Sabah Chief Minister Musa Aman sups with the gods. He, as state Umno chief, led the National Front (BN) to another stunning victory in last year's general election. He is as powerful as the other megalomaniac in Sabah politics, Tun Mustapha Harun. His political patron is Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. He controls all that matters in the state, ignoring advice, consultation, the law.

His reach extends his power as Mustapha's once did: arrogantly, cynically, corruptly to reduce the powerful and the weak into blithering idiots. Along the way, he collects political and personal enemies and a corps of dissidents determined to bring him down. Like Mustapha, he did not recognise the tell-tale signs of his loss of power. He lost out when he could not appoint one in his extended family as Yang Di-pertua Negeri (governor). He holds office for two years, rotating it with other racial groups in the state. He wants to scrap that, again without consultation, and make the Umno leader chief minister.

In politically volatile Sabah, that is red rag to the bull. In an attempt to retain a hold on the state, it devised a system that would rotate the chief ministers from amongst the three main political groups the Malay Muslim, the non-Malay Muslim, the non-Malay non-Muslim holding office for two years in Buggin's turn. After the BN's electoral sweep last year, Umno decides to scrap it unilaterally without even consulting its cauldron of competing and often hostile chieftains. The chieftains in Umno and BN disagree. So did the state BN.

But they would not confront. The BN in Sabah, as in the centre, prove their loyalty to Umno in public displays of self-flagellation to remain on the team. But Umno chieftains, on the other hand, now refuse to. And behind the scenes, treachery and revolt lurks, which threatens to get out of hand.

But federal Umno decided for its selfish political power on a permanent Muslim-controlled Sabah to counter the dominant Roman Catholic-centred Kadazandusun political force. Since Sabah and Sarawak teamed up with Malaya to form Malaysia in 1963, the minority-Muslim constituency, with Kuala Lumpur's help, tried, so far with little success, to break it down. Federal Umno, in frustration, came into Sabah to re-order the political scene once and for all. All it did was to raise the shackles against it of Sabahans, not just the Kadazandusun. Especially now when the Mustapha redux in Musa Aman unites Sabahans of all persuasions against Umno.