KOTA KINABALU: Warisan President Shafie Apdal is becoming increasingly desperate as he resorts to spreading more blatant lies and slander in his bid to hold on to power.

In his recent campaign-like speeches, Shafie cavalierly threw baseless accusations, and unashamedly played the race card to confuse the public.

Spreading fake news has become the norm for Warisan.

Recently, Shafie made an accusation that the previous state government had purportedly gave land belonging to Yayasan Sabah to a selected few.

Clearly Shafie’s intention is highly questionable because as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Yayasan Sabah, he should have known that this cannot be true because YS licensed area cannot be alienated to a third party.

As a sole licensee, Yayasan Sabah can only invite a third party to extract timber by Reduced Impact Logging (RIL) or develop its licensed area on a contractual basis.

I suppose for some politicians fake news, lies, smear campaign and character assassination is the only way for them to get elected.

What was Shafie’s motive when he made those allegations that certain communities were favoured by the previous government when it came to land awards?

All his speeches are nothing more than political rhetoric laced with inaccuracies based on pure propaganda. One may not be faulted for inferring that his speeches are riddled with racism.

Warisan has not achieved much since they unconstitutionally took the government which was lawfully formed after GE14. With only a GDP growth rate of 0.5% (the lowest in Malaysia for 2019), Shafie and his ministers seem happy to spend most of their time performing ceremonial duties and ribbon cutting to officiate projects and programmes which were initiated by the previous government.

At best Warisan have mastered the art of announcing billion ringgit projects that have not seen the light of day.

I must say Warisan’s KPI on making empty promises and spreading fake news is extremely high but I fear for Sabah if this is as good as it gets.

Tan Sri Musa Haji Aman,
Kota Kinabalu,
September 2, 2020