The other issue I would like to differ with JJ is his adoration of the late Tun Mustapha. Much of what he believes in about the man is probably hearsay. No doubt the late Tun was a very nice gentleman and he had a lot of quite fanatical supporters. (He even turned up at my father’s funeral in 1985). Sadly, most of these supporters were drawn from very backward pools of people notably from areas such as Usukan, Semporna, Kunak, Sipitang, Beaufort, Kudat, Pitas, Kinabatangan and pockets where so-called Muslims lived. The late Tun did not enjoy wide support amongst the non-Muslim Bumiputras and the Chinese. This was reflected in the 1976 general election results when USNO retained all 20 Muslim-dominated seats but lost all the rest to the newly-formed Party Berjaya.

In the 1981general elections, Berjaya won by a landslide, leaving USNO with only 3 seats, Usukan, Semporna and Banggi (Tawau was won by the late Stephan Chan). These 3 seats were inhabited by the most backward, uneducated, and neglected group of people then. However, it must be remembered that the late Tun did not play any part in that general election. He was not even living in Sabah at that period of time.

In 1985, when Datuk Harris Salleh decided to call for a dissolution of the legislative assembly, the late Tun decided to make a comeback. The scene at the old airport in Tg Aru, for those thousands of USNO supporters who were there, must have been completely unbelievable. The Tun’s long, black Mercedes bearing registration number J1, were pushed all the way back to his house.

People were very angry with Datuk Harris over his treatment of Joseph Pairin Kitingan,Tambunan and the issue of Labuan becoming a federal territory. The late Tun saw an opportunity to make a comeback and seats were ripe for the taking from Berjaya.

USNO managed to capture 16 seats, PBS 25, Pasok 1 and Berjaya was left with 6.

After the annulment of the late night swearing-in of Tun Mustapha at the Istana, PBS formed the government. Riots broke out soon after.

The reasons for the riots and subsequent curfews in Kota Kinabalu was simple and straight-forward, PBS and USNO had a joint undertaking to topple Berjaya. When PBS had sufficient seats to form a government, they left USNO out of the equation. This angered the USNO supporters who took to the streets. This started when someone painted 2 crucifixes in red at the state mosque in Sembulan.

A subsequent march from the mosque a few days later was stopped by the police at Karamunsing for several hours. This led to the burning of many of the Karamunsing warehouses.

In the evening of that day, Datuk Hj Yahya Lampong, who was one of the leaders of that march, escaped the police dragnet and reached my beach house in Sipitang. His immediate request upon alighting from his vehicle was to ask for my help to get him out of the state. My immediate retort was whether he had any money on him to pay for his transport out. I asked him to go into the house whilst I looked for a friend in town to tell him about our predicament. When I returned home, I fed him some chicken curry and he told me what had happened earlier that day in Karamunsing. Soon after, another old friend turned up by boat with his son, not having a clue as what was going on. I put Hj Yahya on his boat for his escape to Brunei.

What’s my point in saying all this JJ might ask?

My point is this, whilst JJ spoke of the need to educate the young to be worldly and to be mindful of the country’s needs to move forward towards betterment, the hardcore USNO/Tun Mustapha supporters up to the late 1980s were the exact opposite.

I dare say this because I spent years in community service and I knew which type of people supported USNO and had great admiration for the late Tun. These people were mostly from extremely misinformed or ill-informed backgrounds. They were mostly poor Muslims who looked towards the late Tun for some form of leadership, much like Malays looked to their Sultans because they did not know or dare look to anyone else.

During the riots of 1985, I stayed at the Tun’s house in Tg Aru and had the opportunity to study the demeanors, facial expressions and opinions of those hundreds who camped there. It was an experience that haunted me to this day. What I saw was scary. I said to myself, there was no hope in hell we could move forward with these people. By now their children would have changed perhaps and are supporting UMNO.

What I would like to state here is that the late Tun might have been a good rallying point for the Muslim Bumiputras for a period of time. That worked because like the people I saw at his house, were willing to believe in him and allowed themselves to be deluded into believing he was their leader regrdless of anything else.

To illustrate a case in point, some years ago when USNO had been dead and gone and replaced by UMNO, I had coffee with an old uncle who told me that he would not support Harris simply because, according to him, he sold Labuan. This of course was a common rallying call in 1985. But what saddened me was, what had this to do with him and how had he managed to improve his well-being all these years other than believing a lie perpetrated by USNO leaders? The people of Labuan are not complaining about being a federal territory whilst he had to wait for a pirate taxi to take him to town from the 1960s until he died in 2005. In all that time he made no effort to improve himself and yet he was happy to believe in a lie.

If he go through the records of the Tun’s tenure as chief minister, we will know that his achievements were minimal. He was hardly in the state to govern.

The general elections of 1976 laid bare many of his misdeeds and the people of Sabah decided they have had enough of him as a leader except for the Muslim areas. I shall not bother to list the many issues that worked against him, for enough were written in the past about this. Attempts to recuscitate his fine points will be futile.

For JJ to claim that other chief ministers did not give a damn about developing the youths is empty rhetoric and devoid of knowledge.

I was part of a government that provided free shoes, free uniforms, free milk to school children. This simple, albeit expensive program, reduced immeasurable burden from parents in the rural areas. Malnourishment, believe it or not, was common amongst children in Sabah up till the 1980s. This, and the lack of simple requirements like uniforms and shoes, caused parents to stop sending children to school.

The granting of scholarships and study loans did not end with the departure of Tun Mustapha. It continued until there was no more funds left. Those who borrowed did not pay back their loans. These loan defaulters are living amongst us today. Some are talking smart about politics and babble on about how things should be done. They probably avoid telling their children about these debts for they know that they are curtailing the ambitions of other youths who are not their children to get their education and make themselves better citizens.