Mahathir 'mudah lupa' about why Malays are poor

 

Two-time prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad - for 22 years and then 22 months - easily forgets these days. He recently expressed sadness that Malays were still poor, lamenting their backwardness relative to other races.

But why are the Malays poor, Mahathir? The truth is that they are poor because of you, Mahathir, you ignored them for the nearly 24 years when you were in power - you were too busy making Malay (and non-Malay) billionaires, including one or two of your children and saving them from ruin as well.

What was it that you did for the poor Malay, or for that matter, for any poor Malaysian? In the last 42 years, you were PM for almost 24 years, 57 percent of the time. You had every opportunity to take care of the poor, but you did not. Because you were focused on the rich.

You wanted to create world-class billionaires and businesses from a country whose income was middling - how is that possible? The only way you develop a country and increase its gross national income is to increase productivity and pay everyone a decent wage.

The only way you get many billionaires in a poor country is when you give away the country’s precious resources in return for your own well-being and the well-being of your party and politicians from your party who got kickbacks aplenty from these businesses and businessmen.

You cultivated a coterie of billionaires by giving them things such as independent power generation, mobile telephone licences, toll roads, construction contracts, gaming licences, water concessions, monopolies and oligopolies through your much-abused privatisation and other means.

The list of billionaires came not only from Malays but from other races and included the likes of Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary, Francis Yeoh, Vincent Tan, Ting Pek Khing, Eric Chia, Ananda Krishnan and many more.

You appointed as your economic czar to distribute the largesse, your crony Daim Zainuddin, who had unfettered power and who cultivated his own coterie of billionaires who were often high-spending and lived a lavish lifestyle, way beyond what most Malays could even imagine.

Whereas the person who helped you most to get to the top, the second prime minister Abdul Razak Hussein, traipsed the countryside with his walking stick to see rural development for himself, you ignored this, and in the process a large part of the Malay population - you turned your back on them.

Dr Mahathir Mohamad recently joined Putra

Farming got a very low priority and our food production is rather low compared to, say Thailand, which is more or less self-sufficient in food and has a substantial food processing industry. But, you were too busy promoting heavy industries and low-end manufacturing which required cheap labour.

So ingrained was an industry in your mind that you allowed cheap Indonesian labour in, starting with the plantation sector, where hordes of Indians moved from their green ghettos to the urban ones, with spillovers to all sectors of the economy as cheap labour spread everywhere.

You skewed entry of migrant labour to alter the religious and racial composition of the country but neglected to or could not care two sen that many Malays were stuck in a rut of poor wages for manual labour. You impoverished them, I will say that again: You impoverished the Malays, Mahathir. You made them poor.

You and your economic czar ensured industrial competitiveness by depressing the wages of Malaysians, at least 60 percent of whom are Malay and now you have the temerity to say you are saddened by their poverty when you caused it.

Everyone saw through you

The Malays saw through your deviousness, when your party Bersatu, was dealt a blow in the Malay heartland in the 2018 election. Bersatu contested 52 parliamentary seats and won only 13 - a clear indication that you were not responsible for the Pakatan Harapan victory.

With 13 seats you still became PM on the promise that you would hand over power to Anwar Ibrahim. You blatantly broke your word. The non-Malays supported you for a while, perhaps partly because of DAP’s undue adulation of you and the hopeless hope that they could control you.

But eventually, everyone saw through you. If any more evidence of your lack of support base is needed, you and every one of your Pejuang candidates lost their deposits in the latest elections. This left you like a drowning man, clutching at weeds and straws to keep afloat.

After the second round of dalliance with the disreputable Perkasa, you are now disgracefully courting PAS while your son Mukhriz seems infatuated with Bersatu.

Neither Abdul Hadi Awang nor Muhyiddin Yassin will give you or your son the time of day although they may not be averse to using you - they know you better than that. Were they not the ones who got rid of you?

You might as well accept that your days are over - you can’t fool people all the time. Nobody believes anymore that you acted in the interest of the rakyat but for your own selfish ends - not for the Malays, not for the Malaysians.

So, Mahathir, in your last days, stay out - you have done more harm to this country than any other single person, even Najib Abdul Razak, for he was only following the path you set for every PM who succeeded you - using patronage and corruption to the hilt to benefit yourself, your cronies and your party in that order.

What is worse, you did it in the name of the Malays - that you were developing Malay entrepreneurship when what you needed to do was to educate them, giving them a means of getting better jobs. You destroyed what was a decent education system.

Ringgit vs SGD

One last thing. When you became PM in 1981, 24 years after our independence in 1957, the ringgit was trading about on par with the Singapore dollar. By the time you left in 2003, 22 years later, one Malaysian ringgit was worth just 45 Singapore cents.

Following the lead you set, it has declined more - one ringgit is worth about 30 Singapore cents now. How badly you have done when compared with a neighbouring country which was about as developed or undeveloped as we were then!

That should give you an indication of how bad your management of the country was and how you were more responsible than anyone else for poverty among Malaysians, of which 60 percent are Malays.

You should spend your time in deep reflection and even deeper regret over the enormity of the damage you have done to this country and live in the knowledge that you were more responsible than any other person alive or dead for the ills facing us.

Also, realise that it will be next to impossible for anyone to equal your infamous record with respect to this. And know this: Despite his shortcomings, the man you despise so much and the one who suffered so much under your stained hands, Anwar, will go down in history as a far better PM than you have ever been, which is justice personified through the hands of fate.

I shall stop writing about you anymore and let you slide - not into obscurity but into infamy - an example of everything a leader should not be and the hypocrisy, lies and sheer, unbridled deviousness and crookedness you used to control this country and its people.

That includes the Malays.

No one will be taken in by you anymore. You have had your time, and now it's over. - Mkini

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P GUNASEGARAM says that history eventually catches up with the bad and shows them for what they really are.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.