Mositun chides Siambun over criticism of Anifah
PAPAR: Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) secretary general Datuk Johnny Mositun said BN Sabah was ready to face the coming general without resorting to gimmicks or petty rhetoric over small matters to draw political mileage.
“The opposition seems more obsessed with finding little faults and disparaging BN leaders rather than focusing on bread and butter issues and how they propose to govern better than BN if at all they ever win the people's mandate,” he said after visiting Nulimin Majusip, a seriously ill villager at Kampung Lakut and extending financial assistance to the family.
He chided Parti Warisan Sabah's Terence Siambun for taking umbrage at Datuk Seri Anifah Aman for saying that ‘Sabah belongs to Malaysia' when dismissing the Philippines claim to Sabah in a recent statement.
“Siambun deliberately chose to ignore the substance of the Foreign Minister's statement and picked on the latter's use of the words ‘belongs to Malaysia' as if it had any negative implication. “How petty can one get? Isn't Sabah an integral part of Malaysia, the country we so willingly and readily formed together with Malaya, Sarawak and Singapore in 1963? Malaysia belongs to Sabah as much as Sabah belongs to Malaysia, so what's so wrong about Datuk Anifah Aman's statement?” Mositun wanted to know.
He said that going by Siambun's criticism of Anifah, it would mean that Malaysia was another country, that Sabah had nothing to do with the creation of this country.
“Malaysia as we know it today would never have come into existence without Sabah or North Borneo as we were known then. We Sabahans created Malaysia, along with Sarawak and Singapore.
“Where does the question of not belonging to Malaysia arise, as Siambun would have us believe? It would be a different matter if Anifah had said ‘belongs to Malaya', or even some other political entity that existed before August 31, 1963, but that's not the case at all,” Mositun said.
He said that in any event, all patriotic Malaysians could take pride and comfort from the substance of Datuk Anifah Aman's unambiguous stand on Sabah's sovereignty and rejection of the Sulu Sultanate's or the Philippines' claim.