ANALYSIS Former Federal Territories chief Zaid Ibrahim’s sudden departure from PKR, under somewhat unhappy circumstances, has caught Sabah strongman Jeffrey Kitingan flat-footed but not entirely without political options.

Zaid, who had banked so much on Sabah and Sarawak to win the PKR deputy presidency, apparently left his allies in the party in a lurch when he quit out of the blue without breathing so much as a word to them.

His critics, and many supporters as well, explain this apparently impulsive quit action on his part as basically due to a fundamental “instability of character” in Zaid. The truth, as usual, may be somewhere in between...