Past Malaysian Election Retrospectives (aka the Cao rambles about Malaysia thread)

[Joseph Cao]

As there likely won't be by-elections for a while I have been going ahead with some more writing about historical Malaysian by-elections and other things of electoral interest. So might as well make a thread and avoid clogging up the main one, which after all is about discussion of the present.

Expect updates to be few and far between.

[Joseph Cao]

Where better to start than by commemorating a trailblazer in Malaysian electoral history?


“It occurred to her at that time that if she had the rights to which the vote entitled her, she should regard it as an obligation to help other women who regarded politics as unthinkingly as she had once done.”

—Sunday Standard, 28 June 1953

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

Devaki Ayathurai Krishnan, who died on Saturday aged 100, was the first woman ever elected to public office in Malaysia – during the 1952 local elections, specifically those for the Kuala Lumpur Municipal Council, which also marked the first-ever elections for Kuala Lumpur and the first time women in Malaysia had the opportunity to vote. Wikipedia has a fairly decent summary of her achievements, including another record she holds: for longest membership in the Malaysian Indian Congress, surpassing even the MIC titan Samy Vellu.

But Devaki’s electoral history predates that of the UMNO-MCA-MIC alliance. In point of fact she was first elected on the ticket of the Independence of Malaya Party, which came about in the flux of pre-independence Malayan politics. Onn Jaafar’s IMP had big ambitions to supplant then-Tun Abdul Rahman’s UMNO as the party of choice for Malays, and it’s widely acknowledged that the death knell for those ambitions began during the inaugural 1952 elections in Kuala Lumpur.

Kuala Lumpur’s boundaries at the time covered a much smaller area, essentially the immediate area around the city center; this got four wards with three councillors each, elected on the same thirds system that the UK still uses for its local elections. So all councillors would initially be elected at once in a special February 1952 election to start things off, and a third of them (one per ward) would go on to stand for full terms in December, followed by the next third in 1953, and so on.

The fledgling alliance that UMNO and MCA drew up for the 1952 elections got them nine of the twelve seats, sweeping three of the four wards, in what has been described as a successful test run for the electoral prospects of communalism. The exception was Bangsar ward. The maps don’t exist anymore but as best as I can tell this ward ran from Brickfields, site of the KL Sentral train station, up the west bank of the Klang River and north to the Sentul area between the Gombak and Batu rivers where the massive Sentul Depot was located. The railroad industry employed tens of thousands of Indians; these were and still are heavily Indian areas as a result, so the election result should not be especially surprising. What UMNO and MCA concluded was that they needed an arm into the Indian vote, and the rest is history, as they say…

It was still a close thing in this ward. The IMP slate consisted of Devaki, who despite being the youngest candidate in the field was so locally popular that her community nominated her even before Onn Jaafar came knocking with his IMP membership offer; the Kuala Lumpur Municipal Commissioner, T. Rajendra; and Kundan Lai Devaser, the then president of the MIC, which was allied with the IMP for the local elections. There was also an independent activist, S.C.E. Singam, who ran far ahead of the IMP candidates. Devaki came seven votes behind Devaser and 53 votes ahead of the closest UMNO candidate.

Bangsar ward, KL Municipal Council election, February 1952 (3 to elect)

S.C.E. Singam (Independent)              718
K.L. Devaser (IMP)                               577
Devaki Krishnan (IMP)                         570
Ahmad Haji Mahmood (UMNO-MCA)         517
Raja Mohamed Raja Allang (UMNO-MCA)  508
S. Karalasingham (Labour)                      466
T. Rajendra (IMP)                                   422
Elsie Somasundram (UMNO-MCA)            232

She had a slightly easier time of it in December when she ran for a full term with the undivided backing of the IMP, who continued to receive the MIC’s support: the Indian headwinds continued against the UMNO-MCA pact to the extent that the (Indian) Labour candidate nearly unseated MCA in the heavily Chinese Petaling ward. Devaki won 1300 votes against the MCA’s 700. So too in 1955, by which time the IMP had dissolved and she had became a party member of the MIC, which under V. T. Sambanthan had formally joined the Alliance; in fact there were no other contesting parties and Devaki won unopposed. After the election she was given an open-top car parade running down Batu Road, now Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, the nerve center of her ward.

^{The December 1952 winners. (Photo courtesy of Singapore Standard)}

Bangsar ward, KL Municipal Council election, December 1952, approximate totals

IMP                1300 65%
Alliance (MCA)   700 35%


Bangsar ward, KL Municipal Council election, 1955

Alliance (MIC) Unopposed


It should be noted at this point that Bangsar MIC, as an urban and militantly leftist group dominated by MIC Youth members, were much more in tune with the urbane Devaser than with his successor. Under Devaser the MIC had defeated Singam in 1954 with their Bangsar president, K. Gurupatham. They clashed often with Sambanthan and the wider Alliance. A lot of it exposed the early contradictions of Malaysian Indian involvement in the Alliance project, as the least numerous and most trodden-on ethnicity, and makes for fascinating reading.

