Isa Won and UMNO Lost!
By Hawkeye
We came and saw, we did and knew, that it was an uphill task with all the machinery and money that was thrown in. This election is a more aggressive stance taken by umno and we saw a bit of it in Manek Urai, Kelantan, remember? In Manek Urai PAS had only won by a slim majority of 65 votes in 2009 when they had a bigger majority of 1352 votes in 2008. PAS nearly lost it in Manek Urai and that was a close call.
What we saw here in Bagan Pinang was the power of money as in Manek Urai, however the win here is the additional money power of Isa Samad and all he had to do is to buy oops! I mean win over another 1000 voters or so, which is nothing as compared to the 2500 delegates from the umno election.
There were much more hooliganism and gangsterism this time around and much more intimidating than in Manek Urai, we had real experiences and witnessed many of such incidents. This was an UMNO stronghold and had held this seat with the added support of the huge army or postal votes, of which there had always been much irregularities and a lack of transparency in the voting process of these postal votes. PAS was denied access to campaign in the army camps whereas UMNO unfairly campaign through the Defence Ministry. And the postal voting process were not fairly quantified and verified by the oppositions and even the independent monitors were not allowed to witness the postal voting process.
Isa Samad won this buy-election with a greatly increased majority of 5435 votes but sadly, UMNO lost. There were much hype and justification on the selection of Isa Samad as a candidate and the media spin that he was a popular candidate much loved by the people of Bagan Pinang was just that, a media spin. In Bagan Pinang any other reasonably suitable candidate from UMNO would have won but in Isa, they had the advantage of additional fire power of his money and maybe his ground networking being a local of the constituency. There was a lot of talk in coffee shops that the local “Tai Kors” and “Penghulus” and “Big Mundehs” were all very happy with the sudden windfall coming about from this buy-election.
UMNO lost in the fight against corruption and with the return of Isa Samad, a politician previously found guilty of corrupt practices in the UMNO party election, UMNO will lose much with this win by Isa Samad, it will be much more difficult to cleanse or change the image of the party which is widely seen as a party of warlords and money, and this win by Isa will only endorsed the strength and power of the corrupt and as any right thinking individual will not seek to be elected after being dismissed for corrupt practices but than again it looks like “UMNO boleh” as in UMNO only the corrupt has the power and money to dictate and all else matters not.
This win by Isa Samad had reinforced the image of corruption of the political party of UMNO. UMNO had endorsed corrupt practices and will not change. Any attempt to change in UMNO will now be seen as purely cosmetic and an act of deception.
