Deputy President of Sarawak National Party (Snap), Ting Ling Kiew, has yet to receive a show cause letter sent to him by the Central Executive Committee.

“The committee has given me until May 7 to reply, but until now I have not received any letter. So how can I reply?” Ting asked.

batang ai election day nadai name pix 070409 04 “I think they only ‘main, main sama saya’ (playing with me) and they simply want publicity for the sake of the Batang Ai by-election,” he said.

He said it is possible that Snap president Edwin Dundang and the secretary-general Stanley Jugol were scared of his threat to sue them if they went ahead with the show cause letter.

The show cause letter arose after Ting did not agree with his president and secretary-general to throw their support for Jawah Gerang, the Parti Keadilan Rakyat candidate for the April 7 Batang Ai by-election.

Instead, Ting not only campaigned for the Barisan Nasional candidate, Malcolm Mussen, but went to meet with the newly-appointed Umno president and Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak and declared to him Snap’s keenness to return to the fold of Barisan Nasional.

Snap hit by many problems

Dundang and Jugol were unhappy with Ting’s unauthorised move and asked for an explanation through the show cause letter.

Efforts to contact the secretary-general failed. Phone calls and “sms” went unanswered.

tiong king sing Snap has been bogged down by problem after problem since April 2002 when the party led by the then James Wong expelled the Bintulu MP Tiong King Sing after they found that he had breached party discipline.

Although it was not mentioned what the breach of discipline was, it was publicly known that it had something to do with the TV3 project in Bintulu.

According to Snap, Tiong agreed to come up with RM1.5 million to finance part of the project. Tiong, however, denied that he had agreed.

Tiong’s expulsion triggered a leadership crisis when nine CEC members did not agree with the action of the party to kick Tiong out. The crisis led Snap to being deregistered on Nov 5, 2002 and the formation of Sarawak Progressive Democratic Party. But Snap is now given a stay of execution pending its appeal to the court.

Party needs a charismatic leader

Since then Snap has been reduced to a “mosquito” party and its attempts to return to its former glory had ended disastrously in every election it contested. Snap’s problems became more complex and apparently unsolvable with the resignation of Wong as its president on Nov 27 2005.

Wong also withdrew as one of the applicants in Snap’s application for a judicial review of the decision of the Registrar of Societies to deregister Snap and allowed the leadership to do what it deemed fit.

Thus the leadership was therefore thrust on Dundang to shoulder, a man with little experience to run the party and surrounded by equally incapable CEC members.

For Snap to return to its past glory, it needs a charismatic leader, who has the qualities of its founding president Stephen Kalong Ningkan. But for now, it still needs Ting for various reasons.