The disunity contributed to a losing streak for the MIC in Bangsar ward that began after 1955; on at least one occasion, in 1957, the Bangsar MIC aided the opposition Labour candidate after Selangor MIC imposed a Sikh candidate onto the Tamil ward, which probably would have continued to vote for the departing Gurupatham. That winning Labour candidate was V. David – and thus began another long and illustrious career which we will get into some other time.

Selangor MIC came down hard on Bangsar, first in 1956 with the suspension of Devaser, then the following year over the V. David fiasco which saw Gurupatham’s suspension for his involvement. There was even a temporary campaign to expel the MIC from the Alliance over this incident; throughout 1958 Selangor UMNO, with MCA backing, refused to admit the MIC into Alliance councils and committees. Eventually Sambanthan had had enough and dissolved MIC Youth, thus removing the sting of the Bangsar branch. Thirty Bangsar members resigned from MIC in response, and following the MIC losing Bangsar ward yet again in the 1958 municipal elections there was another wave of resginations.

All this almost certainly caused a significant drift of the working-class Indian vote away from the MIC and towards the Labour Party, not just in Kuala Lumpur but in the wider Selangor state. And so we return to Devaki, who agreed to run on the Alliance ticket in the 1959 Selangor state elections – remember Kuala Lumpur was still a part of Selangor at this point – where she was the only female Alliance candidate and one of the MIC’s four candidates. Here’s the Sentul constituency she contested in:

^{Contemporary map courtesy of Senftleben (1974) and my artistically skilled rendition of its location in modern Kuala Lumpur (2024).}

You will note the overlap of the southwestern bit with the Sentul portion of Devaki’s ward. Setapak was practically wilderness at the time and would remain so for a generation longer, so the Alliance had reason to fancy its chances based on its domination during the 1955 results – when they won all but one parliamentary seat nationwide.

1959 was of course nothing like 1955. This era was also a great one for leftist parties: the Socialist Front, an alliance between the Labour Party and the Parti Rakyat Malaysia, got away with five parliamentary seats and three state seats in Selangor as three of the four MIC candidates went down to defeat. Devaki lost by 552 votes to Parti Rakyat Malaysia’s future acting president Nazar Nong, a former anti-colonial guerrilla fighter and the great-grandson of the 19th-century anti-colonial guerrilla fighter Tok Gajah of Pahang. Nazar would later be arrested and detained under the Internal Security Act, which put paid to his chances of recontesting when the 1964 state election rolled around, though today he is improbably commemorated with the name of a Pahang housing estate not far away from his hometown of Kuala Lipis.


Sentul, Selangor state election, 1959

SF (PRM)        2965 47.62%
Alliance (MIC)   2413 38.76%
PMIP                  848 13.62%
Total valid votes 6226


That was the end of Devaki’s electoral career, as it happens. She never ran in another election and instead returned to community work – she oversaw humanitarian and medical efforts in Stadium Merdeka during the May 13 riots, no mean feat – and, later, climbing the party ladder, recruiting heavily for the nascent MIC women’s wing and in time becoming its deputy president and Selangor head. She got other members of her family into politics too, despite her businessman husband being absolutely apolitical. Her eldest grandson ascribes his decision to enter MIC to her, and he also climbed some way up its ladder before jumping off in 2020 to join PKR; that grandson is Ramanan Ramakrishnan, MP for Sungai Buloh, who defeated the onetime UMNO wunderkid Khairy Jamaluddin to win his seat. He broke the news of her death this weekend.

The house where Devaki lived her whole life is in Brickfields by the river’s edge, a stone’s throw away from the local primary schools, one English and one Tamil, whose pedestrian crossings were introduced in the 1950s as a result of her council work.

[Novelty]

Nice one.

BTW, since you mentioned Bangsar, any chance we will get a write up about another famous ethnic Indian who was elected there, and later became the President of another country?

[Joseph Cao]

Nice one.

BTW, since you mentioned Bangsar, any chance we will get a write up about another famous ethnic Indian who was elected there, and later became the President of another country?

Maybe!

I'm on a Sabah bender right now but that could certainly be under consideration at some point.

[Novelty]

I'm on a Sabah bender right now but that could certainly be under consideration at some point.

Are you doing the (half) British guy who was Chief Minister of Sabah and whose death was supposedly an assassination attempt?

[Joseph Cao]

I'm on a Sabah bender right now but that could certainly be under consideration at some point.

Are you doing the (half) British guy who was Chief Minister of Sabah and whose death was supposedly an assassination attempt?

May have to wait for a post of its own, but yes. I have Labuan on the queue (for very unrelated reasons of news and electoral interestingness) and any discussion of it and Harris Salleh would probably need a 6/6 post for context, so whenever I find election results connected to it I'll see what I can do.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

What counstintucnes or regions of malasiya are most strongly influenced by Singapore ? Has there been any interesting cross-straits political effects ?

[Joseph Cao]

What counstintucnes or regions of malasiya are most strongly influenced by Singapore ? Has there been any interesting cross-straits political effects ?

