‘I didn’t own it’ tack on corruption by Dr Mahathir is false

 

From Terence Netto

The Keluar Sekejap podcast where Dr Mahathir Mohamad was interviewed drew interest for any hint of the sapience of age in a leader fast approaching his centenary.

After all, how often do leaders who wrestled with the central dilemmas of their times get the chance to live to a grand old age where they can look back and see clearly what went on before?

Longevity is a grace. In as combative a politician as Mahathir is, that gift is wasted.

The reason: he is not ruminative and so an innate partisanship does not give way to detached judgement, exercised at a distance and informed by the knowledge of consequences.

On Keluar Sekejap, the programme’s co-hosts, Khairy Jamaluddin and Shahril Hamdan, drew Mahathir out on the issue of corruption, now eating at the nation’s innards like terminal cancer.

Mahathir disclaimed responsibility for its incidence and spread.

Critics say the corruption now bedevilling the nation became a problem of serious proportions after the removal of Salleh Abas as the top judge in the country in 1988.

However, Mahathir maintained on Keluar Sekejap that if there was corruption under his prime ministerial watch (two stints, viz 1981-2003 and 2018-2020), it was the responsibility of the people in charge of portfolios, departments and agencies to report the matter to the Anti-Corruption Agency.

He conveniently forgot that when the ACA chief in the 1990s, Shafee Yahaya, reported he found RM100,000 in the drawer of the then director-general of the Economic Planning Unit in the Prime Minister’s Department, Ali Abul Hassan, Mahathir reacted by dressing down Shafee for having the temerity to search his officer’s premises.

The incident became a cause celebre.

It came up in the corruption trials of Anwar Ibrahim in the late 1990s and in the appeals in the 2000s.

Details of the confrontation between Mahathir and Shafee can be found in a biography of Shafee, “The Shafee Yahaya Story”, written by Kalsom Taib and published in 2010.

This is only one story of an incident that happened during Mahathir’s tenure as prime minister.

From the details of the incident involving Shafee, it is not difficult to infer that Mahathir was being flexible with the truth on the issue of corruption during his tenure.

It serves to remind us of the fate of Ali Abul Hassan: he went on to be Bank Negara governor.

Given that the problem of corruption these days is so entrenched, there was no sign while on Keluar Sekejap that Mahathir harbours remorse for his abdications on the matter during his 22-year first stint as prime minister. - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.