Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News
Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News |
| Posted: 03 Jun 2011 02:16 AM PDT According to Chief Minister Musa Aman and the Barisan National led by him, Sabah has witnessed a social, political and economic paradigm shift in the last eight years under his rule. Musa Aman contends that this shift will be reflected in new political parameters with development as the key factor, pushing aside considerations based on Kuala Lumpur's dominance and interference that have for decades dominated the State's electoral politics.The Barisan National's coalition partners in the state, largely shares this perception, though some sections in the party are sceptical. The Pakatan Rakyat and the SAPP led by Taiko Yong Teck Lee, which constitute the main opposition, dismiss the "paradigm shift" premise as baseless and assert that these elections will, as always, be dominated by "Sabah For Sabahan" (Sabah Rights) sentiments and community considerations and illegal immigrants. "Sabah for Sabahan" sentiments and illegal immigrants, of course, have traditionally dominated elections in Sabah. Elections have been fought and won on the basis of careful manoeuvreing of "Sabah for Sabahan" sentiments coupled with some deft social engineering via illegal immgrants. This time, however, a significant number of political activists and observers agree with the Chief Minister's assessment. Governance under the Barisan National government in the past eight years, they say, has changed society and politics in the State, allowing the urge for "development" to sideline "Sabah for Sabahan" considerations. At a ceramah recently, Musa Aman said: "In the past eight years, the whole political grammar of Sabah has changed. The beginnings of the same were seen even in the 2008 polls when Sabahans decidedly voted for a change and gave Barisan National 59 State seats out of the 60 State seats and 24 Parliament seats out of 25. Over the past eight years, more and more sections of society have joined that process on account of the policies and governance we had adopted and the net result has been the concretisation of the change in political grammar." He added that despite this obvious change, his principal adversaries, Anwar Ibrahim, Lim Kit Siang and Taiko Yong Teck Lee and even Chong Kah Kiat now, were clinging to the "old syllabus" based on sentiments, confrontation, race permutations and combinations. "They will soon be brought to realisation with a thud," he said. A large number of people in and outside the State endorse his view. They believe that development has been brought firmly on the State's radar and that nobody would want to upset that. However, the other side sees the Chief Minister's claims as just so much rhetoric. For Anwar Ibrahim, Lim Kit Siang and Taiko Yong Teck Lee, the "development" story is a creation of a pliant media rather than a realistic assessment of the situation on the ground. As for the UMNO, which heads the ruling Barisan National at the Centre, it is ready to admit that the State has witnessed better development under Musa Aman than under earlier governments since 1963. But it asserts that this was made possible by the substantial funds that Kuala Lumpur made available, the political stability and the security factor "The Feds" has provided his government.
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