I asked this to two different Singaporeans and they replied "what influence?" Make of that what you will.

One would expect it, if any, to show up most in the immediately adjacent constituencies but for various historical reasons there hasn't been such an electoral effect. You have slightly lower turnout from part of the electorate working in Singapore but it's not politically significant for the same reasons. I think jaichind and I played around with this in the other thread when we were discussing Pulai.

[Joseph Cao]

I do intend to give the same treatment to some other past by-elections that I've done for last year's, and the logical way to do it would be in reverse chronological order. So we'll start with the by-election which was held concurrently with the day I got epic amounts of egg on my face, November 19, 2022, GE15 itself. Fitting for an Easter week update.

This was to fill a vacancy in the Sabah State Legislative Assembly caused by the death of WARISAN incumbent Manis Muka Mohd Darah on November 16, 2020, due to kidney complications:


Bugaya

“Sejak dahulu lagi, saya menganggap daerah Semporna adalah sinonim dengan namanya. Ia ibarat sebutir permata. Keindahan dan kesempurnaan permata itulah yang amat saya hargai.”
(“For a long time I have thought the Semporna area to be synonymous with its name. It’s like a jewel. The beauty and perfection of this jewel is what I most value.”)

—Tun Sakaran Dandai, 2007 (boldface mine)

GE15 results of parliamentary election in Bugaya by polling district; light blue is WARISAN.

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

Here we are at the Semporna Peninsula, the end of the forest, or Tong Talun as this area was called by the Bajau people with whom our story begins. The precise origins of the Bajau are still speculative but they have been living on these shores – or rather offshore, being sea-dwelling, hence the name of their subgroup the Bajau Laut – for millennia. Another ethnic group, the Suluk, likewise remained here past the dissolution of the united Sulu Sultanate. They have intermingled to the extent of being lumped together as “Bajau-Suluk” by wider Malaysian society, and have been monolithically Muslim since the spread of Islam in the southern Philippines to the east.

Semporna is the premier Bajau-Suluk town, founded as such under the auspices of the British North Borneo Chartered Company soon after its acquisition of the territory now known as Sabah, and the town became a haven for various ethnic groups at an unstable time in the region. It has always been sea-oriented; road connections to Tawau and Lahad Datu were barely existent until the 1950s and it is the Kunak trunk road that holds the Bugaya constituency together. So we’ll begin at its western end on the outskirts of the town of Kunak (of which more later) and travel towards Semporna town.

The opening of this road brought in plenty of industry; cocoa and coffee used to be the cash crops but have been replaced by palm oil plantations, which uniformly dominate the landscape and are encroaching into protected forests around Mount Pock and the Segarong River. On the coast, the Segarong forest reserve is also noted for its bird’s nest caves cultivated by the nearby villagers since colonial times for the benefit of consumers in China and Hong Kong. The road joins the Tawau highway shortly before crossing the Pegagau River (site of touristy wildlife river cruises) which runs north-south and divides the constituency in half. On the eastern side of the river are more palm-oil villages including the eponymous Kampung Bugaya, where the Semporna al-Quran Studies Academy opened in 2017 and claims to be the only one of its kind in Malaysia.

Water supply is a persistent problem here: in Bugaya the water only comes twice a week for five hours at a time. Amidst this there is political scandal flowing like water. In 2016, two senior officials in the Sabah State Water Department were arrested for graft in the MACC’s largest seizure haul at the time; another federal investigation was subsequently opened pursuing the embezzlement of RM1.5 billion in federal funds for rural development. The link between the two cases was a failed water treatment plant in Kampung Sungai Intan, meant to supply villages in the vicinity, including Kampung Bugaya, after over thirty years without treated water. The political link was local MP Shafie Apdal, who had just left UMNO to establish Parti Warisan Sabah after being sacked as rural development minister the previous year for raising the 1MDB case in Najib’s cabinet. Shafie and other WARISAN leaders were investigated over the next few years, but the case was dropped for insufficient evidence soon after Najib’s fall from power in 2018 and Shafie’s own ascension to power in Sabah as chief minister.

The Bugaya constituency doesn’t cover Semporna town. It extends up the road as far as Bubul village and jumps north to take in some of the town’s outskirts. A spur pointing north from the Semporna Hospital takes in the floating village of Kampung Bangau-Bangau, named for the island it links to the mainland and built in 1955 for the local Bajau Laut. Their livelihoods have been shifting onshore for some time, though the sea is everpresent: in 2012 a villager, Estino Taniyu, became the third Malaysian to swim the English Channel and remains the only non-professional swimmer to do so. But many other inhabitants are non-citizens and may never get that far, even with the efforts of NGOs like Sekolah Alternatif Borneo Komrad, an “alternative school“ for stateless children operating in the village.

