It appears that a major reason for this is that the constituency was served by the popular Abdullah Ahmad Badawi for eight terms. He did not run for election in 2013, which was called four years after he resigned from the prime minister’s post.
The man who replaced Abdullah for the 2013 contest and won, Reezal Naina Merican, used to be his political secretary. The association probably helped, judging from the cheers Reezal got when he mentioned “Pak Lah” at a recent Umno forum held in a kampung within the Kepala Batas district.
In a video released last year, Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng acknowledged that Abdullah’s popularity would make it hard for Pakatan Harapan to crack through the Umno shell that encases Kepala Batas.
“The Pak Lah influence is strong,” Lim said. “We have chances elsewhere, but Kepala Batas will be difficult.”
In an interview with FMT, Reezal said it was Abdullah who was responsible for turning Kepala Batas from a sleepy town into the bustling modern community that it is today.
He said development started trickling in after he assumed the deputy prime minister’s post in 1999.
“Kepala Batas has witnessed a big change since then. It is amazing how Pak Lah turned around our hometown into something we can be all proud of.”
Reezal, 45, is an Umno supreme council member and deputy foreign minister. He won the last polls against PAS’ Afnan Hamimi Taib Azamudden by getting 53.8% of the votes. This was rather humbling, compared to the nearly 66% that Abdullah got in 2008.
Reezal said he was ready to fight any candidate put up by Pakatan but would not stoop to boasting about his chances.
“I have been trained by Pak Lah since I was his political secretary,” he said. “We do not thump our chests and claim we are strong. But we will continue doing the one thing we do best, which is to serve the people.
“I will not give any estimate of my chances in the coming polls. It’s important that we are not here to do touch-and-go politics, but to touch the people’s hearts instead.”
The director of Pakatan’s Kepala Batas secretariat, Zaidi Zakaria, acknowledged that Kepala Batas had seen much economic progress, but said this was only because the former and current MPs were cabinet members.
“Therefore, PH will woo the voters through education, that is, by creating awareness on the issues that matter,” he said.
“The people of Kepala Batas need matters explained to them, especially on the rising cost of living.”
He said many of the rural folk were unhappy about the rising prices of goods and services but did not realise that the GST was to blame.
“Some people I’ve met think GST is something you pay to the Inland Revenue Department. We’ll enlighten them through our education series.”
Zaidi, a paediatrician attached to a private hospital in Bukit Mertajam, said Pakatan would also call for the upgrading of the Kepala Batas Hospital to a specialists’ centre like the Penang and Seberang Jaya hospitals.
According to statistics from the third quarter of last year, Kepala Batas has 60,075 voters on the electoral roll. Of the number, 78% are Malays, 17% Chinese, 4% Indians and 1% others.