The Huguan Siou still holds sway

CHARISMATIC LEADER ... Pairin, the paramount leader of the Kadazandusuns is still a magnetic force and enjoys the adulation of both men and women, young and old.

My taxi crunched to a stop outside the Kitingan family home. A sign at the gate announced it Pagok Tokou – it means “Our Home” in Kadazandusun. It is probably the grandest house in the Tambunan valley, the home base of Datuk Seri Joseph Pairin Kitingan.

Pairin was already waiting in the spacious living room, wearing his trademark grey bush-suit and sipping his second cup of kopi-O.

The deep green jade stone on his ring finger gleamed as he introduced the other men in the room – Datuk Bullah Ganggal, a vice-president of Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) and Wilfred Jakil, his right hand man in Tambunan, and his brothers Philip and Victor (third and youngest in the 15-member Kitingan brood).

The atmosphere was formal as Pairin settled into a cane sofa, poker-faced, his back straight and his voice as solemn as though he was speaking in a church. As usual, the media has a way of making people bigger than they really are, and I am struck by how much smaller he is in the flesh.

He will be 62 this year and despite his roller-coaster political career, he seemed none the worst for wear. Only his eyes looked weary, as though he had seen much sadness and disappointment.

This is the man whom many Kadazandusuns regard as their folk hero and whom they look up to as their Huguan Siou or Paramount Leader.

Pairin had catapulted into the national consciousness in the early 1980s when he stood up against the might of Datuk Harris Salleh and the ruling Berjaya party and formed PBS which he led to victory in the state in 1985.

He went on to become Chief Minister for two terms – first, as part of the BN and later, outside the BN. It was a bittersweet stint in power that came to an end in 1994, when the BN regained control of the state.

The half dozen or more years spent out of power and in the opposition have been far from easy. Late last year, PBS applied to rejoin the BN and the formal approval came last month. Pairin had come full circle.

Pairin is hardly the easiest of persons to read. He does not wear his heart on his sleeve and, as many journalists would testify, he likes to mull over questions and pick his words.

As we chatted, his mother walked through the door. The Kitingan matriarch is a pint-sized lady, with smiling eyes. She shook hands with everyone in the room, including her famous son and insisted we eat the rather elaborate lunch that had been prepared by Victor’s wife.

It was a good thing that I did not immediately plonk myself down at the table as I suddenly realised that everyone was standing behind their chairs, palms clasped and ready to say grace led by the matriarch.

The lady of the house is a devout Roman Catholic and rises at 4am everyday to pray till about 7am. She is obviously devoted to her first-born and spoke about how as a young boy, Pairin would help her look after his younger brothers, do the laundry, feed the chickens and pigs, harvest the padi.

Her late husband was a policeman whose constant transfers from town to town resulted in Pairin spending most of his school years in boarding school. It was probably a blessing in disguise for boarding school instilled in him a discipline and routine that would not otherwise have been possible.

Pairin went on to win a Colombo Plan scholarship to study law in Australia and became the first Kadazandusun lawyer.

He returned in 1971 to join the Attorney-General’s Chambers, set up his own legal practice in 1974, stood for elections under the Berjaya ticket in 1976, fell out of grace with Datuk Harris Salleh in 1984, won the historical by-election in Tambunan in 1984, formed PBS in 1985, won control of the state in 1986 and the rest is history.

With lunch over, we left in two cars for Paula Damianus’ house. Paula is the deputy head of the women’s wing of the Tambunan division and the occasion was the first year anniversary of her father’s death.

She is a jovial woman and quite without vanity for she greeted us wearing a pair of baggy shorts and a grubby t-shirt.

We sat down to another lunch – wild boar cooked in a variety of ways. By then Pairin had shed a bit of his reserve. He was definitely on home ground as the village folk came in to greet him, hug him and shake his hand.

One of them was a really elderly lady with skin like crepe paper. She sat close to Pairin, talking to him with great familiarity and even buried her face in the nape of his neck when I tried to take their picture. Pairin hugged her close, as tenderly as he would a child.

That is a side of Pairin that few people outside of Tambunan see – his kindness and reverence for the elderly and his affection for children. His face softens when he sees children and he makes clucking sounds, pats their head and goes: “Hellooo … sooo cute!”

Lunch was hardly over when the rice wine was brought out.

The Huguan Siou, as the guest of honour, was offered the first glass.

A tiny cup about the size of a sherry glass is filled to the brim and the person offering the drink hovers over you until you down the last drop. Then the cup is rinsed in a shallow basin of water, refilled and offered to the next person. Yes, I did entertain some thought to the aspect of hygiene but after a few cups, you sort of cease to care.

And after a few cups, Pairin grew even more relaxed. He laughed at all of Paula’s jokes, teased the children who had come with their mothers, told stories about climbing Sabah’s second highest peak Mt Trusmadi, talked about the types of bamboo and ginger found in the Tambunan valley and even tried to teach me a bit of Kadazandusun.