It’s common for the rest of Malaysia, indeed the rest of the already looked-down upon state of Sabah, to conflate the diasporic Bajau long settled in this area with more recent waves of illegal immigration from the east. Many of these so-called “plastic Bajau” became Malaysian citizens under Mahathir’s Project IC after the UMNO ruling class judged their Muslim-ness to be an electoral asset. Many others still are not; Semporna has one of the highest concentrations of non-citizens in the country. All of them get lumped together as “foreigners” which is as far as official acknowledgement of Sabah’s statelessness problem ever gets – the statelessness problem as a whole, one gathers from recent events in Parliament, won’t be progressing much further.

Then there are the actual threats from offshore. Sulu pirate attacks have battered the Semporna coast (and its Bajau inhabitants) for centuries. A spur in our constituency boundary points southwest from the Semporna Hospital along Jalan Balai Polis to take in the town’s police station. This week marks the 70th anniversary of a pirate raid on March 29, 1954 that claimed the lives of six people, including a Sikh sergeant, Sagar Singh, and two constables who died defending the station. This seems to be the first attack recorded in detail, probably because another casualty was a white officer, forest conservator Thomas Robert Barnard, who was buried in the old Christian cemetery of Lahad Datu; his grave was rediscovered in 2011 on the verge of being swallowed up by jungle, and subsequently restored.

The last attack to date occurred on March 3, 2013, part of the Lahad Datu standoff: gunmen claiming loyalty to the long-defunct Sulu Sultanate staged an ambush in Kampung Simunul, Semporna where they killed several police officers and mutilated their bodies. This floating village east of the town center is inhabited by recent Filipino migrants, as the name probably gives away. Security forces have consequently focused quite a bit of their counterterrorism efforts on the village. In particular, an extensive resettlement scheme has moved many of the villagers to Kampung Bubul and other areas inland within the Bugaya constituency. As the inset shows, the Simunul polling district isn’t contiguous with the rest of Bugaya, but it has always been included in the seat; no official explanation has ever been given for this but it seems to stem from the makings of March 3 one way or the other.

This is the largest state constituency by area within Semporna, clocking in at 87.00% Sabah bumiputera, 8.75% Malay-Muslim bumiputera, 3.17% other ethnicities and 1.09% Chinese. Who drives all these schemes within its borders? Midway between Kampung Bangau-Bangau and Kampung Simunul, insulated on both sides by tourist jetties and separated from the town center by the silver-domed Semporna mosque, the Bajau-dominated floating village of Kampung Air Semporna is the stomping ground of a staggering portion of Semporna’s political elite, many of whom are related by blood or by marriage.

Earlier I mentioned the British North Borneo Chartered Company’s acquisition of Sabah. Between local Bajau resistance and the kinks in the Sulu negotiations, their 1883 date of acquisition isn’t true to what happened on the ground, and our story properly kicks off with the 1903 appointment of Panglima Uddang as penghulu (native head) of the village of Kampung Air Semporna and surrounding areas. The Panglima was a key promoter of the perahu lepa, the 30-foot boat capable of trips to the Philippines. Semporna as a whole is very proud of the perahu as a symbol of the Bajau Laut seafaring prowess and a statue of one of its variants graces the roundabout where the Kunak road and Tawau highway meet.

Panglima Uddang’s son Panglima Abdullah likewise got an administrative role in the post-Japanese era under the returning British, serving as Semporna’s district chief before becoming chairman of the Semporna District Council upon its creation in 1962. Panglima Uddang’s successor as penghulu, Panglima Jakarullah Boraluddin, was appointed to the post of district police commissioner by that body’s predecessor, in which capacity Jakarullah had overseen the response to the 1954 pirate attack.

A word about Sabah politics at this juncture might be necessary. Two parties, USNO (the United Sabah National Organization, Muslim-based) and UNKO (ethnic Kadazandusun-based, later merging with the smaller ethnic Murut-based PASOK to form the United Pasokmomogun Kadazandusunmurut Organisation, or UPKO) were established in 1961, the year Tunku Abdul Rahman proposed a federation of Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore. Both were largely the projects of individual politicians, Donald Stephens for UNKO and Mustapha Harun for USNO. Mustapha had resisted the Japanese occupation and become a native chief after the war, from which he ascended to the nominated Legislative Council. USNO supported federation before UNKO did and, unlike UNKO/UPKO, showed little concern for any particular state’s rights Sabah might enjoy in the Muslim-dominated Malaysia. I’ll give you three guesses why.

Both the Panglimas took leading roles in bringing USNO into Semporna, with Abdullah becoming its first division chief in 1963 and Jakarullah his deputy. The first USNO division meeting was held at Abdullah’s house in Kampung Air Semporna. In 1966 Jakarullah ran against Abdullah for division chief and won; he brought on Mohd Darah Langpad, a Bajau Simunul who had been one of Sabah’s 15 inaugural appointees to the Dewan Rakyat in 1964, as his deputy. Abdullah promptly established a separate USNO branch with his son-in-law Sakaran Dandai (of whom more later) as chief and his son Mohd Salleh Panglima Abdullah as his deputy.

