Far Away

• 13 July 2017
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These were the words chosen by Sarawak Chief Minister Johari to describe the next general election. Admittedly far is a term with many interpretations but in this context he is talking nonsense. It could be next month and has to be held not later than next year. Unless he knows something that h is not willing to share with the electorate; in addition to timber profits.

Did he perhaps mean that he had been privately informed by arch robber Najib that no election would be called this year? Are relations between the two still as close as before given the coming dispatch to London of an official mission to study the 1963 Malaysia agreement?

In the apparently unlikely event that Sarawak could separate from Malaysia the tap would be turned off in KL for much of the oil revenue; threatening national bankruptcy. For that reason alone Putrajaya will never willingly allow Sarawak to secede. Johari knows that as well as anyone and sending the mission is either amateur blackmail or an attempt to conserve voters increasingly conscious of the disgraceful sell out in 1963 involving both London and Kuala Lumpur (as well as some prominent Sarawakian politicians of that time).

Whatever else all this is likely to become a major issue in the coming general election campaign in which, as always, BN will try to use bribery and other election offences to buy their way to another majority. They would do well to remember two things.

First Najib has no hope of winning, will enter jail soon after the result and will be followed there by his criminal associates, including those from Sarawak.

Second the destruction of BN will be followed, in Sarawak as in peninsular Malaysia, by detailed and far reaching investigations into the trail of corruption laid by BN over the years. None of the criminals who have despoiled Sarawak’s forests for personal profit will be able to retain their ill-gotten gains; nor obtain their liberty.