Dr Pamela Yong said Upko president Ewon Benedick’s views should be taken with a pinch of salt as the party ‘moved wherever the winds blew strongest’.
PETALING JAYA: A Sabah MCA leader said Upko president Ewon Benedick’s concerns over local leaders from national parties should be taken with a pinch of salt noting that the Sabah-based party has repeatedly shifted coalitions for political expediency.
Dr Pamela Yong said Upko “moved wherever the winds blew strongest”, questioning if the party’s latest move was “just theatrics”.
“What we are witnessing is simply a continuation of an established pattern. So the statement by the Upko president is neither surprising nor new,” the Sabah Wanita MCA chief told FMT.
Ewon had yesterday said that Sabah could lose leverage if voters installed local leaders from national parties as these leaders took instructions from party presidents “across the sea”.
The Penampang MP, who recently resigned as a federal minister and pulled Upko out of Pakatan Harapan (PH), told Malaysiakini that a state government aligned to parties headquartered in Peninsular Malaysia may face conflicting instructions, including when negotiating Sabah’s 40% revenue entitlement.
Yong said that when Upko was in PH, the party dropped the 40% revenue entitlement claim, referring to the time when Sabah PH withdrew its suit against the federal government for its stake.
Ewon was one of the plaintiffs in the originating summons.
Yet, weeks before the state election, they abruptly exit PH and now claim that supporting federal parties would undermine Sabah’s rights, she added.
“If that is truly their conviction today, then Sabahans deserve to ask: where was that conviction when they were in PH? Or is this just theatrics?
“This is just political recalibration, not an awakening of ‘renewed’ principles,” Yong said.
She added that Sabah deserves leaders who maintain their principles regardless of timing or political necessity, and not those who rediscover “Sabah rights” only when the campaign season begins.
Ewon resigned last Saturday, citing his party’s principle to uphold the Malaysia Agreement 1963 (MA63) and Sabah’s constitutional rights as his reason.
He said this was especially in view of the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) review of the Kota Kinabalu High Court’s ruling last month upholding Sabah’s constitutional entitlement to 40% of federal revenue collected from the state.
A day later, Upko decided to withdraw from PH, more than four years after joining the coalition, which the party’s secretary-general Nelson Angang said was made after taking into account its time in PH and the sentiment among Sabahans for local parties to join forces.
However, the AGC has since announced that the federal government would not be challenging the court ruling.
