COMMENT | Anything but Umno… and ex-Umno

COMMENT | When lawyer-activist Haris Ibrahim first coined the phrase “Anything but Umno” in 2011, he had to wait seven years until 2018 before the voting public rejected Umno/BN to vote Pakatan Harapan into government. (Both the English and Malay acronyms are the same - ABU - Asalkan bukan Umno in Malay)

In October 2022, less than a year before his death due to cancer and after the elected Harapan government was toppled by the traitorous Sheraton Move in 2020, he expanded it to include those PKR defectors who contributed to the fall - Azmin Ali, Zuraida Kamaruddin, and Saifuddin Abdullah - the untrustworthy trinity.

Another metamorphosis was made in November of the same year when Haris included PAS under the category. He explained: “It looks like Harapan has to turn to Umno/BN to avoid a PAS-dominated government, which is what would happen if PN (Perikatan Nasional, the coalition whose main partners are PAS and Bersatu) was allowed to take the lead in forming the new administration.

“I have touched on two elements regarding the divisive politics of the country. One is ethnicity. The other is religion and PAS represents the most dangerous of the latter,” he said.

To these, I would like to humbly add ex-Umno too. It looks like once one is tainted with the Umno blood and DNA, it’s forever. No matter what they say they will do, or the unfair suffering they have undergone before, once they come into power, they forget all that...