About time Harapan dispensed with Dr Mahathir and Anwar

For close on three decades now, history has contrived to make the choice for national leadership in Malaysia revolve around Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Anwar Ibrahim.

This narrowed choice has been to the impoverishment of the nation.

True, there have been others, like Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and Najib Razak, who followed Mahathir in the prime ministerial post.

But their tenancies were truncated, essentially because their continuation in office would have made Anwar electable as PM.

Mahathir simply wouldn't abide that.

Thus he agitated for Abdullah's cessation and campaigned for Najib's ouster.

Malaysia's first PM, Tunku Abdul Rahman (above), who lived until 87, once mischievouly suggested, at an octogenarian birthday celebration of his, that PAS would claim the Almighty had granted the Tunku a long life to repent for the sin of forming Umno.

The wise regard divine purpose as inscrutable and disdain to affect knowledge about it. But in the same facetious vein as Tunku's, it can be said the Almighty has granted Mahathir a long life to baulk Anwar's obsession with being PM.

The chief fascination of Mahathir's now 19-month-long second tenancy of the PM's office is how long he can sustain the illusion he will hand over to Anwar and still sound credible? Otherwise the man becomes a crashing bore.

Essentially, in retrospect, the main qualification for long tenancy of the PM's post for someone following in Mahathir's 22-year first tenancy (1981-2003) is distaste for anything that may facilitate the assumption of the prime ministerial reins by Anwar.

Abdullah Badawi (below), on taking over from Mahathir, adopted a policy of glasnost (openness).

This spawned the atmosphere for Anwar's judiciary hastened release in August 2004 from his first bout of incarceration for corruption and sodomy, charges levelled against him by the administration of Mahathir,

Worse - from a Mahathir standpoint - was to follow. Abdullah compounded glasnost by empanelling in January 2008 a royal commission of inquiry (RCI) into the Lingam vidoetape issue.

Horror of horrors, it recommended Mahathir be charged for offences for abuse of power, and the like.

Abdullah simply had to go, and duly went in April 2009, a year after the RCI posted its recommendations and almost simultaneous with a politically resurgent Anwar's denial of Umno-BN's traditional supermajority in Parliament at GE12.

Taking over from what was a mortally wounded and ineffectual Badawi, Najib began his new 'broomism' by shaping to introduce economic reforms to the country's ossified socio-political system.

Mahathir would have none of it.

Using his proxies among the Malay right wing, like Perkasa, he fulminated against Najib's intended economic reforms.

Najib took fright and backpedaled, just as Abdullah did after starting out promisingly in late Octber 2003, by empanelling a RCI on the management of the police force.

It serves to note here that almost 15 years after that RCI's most signal recommendation – IPCMC (Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission) – the signature reform is striving to see the light of day.

This stall reflected the depth of ossification of the country's socio-political system.

Backpedaling like predecessor Abdullah, Najib then fomented the behemoth called 1MDB, a suction pump that would drain away the nation's finances.

This made Anwar electable yet again after the miss of GE13 when the opposition coalition he led bested Umno-BN in the popular vote, but was well short of a parliamentary plurality.

But Anwar could not openly campaign against Najib because of a second stint in gaol in Sungai Buloh, again for sodomy.

Mahathir took up the slack and, uniquely for a politician of any stripe in the history of democratic politics anywhere in the world, campaigned and was believed by a majority of voters to be a credible reformer of a system whose stagnation he had done much, during his first spell as PM, to embed.

One-and-a-half years after the success of an awe-inspiring campaign by a man in his nineties, Mahathir has confirmed the truth of the philosopher Georg Santayana's warning – that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

As for Anwar Ibrahim, his folly is not amnesia. His mistake is the deeper and, in a sense, more tragic one of having campaigned all his adult life on a religious platform that is at odds with an aspect of his being.

Suffice it to say Anwar cannot be PM of a Muslim-majority nation. His fault is not to know this when, rationally speaking, he should most know it.

That he continues to obsess about the position only measures the extent of self-delusion.

Mahathir and Anwar are self-delusonists. In rendering them, the usual categories of exposition have to be transcended to attain compehension.

That entails a resort to great literature, the province to which that famous demistyfier of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud, readily deferrred.

In the case of Anwar and Dr M, VS Naipaul's opening lines of "A Bend in The River" are illuminating: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

Pakatan Harapan must move with surgical and deliberate speed to end Malaysia's three-decade bewitchment with its two socerers.

They have no place in the coalition to build a new Malaysia.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. - Mkini