He asked me to say, “Er-herh” when the wine cup came around again. It means “Yes.”

By the time everybody rose for the memorial service, my head was spinning. As everyone was praying, I slipped out to the Range Rover where the driver helpfully cranked up the air-conditioning. After a while, word got around that I was mabuk, or as they put it in the local parlance: “Joceline sudah mabook!”

When I next stumbled into the house, Pairin was crooning his favourite song, Jinulim di Batu Lapan. It is a romantic ballad about a village belle named Jinulim who lives on the eighth mile.

When we asked him about the song, he said laughingly: “Let the mystery continue.”

The Kadazandusuns really know how to party!

We left at about 4pm for our next stop, the wedding of the son of Pairin’s former driver, a rather handsome gentleman called Enos and his wife who sported a beehive hairdo for the occasion. They embraced Pairin like a long-lost brother.

The wine was already flowing by the time we arrived and ushers bearing huge bamboo containers filled with the brew went about compelling everyone to drink up.

The bride and groom are police officers working in KL and they made a striking pair. The groom was tall and macho although his name is Hilary, and the bride Jacqueline was quite a sexy babe, with doe eyes and a Julia Roberts set of lips.

Three elderly ladies were singing their own unique rendition of the Kadazandusun version of Ave Maria but everyone gave them a big hand anyway. It was a raucous wedding, so full of laughter, singing and shouting that it made conversation excruciating.

As I ate my third lunch of the day, I asked Donny, the Australia-educated son of Datuk Bullah, what he thought of Pairin.

“Well, he’s our Huguan Siou but I admire him because he’s a man who plays by the rules …”

Before he could go on, Pairin’s right-hand man, Wilfred, came up to introduce his cousin Joseph Jouti.

“I am in PBS, he is with Bersekutu … ask him, ask him!” Fred egged me on.

I was about to have a close-up look at the complexity of Kadazandusun politics. Wilfred is a diehard PBS man, but Joseph is a supreme council member of Parti Bersekutu and was in two other parties before that. He has also contested against Pairin in three different elections.

“Oh, we still talk … there is only one Huguan Siou, you know,” Joseph insisted.

As we chatted, I noticed Joseph’s wife doing a leisurely waltz with Pairin. When they finished, Liza (pronounced Lai-za, not Lee-za) came over, pulled me close and whispered in my ear: “My hubby is Bersekutu, but my heart has been with PBS from day one.”

Joseph interrupted to draw my attention to a tall, stylish lady walking in just then. She turned out to be his younger sister Zubaidah who is married to a Muslim and deputy Wanita Umno head for Tambunan. Wow, what a family!

At about 8pm, Pairin went up to the makeshift stage, took the mike and began to sing. By then, all of my preconceived notions of Pairin as a stiff and humourless politician had evaporated into the unpolluted air of Tambunan.

He sang a medley of Kadazandusun ballads in a deep, melodious voice that someone likened to Harry Belafonte.

The songs sounded rather romantic but I was told that the first song was, “Don’t be stingy, let’s have fun,” and the second was, “I’m in Tambunan, don’t restrain me or my clothes will tear.”

The third was titled “Tamparuli Bridge,” and the final song was of course his signature, Jinulim di Batu Lapan.

Everyone knew that Jinulim was the signal that Pairin was about to take his leave, and as he neared the end of the song, people began milling up along the narrow aisle.

He must have taken a good 20 minutes to negotiate that short aisle from the stage as men and women threw their arms around him, hugged him in rocking motions, squeezed his shoulders. An elderly man almost burst into tears and from the way they went on, you’d think he was leaving for a pilgrimage to Rome instead of just going home.

We drove off with the driver hooting the horn as though Pairin was the groom himself. “Let’s go to my mother’s house to wash up,” he said.

The man can really hold his drink. He walked up the garden path to his mother’s house as steady as though he had been drinking black coffee the entire day.

After a wash, coffee and banana cake, we left for Kota Kinabalu. His head was still clear for he started to explain why PBS had returned to the BN.

“We felt we had to rally behind the government in fighting the terrorist threat,” he said.

Moreover, he added, the BN’s policies had, over the years, come to dovetail the concerns of PBS, chief among which was the government’s stand on illegal immigrants and foreign workers, issues which the PBS had highlighted since the 1980s.

What he seemed less ready to admit was that the PBS, on its own, has little chance of another shot at power given the redelineated constituencies – the ethnically-mixed seats now outnumber the Kadazandusun-majority seats.

The last two state elections saw young Kadazandusuns swaying towards the other Kadazandusun-based parties in the BN, and Pairin is too seasoned and shrewd a politician not to have noticed the writing on the wall.

PBS has lost quite a bit of its early Oomph! but Pairin as a personality is still a magnetic force if the kind of adulation he draws from both men and women, old and young, is any indication.

Or as so many Kadazandusuns articulated that day in Tambunan, there is only one Huguan Siou.

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