Presently, Dr Jeffrey Kitingan, formerly of PKR and a host of other dizzying party affiliations and, latterly, of the United Borneo Front, has contrived to be the most hunted and the most haunted man in Malaysian politics.

NONEUnraveling this conundrum in Kota Kinabalu this afternoon will be part of the mission of two emissaries from PKR central, wise men from the west bearing gifts of conciliation for what is regarded as Sabah's leading broker of the Kadazan-Dusun-Murut (KDM) vote.

Alienating this bloc may well deprive PKR of 10 parliamentary seats – out of Sabah's 25 (26, if the federal territory of Labuan is included) – in the fast approaching general election that many expect to be held in the coming months.

Whether Michael Bong and David Yeoh, two men of wealth and backroom influence in PKR central, succeed in meeting the man of vaunted power over the KDM vote, said to be preponderant in 10 parliamentary seats, remains a tantalising question.

Not least because factions allied to Jeffrey were busy trying to sabotage the hitherto secret tryst.

The minute groups got wind earlier this week that Bong and Yeoh, commissioned by PKR president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, were headed for Kota Kinabalu to conciliate Jeffrey, these factions, which only two months ago barely succeeded in extruding Jeffrey from PKR, worked overtime to derail the meeting.

This they did by spreading stories on the grapevine and in web news portals that Jeffrey was on the verge of another volte face, those head-twirling somersaults that have made him the most invertebrate politico in Malaysia.

All of the last two months, PKR stalwart, the Kota Kinabalu lawyer Christina Liew, a staunch Jeffrey supporter, has been working assiduously behind the scenes to get Azizah to initiate the move to conciliate Jeffrey after party supremo Anwar Ibrahim, in tandem with deputy Azmin Ali, had done enough since October 2009 to do the opposite: derogate Jeffrey by dallying with his nemesis, Ansari Abdullah.                    

After the unpopular Ansari's defeat in last December's Batu Sapi parliamentary by-election and after the humiliating defection to Umno of his surrogate, Pajuddin Nordin, who briefly was Sabah PKR chief, PKR central tardily has come to the conclusion that they have to reckon with Jeffrey. Otherwise it curtains for them in Sabah.

Jeffrey gets an open cheque

Hence today's Bong-Yeoh mission which will seek to tell Jeffrey what he umpteenth times had importuned PKR central to concede: that matters pertaining to Sabah must be decided by Sabahans themselves, not by PKR central, in imitation of much-abhorred Umno.

The mission that will virtually offer Jeffrey an open cheque to do, within reason, what he would like to, may not get to fulfill itself.

This is because Jeffrey, under tremendous pressure from his boys, has been playing a shadowy game, telling Malaysiakini yesterday that he has had no word from either Bong or Yeoh that the latter two want to meet him.

But Jeffrey is an operator who prefers to be incommunicado when he reckons that that suits his reading of the game.  

However, word from the Liew cohort holds that the meeting will indeed take place and that Jeffrey is in the driver's seat where pre-conditions for his return to PKR are concerned.

And, oh, that resignation letter he was supposed to have sent with his public announcement in Kota Kinabalu at the beginning of the year that he was quitting PKR – no one knows if indeed it was dispatched to PKR central.

In Sabah's revolving door politics, that's par for the course.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal profession for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.