Of mobile phones and political parties

KUALA LUMPUR: An Umno delegate has likened the political parties in the country to the various handphone and mobile technology companies.

Khairul Firdaus Akhbar Khan said like Umno, the Finnish mobile company, Nokia, had become complacent after dominating the world market for years.

Pakatan Harapan, he said, was like Samsung, which – after seeing that Nokia was no longer innovative – took the opportunity to capture consumers’ interest with interesting and sophisticated models.

He described Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad as an Apple, which was known for its extraordinary vision and huge comeback after a hiatus.

“So what does Umno want to be? Do we want to be Nokia or will we make a comeback like Apple?” he said during debate.

Khairul Firdaus claimed that it was a “blessing” that Umno lost in the general election so that the party could reflect and take stock of what it had done wrong.

“If we had won, we would have been arrogant and continued to call people old and senile and accuse some of them of being traitors to Umno,” he said.

Speaking on Sabah Umno’s behalf, Tan Sri Pandikar Amin Mulia said Umno must carry out a radical transformation for the agenda of the Malays and the bumiputra.

This, he said, included granting Sabah Umno political autonomy so that it could have a new identity and status to restore public confidence in the party.

“With this new identity, the issue of localbased Sabah parties accusing us of being a proxy Peninsular Malaysia party will be eliminated automatically,” he said.