(April 18): The BN flags put up long before Parliament was dissolved in the Parliamentary constituency of Wangsa Maju in Kuala Kumpur have been taken down.
No not by City Hall nor the Election Commission for flouting election regulations but by the very same people who put them up in the first place — Umno Wangsa Maju.
Why? The party’s local supporters are said to be acting in protest because they believe that Wangsa Maju has been given back to the MCA to contest in the 14th general election (GE 14).
Umno and MCA have been tussling for the right to represent BN since GE13 five years ago. Umno won the battle then only to lose the war when its candidate Datuk Shafei Abdullah was defeated by PKR’s Datuk Dr Tan Kee Kwong.
Ever since then, Shafei who is the Umno Wangsa Maju divisional head, had wanted badly to be given a second shot at Wangsa Maju and all indications were pointing to Umno (read Shafei) getting his wish granted despite the resistance of the MCA.
Hence the flags and banners went up and an ops room set up, manned by Team Shafei. The Edge Financial Daily ran a report on this a couple of weeks ago.
Now comes this rollback. There has been no official statement by the BN leadership that MCA and not Umno would contest Wangsa Maju. However, the goings-on seem to suggest that.
Perhaps it could be attributed to a statement made by Umno secretary general Tengku Adnan Mansor.
With an Umno – MCA tussle occurring in Bandar Tun Razak, also in the federal capital, Adnan came up with a formula to settle the issue. Admitting that Wangsa Maju and Bandar Tun Razak were MCA seats, Adnan put forth what he called an Umno approach of “take one give one” .
Apparently the “give one” part involved giving Wangsa Maju back to MCA, much to the chagrin and surprise of Wangsa Maju Umno. Shafei, their boss, had served Datuk Seri Najib Razak in 2013 as political secretary. So to not let him stand in Wangsa Maju in GE14 is unthinkable and cannot be accepted.
Hence the current protest which is threatening to become a full scale boycott of the BN machinery in Wangsa Maju — not just taking down flags .
As for the “take one” part in the Adnan formula, it is said Umno will take Bandar Tun Razak from MCA.
The MCA is not happy, naturally. It is adamant that it will contest saying there has been no official statement by the BN leadership on the matter up till now.
Yet Bandar Tun Razak Umno sees it differently. They too are equally adamant that they should be contesting in the constituency. As far as they are concerned that has been settled.
The only matter to settle is the candidate.
The front runner was (perhaps still is) its division head Datuk Rizalman Mokhtar. In fact he was riding high and was even said to have the blessings of the party leaders including Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi. Until he got into that well-known messy situation, that is.
Nabbed during a police-MACC joint raid at a karaoke centre, he was initially tested positive for methamphetamine use.
But police later said Rizalman’s urine sample had been cleared by the pathology unit of the Kuala Lumpur Hospital and as such no further action would be taken against the Umno man.
That put him back in contention for the candidacy. At least that is how he and his supporters see it.
However, last week it was reported that Tan Sri Shahrizat Jalil was offered the Bandar Tun Razak candidacy and an early report showed that the Wanita Umno head was “interested”. However a few days ago she said that she officially declined, “should the offer be made”.
Now, word is rife among Umno circles that several leaders are being considered to be the BN candidate for the Bandar Tun Razak seat. Among them is, yes, Shafei.
Bandar Tun Razak Umno is said to be not too keen on the parachuting of candidates into their constituency, preferring a local person. If not Rizalman, it must be a local person.
Resistance from the local Umno division could very well be the reason for Shahrizat to turn down the reported offer to contest there.
MCA has been contesting Bandar Tun Razak from GE 9 in 1995 to GE 13 in 2013, winning three times. MCA lost in 2008 and 2013 to former Selangor Menteri Besar Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim, then of PKR .
Khalid, who became an independent after he was sacked by PKR in 2014, will not defend his seat in GE 14 .
BN apart, Pakatan Harapan will surely contest Bandar Tun Razak by fielding a candidate from PKR. PAS is likely to join in the fray.
Bandar Tun Razak is a Malay majority constituency with 54% of the voters being Malay, 36% Chinese and 8% Indian .
With the recent EC redelineation exercise already gazetted, an analyst says, voters there are now “mostly Malays”. Some 20,000 Chinese voters have been transferred to Cheras, Bukit Bintang and Seputeh.