KOTA KINABALU: Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP) president, Datuk Yong Teck Lee has described the recent suggestion by Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) president, Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan, for SAPP to knock on the doors of BN as a gross insult to Sabahans.
Yong said that under no circumstances would SAPP ever re-join the Barisan Nasional (BN) before or after the impending general election.
“The fight is not going to be easy but we shall fight on,” he said yesterday in response to a recent suggestion by Pairin, who also is the Deputy Chief Minister cum Minister of Infrastructure Development.
Yong said the people still remember when PBS had to crawl back to BN in 2001, apologised openly to the then Prime Minister, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad at the PBS congress and to the shock of PBS members, declared himself a “secret admirer” of Dr Mahathir.
“Never before have I ever witnessed such self-humiliation by a once great leader who had succumbed to the temptations of power. The great Pairin that we once knew in the 1980s is not the same Pairin we see today,” he added.
Yong suggested that in fact, PBS should be the one to leave the BN since it had failed to fulfil its promise to solve the illegal immigrant issue by last year.
He said the latest ugly revelations at the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) open hearings on the issue of illegal immigrants, the land grabs affecting Sabah natives and one-sided civil service are some of the reasons that PBS has lost its moral cause to fight for Sabah. On the other hand, he said, SAPP had left the comforts of being in the BN government and our leaders resigned their government posts and privileges in 2008 in order to fight for autonomy for Sabah.
“This is the window of opportunity that Sabah has but that the BN leaders, including Pairin, are not doing anything to reclaim Sabah’s rights under the Malaysia Agreement and the 20 Points memorandum.
“SAPP left the BN on September 17, 2008 with our eyes wide open that we will be in the opposition and will have to face the BN giant in the subsequent elections,” Yong added.