PARTI Rakyat Sarawak (PRS) chief James Masing has said the party will stick to Barisan Nasional.

The Sarawak deputy chief minister said PRS would not betray an organisation which offered him and his party the opportunity to serve Sarawakians.

He recounted the hardship that he and his family and endured when he was in the opposition.

“I was in the opposition for eight years. In order to survive, my wife and I planted paddy in order to put food on the table and keep my three kids in school.

“It was difficult,” Masing, said amidst reports in the last few days that Sarawak BN had sought to join the Pakatan Harapan coalition.

Masing was an anthropologist by training and was Youth chief of now defunct Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak (PBDS), a party which allied itself with opposition forces led by former chief minister Abdul Rahman Yaakub in a failed attempt to oust then chief minister Abdul Taib Mahmud.

The political crisis in 1987 was popularly known as the “Ming Court Affair” as Abdul Rahman and other Sarawak politicians had gathered in the former Ming Court Hotel in Kuala Lumpur to plot their takeover of the state.

Masing said his suffering continued after the party was “soundly defeated” by BN in the 1987 and 1991 state elections.

“After the 1991 election, we had chosen to respect the wishes of the majority and rejoined BN in 1994.”

Masing, who had represented the rural Dayak state seat of Baleh since 1983, was duly appointed to the state cabinet and “got paid as a minister”.

“It was an honest pay for an honest job like any other ministers in the Malaysian government.

“I am always grateful for the BN government for giving me the privilege to serve the people of Sarawak.”

He said for giving him such an opportunity, “I will not forget nor betray the organisation which offered me such an opportunity”.

PRS lost three of the six parliamentary seats they contested in GE14 – it’s the worst performance by any of the four-party state BN coalition.

The other parties that comprised Sarawak BN are Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu (PBB), Sarawak United People’s (SUPP) and Progressive Democratic Party (PDP).

What was numbing for Masing and PRS was that they lost two of the seats to unheralded independents and the third to an “outsider” – an ethnic Lun Bawang winning an ethnic Dayak-majority seat. – May 14, 2018.