Coup d’état against Ismail Sabri being planned
It seems Zahid and ‘BossKu’ Najib Razak want their criminal cases to be withdrawn and the charges dropped. Ismail Sabri, however, is reluctant to do what will not only trigger a backlash on Umno but will result in the end of his career as well.
NO HOLDS BARRED
Raja Petra Kamarudin
A coup d’état or rampasan kuasa against prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob is being planned. The latest intel reports say Umno-Barisan Nasional will win 38 or 68% of the seats in the Johor state assembly in tomorrow’s election. This will give the signal that parliament will be dissolved to make way for a snap GE15, at the very latest by June.
DAP is trying to pre-empt this by offering to extend the MoU with the government, which ends in July. That would in essence give the government the majority it needs in parliament — hence making the dissolution of parliament unnecessary.
Umno president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, however, has rejected the ‘offer’ in favour of a snap GE15.
It seems Zahid and ‘BossKu’ Najib Razak want their criminal cases to be withdrawn and the charges dropped. Ismail Sabri, however, is reluctant to do what will not only trigger a backlash on Umno but will result in the end of his career as well.
Earlier this week, they wanted the Attorney-General Idrus Harun to be replaced with a ‘friendly party’. But yesterday, when his tenure was extended another year, that was the final straw that broke the camel’s back. Najib and Zahid have now decided that Ismail Sabri must go and must go in the next couple of months.
Mohamad Hasan a.k.a. Tok Mat is going to be Najib’s and Zahid’s proxy to take on Ismail Sabri. The battlelines are now drawn and Umno is back to the days of Team A versus Team B — like in 1987 (Mahathir vs Ku LI), 1998 (Mahathir vs Anwar), 2006 (Mahathir vs Pak Lah), and 2015 (Mahathir vs Najib).
In those four Team A versus Team B civil wars, Mahathir was the common denominator in all the fights. In this latest Team A versus Team B Umno civil war, the players are all different, so it is not clear how the outcome is going to be. The only clear thing this time is this new civil war is going to hurt Umno in the next general election worse than in GE14 in 2018.