With federation in 1963 came a West Malaysian conception of the communal Alliance formula that had dominated politics there. But the Alliance formula ran aground in Sabah for various reasons: political consciousness was barely rooted here, USNO and UPKO were competing for the same voters as opposed to the ethnically distinct bases of the original Alliance, and Sabah’s geography lent itself to parochialism rather than communalism. Thus the role of the Sabah Chinese Association upon its entry into politics in 1965 was as kingmaker between USNO and UPKO. In the 1967 elections it chose USNO, and along with the nonentity of the Sabah Indian Congress formed a Sabah Alliance of USNO-SCA-SIC, superficially a copy of West Malaysia’s UMNO-MCA-MIC. They beat UPKO; a few months later UPKO dissolved itself and joined USNO – political consciousness in Sabah did not extend to the idea that such careers might involve time in the opposition. USNO, i.e. Mustapha, was now the undisputed ruler of Sabah.

As a Suluk, Mustapha had familial ties to the Semporna area even though his power base was in Kudat at the northern end of the state. There had been talk in USNO’s early days of Bajau separatism from the party, but crucially they lacked personalities as prominent as Mustapha’s to rally round, and so they stayed with him as he became the only Malaysian politician to rig multiple elections – and I mean really rig: Mustapha promised to “deliver” the Alliance all of Sabah’s federal seats in 1969 and threw out opposition candidates even before the central government suspended the polls; he flew all potential opposition candidates out of the state in the 1971 state polls and held the election while they were away; only one opposition candidate even managed to file nomination papers for Parliament in 1974.

So this period of the Semporna state seat’s electoral history is easy to tell if nothing else. It was won by USNO Youth leader and Semporna division head Sakaran Dandai, a native of Kampung Air Semporna born in 1930 who bounced in and out of his hometown as a district clerk before settling down as Semporna’s native chief in 1960 (the youngest in Sabah) and marrying Panglima Abdullah’s daughter in 1964. He had a particular interest in establishing schools, though he had to give up his civil-service capacity to do so when contesting in 1967; by this time his division had eclipsed Panglima Jakarullah’s to become the dominant USNO branch in Semporna. Between the Semporna seat’s excessive size and Bajau support for USNO he walked home with a majority of 3,670, the largest in the state. He was of course uncontested in 1971, and through this period can claim responsibility for building many of the landmarks we’ve touched on earlier, including the Sungai Pegagau bridge, the Semporna Hospital, the silver mosque, and the very first treated-water supply in Sungai Intan which was to derail the career of his nephew Shafie Apdal much later on.

Continued…

[Joseph Cao]

Part 2:

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

Continued…

The federal government eventually lost confidence in Mustapha. It may have been his open aid to the Moro National Liberation Front’s insurgency in the Philippines, members of whom came ashore at Semporna, creating a major foreign policy embarrassment. Or his lavish lifestyle – financed by his extensive dealings in the timber business encroaching into Sabah’s interior – might have done it too. Or perhaps it was the election rigging. Or it may have been his talk of Sabah seceding from Malaysia. At any rate Kuala Lumpur decided he had to go. In 1975 they sent feelers out to USNO deputy Harris Salleh, who had fallen out with Mustapha, to set up a new party and poach Mustapha’s base. The new BERJAYA roped in now-governor Stephens, who by this point had converted to Islam and went by Fuad Stephens, as its leader.

1976 therefore saw two developments. The first was 1974’s redelineation taking effect, which added a new seat covering the northern part of what is now Bugaya, centered on the logging town of Kunak just to the northwest at the other end of its eponymous trunk road. The town had its own pirate raid in 1962 where two men, including one of the town’s founding fathers Salim Bacho, were taken hostage. He presumably survived unscathed, going on to hold the USNO coupon and win the Kunak seat at its first election. The Semporna seat was pushed south but Sakaran Dandai had little trouble holding it.

This happened in spite of the second development: BERJAYA won the election on the strength of support for Kuala Lumpur and nearly all the non-Muslim vote flowing to them. Fuad Stephens became chief minister; one plane crash later his deputy Harris succeeded him and led BERJAYA into its first election, 1981, as the party of power. In itself this was a big draw for the Muslim vote, which could see which way Muslim federal leaders (including then-deputy prime minister Mahathir) were leaning. People like Panglima Abdullah began to voice support for BERJAYA.

Mustapha’s alliance partners and his rivals within USNO objected to his taking a leadership role in the election and kept him from becoming a candidate, but in his absence no one was able to draw USNO together, compounding their problems. Tun Mustapha assured that he would “campaign against anyone who stood in USNO’s way” – then remained in London throughout the 1981 campaign. Conveniently this prevented him from campaigning against his son Abdul Hamid Mustapha, the BERJAYA candidate in Kunak.

BERJAYA cleaned up in 1981, winning 60% of the vote and 43 of 47 seats. USNO was left with Mustapha’s former stronghold of Banggi; its president Said Keruak’s seat of Usukan where the four-term Bajau leader only just survived by 89 votes; and Semporna, where Sakaran Dandai held off his brother-in-law, Panglima Abdullah’s son Mohd Shakir (the two had also faced off for the Silam parliamentary seat in 1978, which Sakaran also won). Salim Bacho was not so lucky: Abdul Hamid won by 148 votes, and shortly after the election his dad returned as USNO president. Harris brought Abdul Hamid into the cabinet as minister of culture, youth, and sports.

