IT is like any other weekend in Semporna, stronghold of Parti Warisan Sabah president Shafie Apdal.

People are going about their business in the small but tourist-filled east coast town that is the gateway to diving and snorkelling havens Sipadan, Mabul, Kapalai, and Mataking. 

There are no signs of discontent in the town of some 130,000 people even as Shafie, a man that has made a big impact on their lives, was arrested by graft-busters from the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) in Kota Kinabalu.

MACC is investigating alleged siphoning of RM1.5 billion of public funds meant for projects in rural Sabah that allegedly occurred when Shafie was rural and regional development minister.

“You won’t see open discontent anywhere,” businessman Dato Hisham Fattah said as he sipped his favourite Tenom coffee in a small coffeeshop.

“But it’s simmering. Just below the surface, you can say,” Hisham said, as his MP of five terms was on Friday remanded for four days.

“The people are angry alright. Very angry even though we knew, and had been warned that such a day will come after he left Umno and formed Warisan.

“They have been told to expect Umno to pick on Shafie and to try to break up the support for him.

“That day has come just as Datuk Seri (Shafie) said it would,” Hisham, who is Warisan deputy information chief, said.

Support for Shafie is near fanatical in Semporna, the town where six policemen were killed in a botched raid to arrest a wayward Suluk imam in 2013.

When he left Umno to form Warisan, 90% of the members in Umno’s 485 branches in Sabah went with him. It left Umno paralysed in the state.

“The people in Semporna are not showing their anger openly as they have been told to keep everything under control and in check,” Hisham said.

“There is a time for everything.

“We don’t want to provoke the authorities like by holding a rally or demonstration. Probably that’s what the people in Umno had hoped we’d do, but we told them (Shafie’s supporters) to show their anger and displeasure in the ballot box later,” Hisham said.

Like most of Shafie supporters, Hisham echoed the widely accepted view that the investigation and arrest was “selective prosecution”.

He backed his view by asking what happened to the Sabah Water Department money laundering case.

“Why has no one been charged over it when we are hearing that Datuk Seri (Shafie) could be charged as early as on Monday,” Hisham said in reference to the corruption probe into the Sabah Water Department by MACC in 2015 and 2016.

Two senior officers in the department were arrested for alleged abuse of power and graft-busters seized a total of RM52 million cash from various places, including from the house of one of the officers.

Gold, jewellery, luxury brand watches, branded handbags, luxury cars and hundreds of land grants were also seized.

“What happened to the two officers? Why have they not been charged till today?

“What about all those cases of misappropriation of millions in the other ministries that the MACC has investigated?

“I don’t hear of their respective ministers getting arrested and questioned,” Hisham said.

“We are angry but we’re not afraid of what they are doing,” Ghulam Miralam, a Bajau like Shafie and most of the people in the town, said.

“I’ve known Shafie for 30 years and in all those years, he had often advised us in the many meetings not to be ‘dirty’.

“That’s why I am convinced Shafie is not guilty of what he is being investigated for.

“It is plain dirty politics,” Ghulam said.

Ghulam said what Umno is really afraid of is Shafie’s ability to cut across the racial lines and get them to fight for a clean government and what is good for Sabah.

Shafie, a former Umno vice president, fell out with Prime Minister Najib Razak after he questioned the prime minister over the 1Malaysia Development Board (1MDB) scandal.

Najib sacked him from the cabinet but not the party, which Shafie left on his own accord.

“It is obvious why they are doing thus to Shafie,” said Mohd Jakarah Asmad of Kampung  Kubang Pinang.

“They are trying to destroy his credibility by giving the perception that he is dirty and corrupt.”

Jakarah, a former civil servant who now looks after a polling district for Warisan, said instead of tarnishing Shafie’s image, Umno had made Shafie’s supporters angrier at the party for what it was doing to Shafie.

“It makes us more determined, more determined to remove Umno.” – October 22, 2017.