Reflecting on Mahathir’s Legacy in Malaysia
Conducted one of my periodical Amazon price checks today on journalist Barry Wain’s new controversial book “Malaysian Maverick”, which details the legacy of Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Still 80 bucks which I can’t afford.
But I thought it would be worth noting some of the interesting things those who have read the book have noted since its release earlier this year, since Mahathir’s legacy will cast a shadow over Malaysia for a long time to come. I myself still vividly remember his teary ‘resignation’ announcement in June 2002, which I witnessed along with several shell-shocked family members crammed into my grandmother’s house in Malaysia and glued to the television set.
On the Judiciary and Monarchy:
`Hang the lawyers, hang the judges” was one of Mahathir’s favorite private slogans. He argued that the idea of natural justice, which, among other things, required that accused parties be allowed to tell their side of the story, was a relic of British jurisprudence that was ill-suited to modern Malaysia. In a complicated political fight in the late 1980s over the leadership of the UMNO, Mahathir cooperated with the King to undermine the judiciary’s ability to grant a fair hearing to a group of UMNO members who challenged his supremacy over the party. His conciliation of the monarchy, however, was a political tactic that quickly outlasted its usefulness. By the mid-1990s, he had lost patience with the old elites because of the political damage done to the UMNO by the frequently aired stories of princely excess, erratic behavior and corruption. A constitutional amendment passed in 1994 under Mahathir’s pressure gutted any real political power the monarchy once had, and reduced it to a handmaiden of the UMNO.
On Economic Growth:
By many measures, Mahathir’s and the UMNO’s economic policies worked. Once a colonial agricultural backwater marked by widespread poverty, Mahathir’s Malaysia became, within a generation, an impressively performing Southeast Asian economy. Twenty years of Mahathir’s policies (on the back of the New Economic Policy introduced in 1971), had reduced poverty from half of the population in 1970 to just over 5 percent by 2002. Bumiputra standards of living rose markedly. Higher education expanded, medical care became much better and a modern infrastructure network connected all parts of the country. Once ugly and dirty towns and cities became much healthier, more attractive places to live.
As with every other developing economy in the region, however, this growth came at a price. While by the 1990s most Malays were better off than their parents, the urban middle classes benefited most from the country’s modernization. Farmers and the rural petty bourgeoisie, the people Mahathir grew up with, were largely left behind during the 1990s economic boom. In addition, poor non-Malays, Indians and Chinese alike, saw their incomes stagnate while the Malays were favored by affirmative action programs.
Corruption spread like cancer through the UMNO political system. Politics became thoroughly monetised as the scramble for new wealth corrupted the values of the first generation of UMNO leaders. Opportunists took over local politics, and lavish spending on local elections became the norm. At a higher level of capital accumulation, a huge wave of privatisation and investments in mega-projects made the politically connected fabulously wealthy. One critic said “piratization” rather than privatization was the correct word for the sell-off of state assets, since the process only assisted a few well connected people who won projects in no-bid, murky transactions that were heavily political.
Most often, the consequences of overly ambitious plans were ignored. The country’s consumers and taxpayers paid dearly for some of Mahathir’s ambitions. Readers of the book will be familiar with many of Mahathir’s big-ticket ideas: The Proton car, the Bakun dam, the high-tech Multimedia Super Corridor, the Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Putrajaya administrative capital. Big government spending on heavy industry and infrastructure development began in the 1980s as a sort of hyper-Keynesianism; the government wasn’t just borrowing in times of economic contraction to stimulate the economy, but all the time. The UMNO’s Fleet Holdings was an active, aggressive investment channel for the government. Mahathir, as Wain describes it, had an “edifice complex”: He was obsessed with mega projects that would impress the world and intolerant of any criticism of the cost or rationale of these endeavors.
On Political Freedom:
Mahathir as Prime Minister proved to be a formidable enemy of anyone who tried to cross him or go against his wishes. Politics in the 1980s saw a Mahathir-directed reorganization of the UMNO. He sacked his enemies in the government, bullied the press into towing the government’s line, and used the much-hated Internal Security Act to silence and jail his opponents. Wain argues that the climate he played a key role in creating – one of complete disregard for the rule of law and a “by any means necessary” attitude to destroying critics – governed the treatment than any prominent person [like Anwar] who ran afoul of Mahathir could expect from the government-controlled press and organs of state.
On Security and US-Malaysia Relations:
In 1984, during a visit to Washington DC in which Mahathir met President Ronald Reagan, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and others, he secretly launched an innocuous sounding Bilateral Training and Consultation Treaty, which Wain described as a series of working groups for exercises, intelligence sharing, logistical support and general security issues. In the meantime, Mahathir continued display a public antipathy on general principles at the Americans while his jungle was crawling with US troops quietly training for jungle warfare.
On the Man Himself:
Mahathir had…a fully-developed sense of injustice. He appears to this day to continue to resent much of the west, particularly the British. Wain writes exhaustively of Mahathir’s deep antagonism over both British elitism during the colonial days and the disdain of his fellow Malays (Mahathir’s parentage is partly Indian Muslim on his father’s side), especially the Malay royalty. That antagonism against the British has been a hallmark of his career – from the time he instituted the “Buy British Last” policy for the Malaysian government as prime minister to the present day. Robert Mugabe…remains in Mahathir’s good graces. Asked recently why that was, an aide told me Mugabe had driven the British out of Zimbabwe and was continuing to drive out white farmers to this day, although he was replacing them with people who knew nothing of farming. That expropriation of vast tracts of white-owned land might have destroyed Zimbabwe’s agricultural production. But, the aide said, “He got the Brits out.”
The ability to work both sides of the street was a Mahathir characteristic. “While [Mahathir] has been a public figure in Malaysia for half a century and well known abroad for almost as long, he has presented himself as a bundle of contradictions: a Malay champion who was the Malays’ fiercest critic and an ally of Chinese-Malaysian businessmen; a tireless campaigner against Western economic domination who assiduously courted American and European capitalists; a blunt, combative individual who extolled the virtues of consensual Asian values.”
Most of the reviews I’ve read so far suggest this is a pretty fair book, and it has been flying off the shelves. Still waiting on that price decrease though…