Marhaen Dan Rakyat

Sejak berpuluh tahun lalu, bekas Perdana Menteri, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad kerap mendakwa beliau merupakan pejuang orang Melayu yang sejati. Melalui buku The Malay Dilemma, Dasar Ekonomi Baru (DEB) yang dipergiatkan dan Wawasan 2020, beliau berulang kali menjanjikan pembangunan serta kemajuan untuk kaum Melayu. Namun, realitinya hingga kini menceritakan kisah yang amat berbeza. Anak-anak Mahathir terutamanya Mirzan, Mokhzani dan Mukhriz tergolong dalam kalangan manusia terkaya di Malaysia. Namun majoriti orang Melayu masih bergelut dengan kemiskinan, masalah jurang pendapatan dan terpinggir daripada aspek ekonomi. Mengapa Mahathir begitu 'berkesan' membantu anak-anaknya mengumpul kekayaan luar biasa namun gagal menaikkan golongan marhaen Melayu dengan cara yang sama? SUMBER: https://malaysiagazette.com/2023/06/29/nasib-melayu-gagal-semasa-tun-m-berkuasa/ Pada 2025, dua anak lelaki Mahathir, Tan Sri Mokhzani Mahathir dan Datuk Seri Mirzan Mahathir, telah mengisytiharkan aset mas...

There are politicians who leave a country better than they found it. And then there are those who, through sheer force of will, reshape a nation in their own image, for good and ill in roughly equal measure. Mahathir Mohamad belongs to the second category, though his admirers have spent decades insisting otherwise. The case for Mahathir is well rehearsed: the Proton national car project, the Petronas Twin Towers, the push to industrialise a commodity-dependent economy. For a generation of Malaysians who remember the 1980s and 1990s, he represents ambition, a small nation daring to punch above its weight. That narrative is not entirely false. But it is incomplete to the point of dishonesty. What Mahathir built, as much as anything else, was a culture of institutional dependency on one man's approval. During his first tenure from 1981 to 2003, he systematically dismantled the checks that might have constrained him. The judiciary was humiliated publicly in 1988 when he engineered the...