Six months later the Sabah assembly received the abrupt news that Abdul Hamid had resigned and a by-election would be triggered. This was an old trick. Certain political parties, including BERJAYA and USNO, required their candidates to fill in pre-signed resignation letters which could be deployed at any time after their election if they stepped out of line. Harris himself had been the target of such a move when he defected from USNO to BERJAYA, costing him his Labuan seat. Now Harris alleged that Abdul Hamid was conspiring with USNO to overthrow him, which Abdul Hamid naturally denied; he said he only wished to represent the concerns of the Muslim assemblymen who had swelled BERJAYA’s ranks.

So began a by-election that BERJAYA was fighting on exceptionally unfriendly ground against a well-organized opponent, with Salim Bacho returning as USNO’s candidate. For their part, BERJAYA put up a man by the name of Abdul Arah Dara who I literally can’t find anything else about apart from this photo of him casting his vote in Kampung Bugaya on polling day, November 8, 1981:

Image: National Archive.

Two other by-elections on the same day were held by BERJAYA*, but Salim Bacho wrested Kunak back by 500 votes, the first time an opposition party had ever won a by-election in Sabah. By this time Harris and his party were well on the way to becoming every bit as autocratic, distrusted by the federal government, and obsessed with pandering to the Muslim vote as USNO was. Still, though USNO was regaining Muslim support, and converted two more by-election gains, they weren’t able to squeeze BERJAYA much – as showed in the 1982 federal election when BERJAYA-backed independents defeated all of USNO’s candidates, including in Silam where Sakaran Dandai (now USNO deputy president, appointed over the strenuous objections of USNO Youth) lost the only election of his career to short-lived future rural development minister Abdillah Abdul Hamid. And with Mustapha continuing his old rebellious ways, USNO was formally expelled from the Barisan Nasional in 1984.

Instead the pressure came from another quarter. BERJAYA having alienated non-Muslims as a whole and the Kadazan spiritual leader (and a state minister) Joseph Pairin Kitingan in particular, the ball went into Pairin’s court: he was expelled from the party in 1984, had his seat forcibly vacated, won it back in a landslide, and in 1985 formed a new party, the pro-state’s rights Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS), at which point Harris called a snap election to prevent more non-Muslims from bolting. But with USNO cannibalizing the Muslim vote too, despite the heavy involvement of federal leaders on behalf of BERJAYA, it was the incumbent that collapsed: the tally was PBS 26, USNO 16, BERJAYA 6. BERJAYA and USNO attempted to go into government together and got as far as swearing Mustapha in as chief minister before PBS and the federal government, which could at least work out that 26>16+6, kiboshed their plan.

(As a postscript, because the 1984 redelineation had already gone into effect, the Semporna state seat was converted into a parliamentary one which Abdillah Abdul Hamid would defend and Sakaran would win the following year; at the state level Sakaran moved into the Sulabayan seat covering Semporna town. 1985 being 1985, he and Salim Bacho next door both won easily.)

Pairin did not have an easy time as the country’s only opposition state executive. Mustapha took Pairin to court alleging that he was the legitimate chief minister, and when the court ruled in favor of Pairin in March 1986 a series of protests and bomb explosions rocked Kota Kinabalu; Sakaran Dandai and other USNO bigwigs were prominent in the protests and almost certainly behind the bomb-throwers too. Pairin took Sabah to the polls again that year. Though neither Salim Bacho nor Sakaran Dandai had any trouble defending their seats – Sakaran won a sixth term, becoming Sabah’s longest-serving assemblyman at the time† – PBS increased its majority and shortly afterward was admitted into the Barisan Nasional.

UMNO never did warm to PBS and covertly lent support to USNO in 1990’s state elections – where Harris, still kicking, launched a new party that didn’t go anywhere but did eat slightly into USNO’s Muslim vote. Sakaran won a third round against Abdillah in the Semporna parliamentary seat that year, and when he became a federal minister made the decision to give up his state seat; the Sulabayan by-election in December 1990 returned his son Nasir Sakaran.

Shortly before polling day in 1990 PBS left BN and threw its support to Tengku Razaleigh’s opposition coalition, wihch had thrown it some bones on state’s rights; BN couldn’t run candidates against it just then, but Mahathir swore revenge. First, after the election, Pairin and his brother Jeffrey were hit with corruption cases. Second, federal largesse dried up. Third, now that there was no strong Muslim party able to stand up to PBS, it was decided that UMNO would enter the state. But USNO disliked and distrusted this attempt to enter their turf; Mustapha’s son Amir Kahar, now leading the party, decided to bring it into coalition with PBS, in response to which the federal government forcibly deregistered USNO. Some USNO men, like Salim Bacho, took the PBS ticket. Others, like Sakaran, decided to take the plunge with UMNO. Sakaran had never been top gun in USNO; as alluded to earlier he was never very popular with its younger set. Who knows what motivated this decision?

