He Says He Doesn't Care, The Lawsuit Says Otherwise

 

In the documentary My Name is Mahathir, released in May 2026, the former prime minister brushed off the question of how history will judge him. He said he does not care about his legacy, and that if people want to call him a dictator, "that is their right".

It sounded good. It sounded like a man who ran the country for 22 years, built Putrajaya out of a palm estate, and stopped caring what anyone thought of him around 1993.

Now put it next to the other Mahathir story of 2026. He is suing Anwar Ibrahim for RM150 million over a speech at a PKR congress in March 2023. He wants RM100 million in exemplary damages, RM50 million in general damages, a written apology, and a press conference where the sitting prime minister takes it all back in public. The case has been running for three years. It stalled again this year while the High Court waited for the National Heart Institute to say whether he is well enough to keep giving evidence.

So call him a dictator and he shrugs. Say he got rich and he wants a nine-figure payout and an apology on camera. He is not indifferent. He just picks what he defends.

The dictator word is not something a documentary crew made up. It comes from things he did. In October 1987 his government locked up 106 people without trial under the Internal Security Act in Operasi Lalang, among them opposition MPs, union leaders, church workers and teachers, and shut down three newspapers. In 1988 he changed the constitution to take judicial power away from the courts, then oversaw the removal of Lord President Salleh Abas and two Supreme Court judges. The courts have never fully recovered. In 1998 he sacked his own deputy, who was then beaten in police custody and convicted in trials most of the world saw as political. He chose to do all of that. Waving at the label while never answering for the acts is not humility about his legacy. It is a way of managing it.

In the lawsuit, Anwar's defence is that what he said about the family's wealth is true. He points to the 1997 rescue of Konsortium Perkapalan, the shipping company linked to Mahathir's eldest son, by Petronas and MISC. Mahathir's answer is that Anwar should show proof, and that his own assets were declared while he was in office. In 2023 the High Court turned down his bid to force Anwar to hand over the KPB documents.

Forget who wins. The case itself is the problem. A former prime minister is using the courts to squeeze an apology out of the current one over a political speech. Politicians on all sides in Malaysia now sue for defamation as a matter of routine, and each case makes it harder for an ordinary person to criticise the powerful without hiring a lawyer first. Mahathir spent the ISA years arguing that stability meant limits on what people could say. He is making the same argument now, with a different tool. There is a smaller reading too, and the dates support it. He filed in May 2023, weeks before six state elections. His own lawyers asked the court to treat it as urgent. Anwar's side called it politics from the start.

He should get the credit he is owed. Malaysia industrialised while he was in charge. Factories replaced rubber and tin. A large Malay professional class exists because of policies he pushed. In 1998 he refused the IMF's terms, brought in capital controls, pegged the ringgit, and the economy came back faster than in some countries that took the advice.

Then look at the rest. Big projects handed to friends. Bank Negara's foreign exchange losses in the early 1990s, which nobody ever properly explained. Bailouts for companies with the right connections. Institutions bent to suit whoever was in power, which is exactly the machinery Najib Razak found sitting there, ready to use, when 1MDB started. The 2018 election that brought Mahathir back was a verdict on a system he built and Najib inherited. Then in February 2020 he resigned in a manoeuvre that killed the reform government he led, handed power to Muhyiddin Yassin, and left two years of chaos behind. He has explained it many times. None of the explanations account for what happened.

He is 101. He spent weeks in hospital in January and is still under specialist care. His party lost every deposit it put down in 2022, including his own. What is left is a Facebook page with four million followers, a documentary, and a lawsuit the courts may never finish. He says history's verdict does not interest him. The RM150 million says one verdict does.