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 removal of Lord President Salleh Abas following a constitutional standoff. The result was a court system that took decades to recover any semblance of independence, and which many argue has never fully done so. The press was kept compliant through licensing laws that gave the government effective veto power over editorial content. Opposition leaders were imprisoned under the Internal Security Act, a piece of colonial-era legislation that Mahathir wielded with enthusiasm rather than reluctance.
His defenders argue that development required strongman governance, that Asian democracies of that era operated by different rules. This argument has always been more self-serving than analytical. The countries that outpaced Malaysia's long-term development, South Korea and Taiwan, also undertook democratic transitions that strengthened institutions. Malaysia, by contrast, entered the 21st century with an electoral system gerrymandered to near-permanence, a civil service that had been racialised to the point of dysfunction, and a political economy in which government contracts flowed reliably toward the connected rather than the competent.
That last point carries an economic cost that is rarely stated plainly. Malaysia in the 1990s was not merely growing. It was, by several reasonable projections, within reach of high-income status. The ingredients were present: a young population, rising manufacturing exports, significant foreign direct investment, and commodity revenues that could have been channelled into productivity-enhancing infrastructure and education. Instead, the Mahathir model funnelled capital into prestige projects and politically favoured conglomerates. Proton, rather than becoming a competitive automotive manufacturer, survived for decades on tariff protections that raised costs for Malaysian consumers and shielded the company from the discipline of genuine competition. The rents extracted from that protection, and from dozens of similar arrangements across the economy, were not reinvested in human capital or technological capability. They were distributed as patronage. The result was an economy that grew impressively in headline terms while quietly hollowing out the institutional and competitive foundations that sustain genuine long-run prosperity. Malaysia crossed into the upper-middle-income bracket and then stalled there, a fate economists have since labelled the middle-income trap. It is a trap that Mahathir's governance model helped construct, even as he claimed to be building a modern nation.
The treatment of Anwar Ibrahim remains the starkest indictment. In 1998, Mahathir sacked his deputy and heir apparent, had him arrested, and oversaw a prosecution that international observers almost universally condemned as politically motivated. Anwar spent six years in prison. Two decades later, Mahathir would claim Anwar as an ally of convenience, then manoeuvre to deny him the prime ministership yet again, a betrayal so brazen it requires no embellishment. The Sheraton Move of 2020, which collapsed the Pakatan Harapan government that Malaysians had voted for in 2018, bears Mahathir's fingerprints even if its architecture involved others. He gave no credible explanation. He offered no accountability. He moved on, as he always has.
At 99, Mahathir remains politically active and rhetorically sharp. He continues to comment, to criticise, to position himself as the conscience of the nation. The irony would be funny if it were not so costly. The democratic deficits Malaysia continues to grapple with, the weak judiciary, the captured media, the racial politics that benefit demagogues, are in no small part his inheritance to the country. He built the machine. Others merely operated it after him.
Modernisation and authoritarianism are not the same thing, even when they arrive together. Malaysia deserved a leader capable of distinguishing between the two.
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 removal of Lord President Salleh Abas following a constitutional standoff. The result was a court system that took decades to recover any semblance of independence, and which many argue has never fully done so. The press was kept compliant through licensing laws that gave the government effective veto power over editorial content. Opposition leaders were imprisoned under the Internal Security Act, a piece of colonial-era legislation that Mahathir wielded with enthusiasm rather than reluctance.
His defenders argue that development required strongman governance, that Asian democracies of that era operated by different rules. This argument has always been more self-serving than analytical. The countries that outpaced Malaysia's long-term development, South Korea and Taiwan, also undertook democratic transitions that strengthened institutions. Malaysia, by contrast, entered the 21st century with an electoral system gerrymandered to near-permanence, a civil service that had been racialised to the point of dysfunction, and a political economy in which government contracts flowed reliably toward the connected rather than the competent.
That last point carries an economic cost that is rarely stated plainly. Malaysia in the 1990s was not merely growing. It was, by several reasonable projections, within reach of high-income status. The ingredients were present: a young population, rising manufacturing exports, significant foreign direct investment, and commodity revenues that could have been channelled into productivity-enhancing infrastructure and education. Instead, the Mahathir model funnelled capital into prestige projects and politically favoured conglomerates. Proton, rather than becoming a competitive automotive manufacturer, survived for decades on tariff protections that raised costs for Malaysian consumers and shielded the company from the discipline of genuine competition. The rents extracted from that protection, and from dozens of similar arrangements across the economy, were not reinvested in human capital or technological capability. They were distributed as patronage. The result was an economy that grew impressively in headline terms while quietly hollowing out the institutional and competitive foundations that sustain genuine long-run prosperity. Malaysia crossed into the upper-middle-income bracket and then stalled there, a fate economists have since labelled the middle-income trap. It is a trap that Mahathir's governance model helped construct, even as he claimed to be building a modern nation.
The treatment of Anwar Ibrahim remains the starkest indictment. In 1998, Mahathir sacked his deputy and heir apparent, had him arrested, and oversaw a prosecution that international observers almost universally condemned as politically motivated. Anwar spent six years in prison. Two decades later, Mahathir would claim Anwar as an ally of convenience, then manoeuvre to deny him the prime ministership yet again, a betrayal so brazen it requires no embellishment. The Sheraton Move of 2020, which collapsed the Pakatan Harapan government that Malaysians had voted for in 2018, bears Mahathir's fingerprints even if its architecture involved others. He gave no credible explanation. He offered no accountability. He moved on, as he always has.
At 99, Mahathir remains politically active and rhetorically sharp. He continues to comment, to criticise, to position himself as the conscience of the nation. The irony would be funny if it were not so costly. The democratic deficits Malaysia continues to grapple with, the weak judiciary, the captured media, the racial politics that benefit demagogues, are in no small part his inheritance to the country. He built the machine. Others merely operated it after him.
Modernisation and authoritarianism are not the same thing, even when they arrive together. Malaysia deserved a leader capable of distinguishing between the two.
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