Pairin called an early election in 1994, wanting to leverage the outcome of his corruption trial and get ahead of that year’s impending redelineation which would certainly have boosted the Muslim vote in UMNO’s favor (and indeed, an extra constituency was created in heavily-Muslim Semporna which we’ll get to in a moment). But Sabah UMNO, with Sakaran as chief, essentially bought the election. There were key PBS defectors before polling day, which actually ended in a near-tie with PBS slightly ahead – though PBS candidates like Salim Bacho were sunk by UMNO absorbing USNO’s Muslim vote (he lost in Kunak to UMNO’s Unding Lana, who long ago had been youth chief of Sakaran’s breakaway USNO division). So it was easy for UMNO to buy out whichever assemblymen would erase that margin. All but five of them were fished, including Pairin’s brother Jeffrey.

Thus Sakaran Dandai, who had contested and won in every state election since independence, was sworn in as Sabah UMNO’s first chief minister on March 17, 1994. He served just short of nine months, during which UMNO grandly announced the return of development funds and the establishment of Sabah’s first university, before vacating his state and parliamentary seats to become Sabah governor, triggering a second Sulabayan by-election which his son Nasir contested in early 1995 and won again. As this was within a year of the next general election his federal seat was left vacant, and went to his nephew Shafie Apdal. Sakaran would serve as governor until 2002, and also attained the presidency of his lifelong interest the United Sabah Islamic Association, the oldest such association in the state, the same year he left elected politics.

The extra state seat that took effect in 1999, named Senallang, covered Semporna town and Nasir Sakaran carried on representing it, though not without fuss: the first allegations of phantom voters in the area were raised at this election by his opponent, local activist Abdullah Sani Mohd Salleh. Likewise, Kunak was passed on to Semporna UMNO Youth chief Jasa Rauddah, who went on to chair the Fisheries Cooperative during his time as assemblyman. But both of them now leave our story‡, as the next redelineation finally created the modern Bugaya constituency to be contested in 2004.

It went to Basalie Abdul Hamid, a local state’s attorney who became the Sabah BN executive secretary and eventually a legal advisor to Semporna UMNO. In a previous political life he was BERJAYA’s candidate against Sakaran in 1990. He also lived in Kampung Ayer Semporna – in fact, in just the part of the village which caught fire in 2009, though his house was undamaged.

He was not around as assemblyman by this time. In 2008 a new candidate stood here, former FELDA and construction contractor Ramlee Marhaban, who had succeeded Jasa and Sulabayan assemblyman Mohd Lan Allani as UMNO Youth head. He was unopposed; the opposition in Sabah being what it was it’s probable that nobody could be bothered to stand for other parties, or that some were disqualified. In any case he continued climbing the ladder, becoming Sabah UMNO deputy information chief and entering the state cabinet as assistant finance minister after his 2013 reelection. As with all UMNO bigwigs he also distinguished himself in the loudmouth Olympics by getting into an argument with DAP’s Jimmy Wong in the assembly where he described Wong as “not human.”

By this time the headwinds for Semporna UMNO were about to begin. Shafie’s exit from the party in 2016 took several local UMNO leaders with him, and the divisional committee, which had previously issued a statement in support of his 1MDB stance, was reshuffled; Ramlee was brought on as the division’s information head and spent most of his time slamming Shafie for not bringing enough development to the area. In return he had to deal with WARISAN Youth chief Azis Jamman – formerly his successor as Semporna UMNO Youth chief – putting his west-coast seafront mansion with swimming pool, indoor badminton court, and dozen luxury cars** on blast: “Ramlee has been accusing Shafie of doing too little. I agree. Shafie has done too little for himself. He should have done a lot more and perhaps he could live in a better home.”

Determined to recover its ground, Semporna UMNO put Ramlee up against Shafie for the parliamentary seat, vacating his assembly seat which was to be contested by Semporna UMNO treasurer Razak Sakaran, Nasir’s brother. Shafie himself, with designs on Sabah’s top job, was rumored to be contesting in Bugaya, but he went to Senallang (where he was registered to vote) against his cousin Nasir, and instead assigned Semporna WARISAN Women’s chief – formerly the corresponding officeholder in Semporna UMNO – Manis Muka Mohd Darah to face Razak in the Bugaya seat. If that name sounds familiar, she was in fact the daughter of Mohd Darah Langpad who we met all the way back in the 1960s. Family, eh?

But we know what happened in 2018. Despite throwing infrastructure projects and land grants at the electorate every UMNO candidate here was swept away, none of them cracking 30% in seats that had always given them the inverse percentage, and after some minor tussling Shafie was in as chief minister of Sabah. The events of 2020 which turfed him out largely passed his corner of Sabah by, much as the events of 1976 and 1985 had. That year Manis Muka got an almost identical percentage of 72% against Semporna Bersatu chief Mohd Daud Tampokong and five mosquito candidates, one of whom bears mentioning: the USNO Baru candidate (because that party is never going to die) Ahmad Kenajaan, former Sabah Special Branch assistant police commissioner and author of a book on the history of the Sabah Police, received Nine-Nine votes.

