Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP) supreme council – the party’s top decision-making body – is to meet next Wednesday to discuss its status within the ruling Barisan Nasional.
Confirming this today, SAPP secretary-general Richard Yong (left) told Malaysiakini that all 35 members of the supreme council are expected to be present and decide on the rebel party’s membership in BN.
According to Yong, the right-hand man of party president and former chief minister Yong Teck Lee, the party has been excluded from BN’s supreme council meetings for six successive times over the past few months.
“If no decision is made (by BN supreme council), then we will make the decision ourselves,” he said, referring to the show-cause letter the coalition had issued to SAPP.
BN did not discussed the thorny SAPP issue after sending a show-cause letter to the rebel party for vowing to move a motion of no confidence against the ruling coalition chief, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.
The party’s Sept 17 meeting coincidentally comes a day after the deadline set by opposition Pakatan Rakyat coalition to take over the federal government through defections from BN parties.
SAPP ‘s top leaders have hinted in recent weeks that since the party had not been invited to BN meetings, it has come to see itself as no longer part of the ruling coalition.
The party has two members of parliament and four state assemblypersons, including Raymond Tan, who is Sabah’s deputy chief minister in charge of industrial development.
Political observers nearly all agreed that SAPP is likely to opt out of BN and is expected to swing its support to the opposition Pakatan.
Multiracial SAPP stands a better chance of not only defending its present seats but increasing its haul by pulling out of BN.
If it was to remain in BN, SAPP will be in danger of making the party irrelevant, especially given the mood among voters in urban and suburban areas in Sabah.
“The top SAPP leaders can see what’s happening to other BN component parties as they continue backing the increasingly unpopular policies of the ruling coalition,” said a political pundit.
BBC leaders sold out Sabah, Sarawak
Meanwhile, at a press conference in Kota Kinabalu, party leader Yong Teck Lee (photo, centre) said the infamous Taiwan trip organised by the Barisan Backbenchers Club had turned the participating MPs into a subject of much ridicule and had cast Parliament in bad light.
He said BBC chief Tiong King Sing from Sarawak and Bung Moktar from Sabah should apologise to Malaysians, especially Sarawakians and Sabahans, for what they had done, since they were denying the two states the opportunity to take advantage of the ‘little window of opportunity’ to address the apparent imbalances in terms of development so obvious to these two states.
Although vehemently denied by the organisers, the trip involving nearly 50 BN MPs from Sarawak, Sabah and Peninsular Malaysia, had been perceived to be an attempt to stave off attempts by Pakatan to get them to defect in order to take over power from BN. – (Tony Thien/Malaysiakini)