Telling the former federal minister not to side-step the issue and give poor excuses as to his departure from the party, Musa said there was no denying that Shafie had indeed “backstabbed Prime Minister Najib Razak”.
“After not being able to secure his position as the next Sabah chief minister, Shafie joined forces with another Umno dissident, Muhyiddin Yassin, and had his eyes set on the deputy prime minister’s post.
“It’s not my style to get confrontational, but I have to say something.
“Stop tip-toeing around this issue. Let’s call a spade a spade. That was why he chose to leave the party,” Musa said.
He added Shafie had already struck a deal earlier with the “party dissidents”, which included former Kedah menteri besar Mukhriz Mahathir.
Muhyiddin and Mukhriz were both sacked from Umno in June 2016 and Shafie left the following month, having already been suspended.
“To claim that he had placed ‘the future of the nation’ ahead of his friendship with Najib is laughable,” Musa said.
Shafie said in a statement yesterday that Musa was “never comfortable with me being Umno vice-president”.
“Perhaps now that I am heading Warisan, Musa sees me as a bigger threat to his chief ministership and Umno’s very survival in the state,” Shafie said.
Musa called for Shafie to exercise a bit of political maturity instead of acting like a schoolboy by saying that he (Musa) was not comfortable with his position as Umno vice-president.
“If I was uncomfortable, I would have gone for the post myself. Not only didn’t I go for VP, I also did not contest for a Umno Supreme Council post. I did not because of my commitments as chief minister,” Musa said.
Meanwhile, Musa said it was Najib who had helped Shafie become an Umno vice-president, besides giving him the important rural and regional development ministry portfolio, with the hope that he would help Sabah.
“But he squandered the opportunity by his selfishness and dubious agenda,” Musa said, adding that Shafie has now formed a party with his cronies from his time in office.
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‘Backstabber’ Shafie ungrateful for leaving Umno, says Najib