Polling day was September 26. What with COVID scares and quarantines for many of them, and the chief minister tussle that was going on, it took a while for the assemblypersons to be sworn in. But even then Manis Muka had yet to be sworn in by the night of November 16, when she was admitted to intensive care in Kota Kinabalu for kidney complications. She died the following afternoon aged 66.

This by-election was initially scheduled for January 16, 2021. But all that running around during the Sabah polls had triggered a COVID wave, and then-prime minister Muhyiddin got the Agong to consent to a declaration of emergency that postponed it. Unlike Muhyiddin’s own emergency, this wasn’t lifted until the Agong saw fit to do so. He did so in time for the by-election to be held concurrently with the 15th general election.

Manis Muka was particularly well-known locally. For their defense WARISAN turned to Jamil Hamzah, a comparatively anonymous member of their Semporna central committee and chairman of its legal bureau, who also ran a law firm in Kota Kinabalu; his family lives in Kampung Bubul. The UMNO candidate, who based on past form would have to be considered a very distant second, was Semporna teacher Abdul Aziz Mohd Ibno. Going by his Facebook his last political activity was losing the Semporna UMNO Youth chief election to Azis Jamman in 2013. He followed the 2018 BN playbook of promising vast developments, aided by BN’s return to power in Sabah.

Shafie, in his race for parliament, could count on enough support in his seat to go gallivanting around Sabah during the campaign period. His PKR opponent for that race was its Semporna youth chief Arastam Pandorog, who had no such luxury but nonetheless pulled double duty as his party’s candidate for the by-election. Pejuang also stood a candidate against Shafie but found a different man, Mohd Hassan Abu Bakar, to run in Bugaya; his father’s house was among those affected by the lack of water supply in the constituency.

Businesswoman Nazmawati Walli stood on the PBM ticket and spoke about as many words to local media outlining her rationale for running (women’s empowerment) as the number of votes she eventually got. Ex-military man Kairil Panglima Kuraini contested for the Parti Perpaduan Rakyat Sabah, citing his “passion to defend the community” – you can hear the bemusement of the reporter who then noted: “He did not say what the community needed to be protected against.”

And Jufazli Shi Ahmad, Semporna activist and founder of the Youth Movement to Save Sabah, credited his decision to run to his YouTube and TikTok followers and no doubt leveraged his social media presence in addition to all his past local campaigning. He contested as an independent. (It will be noted that he joined DAP in 2017 and then ran against a DAP incumbent in 2018, so his commitment to party labels is clearly fairly fluid.) Independents are allowed to select an identifying symbol on the ballot and he chose a boat, notable because WARISAN is also identified on the ballot by its boat logo; that may have vaulted him into third place in the eventual results:

Jamil Hamzah (WARISAN)                  11382  64.06%
Abdul Aziz Mohd Ibno (UMNO)              4753  26.75%
Jufazli Shi Ahmad (IND)                         693    3.90%
Arastam Pandorog (PKR)                        562    3.16%
Karil Panglima Kuraini (PPRS)                 150    0.84%
Mohd Hassan Abu Bakar (PEJUANG)        130    0.73%
Nazmawati Walli (PBM)                            98    0.55%

One final postscript before we go. Abdul Aziz himself died late last year; the cause of death was undisclosed. As noted, Manis Muka was a generation removed from the founding fathers of Semporna’s politics. And the premier politician in the story of Semporna, a member of that generation himself, Sakaran Dandai, died of COVID-19 in 2021 in the same intensive care unit in Kota Kinabalu, during the procedural limbo before this by-election could be held. You never can tell when your forest ends.


*Abdul Hamid Mustapha’s political secretary Abbas Ali, who held the Balung seat directly to the south, was also given the boot (in a future political life he would return to hold it again as an UMNO man right up to 2018). The last by-election was in Lumadan on the southwest coast where Mohd Dun Banir, who had held the seat since independence, resigned citing age reasons. It was won by his son Johari Mohd Dun, and an adjacent area would later be represented at the federal level by his daughter Azizah Mohd Dun. Fittingly Azizah went on to become Najib’s Deputy Minister for Women, Family, and Community Development, providing a revealing soundbite on the case of British pedophile Richard Huckle (who is burning in hell), viz.: “We don’t know anything about this case,” and neither did anyone else from the country where his crimes were committed, which is really quite strange, isn’t it?

†The current record is held by Pairin, who lasted until his brother Jeffrey defeated him in 2018, a total of ten terms and 42 years in the state assembly.

‡Considering all the different allegations swirling around Jasa, including masterminding illegal sales of subsidized diesel during his time at the Fisheries Cooperative, bribing local UMNO members to support his division leadership bid, and sleeping with at least four different married women including the wives of local officials, this is probably for the best.

**To be precise, a Mercedes S-Class, an Audi, two Lamborghinis, a Ferrari, an Aston Martin, two Nissan GT-R, a Toyota FG Cruiser, a Range Rover, and a Hummer.