor (second right) with his deputy chairmen (from right to left) Jeffrey Kitingan, Maximus Ongkili and Yong Teck Lee at the Sabah Bersatu office in Kota Kinabalu today.

KOTA KINABALU: Gabungan Rakyat Sabah (GRS) pro tem chairman Hajiji Noor today announced that only four parties are officially part of the newly-registered political coalition.

These parties are Bersatu, Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS), Parti Solidariti Tanah Airku (STAR) and Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP).

Before its registration, GRS comprised Perikatan Nasional, Barisan Nasional (BN) and PBS. These were the same parties that cooperated under a loose pact and defeated the then Warisan-plus state government in the Sabah polls in 2020.

Hajiji, who is also Sabah chief minister, said the absence of Umno and its BN counterparts in the officially registered GRS will not derail its plans of ensuring political stability in the state.

“We are together with Umno and BN in the GRS coalition government,” he told reporters after chairing the first GRS meeting post-registration.

“With the GRS registration, this is a new chapter in Sabah’s political history.”

The GRS pro tem deputy chairmen are PBS president Maximus Ongkili, STAR president Jeffrey Kitingan and SAPP president Yong Teck Lee. Sabah Bersatu deputy chief Masidi Manjun was named the secretary-general.

BN president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi was previously reported as saying BN’s constitution and the Societies Act 1966 does not allow a party to join two political coalitions.

Hajiji said that he was confident that Sabah won’t suffer the same political tussles recently seen in the peninsula, even without Umno and BN in GRS.

“In politics there are many possibilities but what happened in the peninsula is not the same as the situation in Sabah.

“The political culture is not the same,” he said.

Masidi said the ultimate reason behind the formal registration of GRS, is to create political stability, as they wanted to focus on doing actual work for Sabah instead of spending too much time on politics.

Hajiji said GRS will be launched in May.

He said a special committee has been formed to review applications from parties interested to join the coalition, naming former Warisan vice-president Peter Anthony’s Kesejahteraan Demokratik Masyarakat (KDM) as an interested party.

He said that last year, United Sabah National Organisation (Usno Baru) had also applied to be part of GRS. - FMT