Marhaen Dan Rakyat

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...

Bekas Perdana Menteri, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad baru-baru ini mengatakan seorang calon Perdana Menteri mestilah individu yang mampu menyatukan orang Melayu. Kenyataan itu seolah-olah logik dalam konteks politik Malaysia, apabila orang Melayu merupakan kelompok majoriti dan penyatuan mereka dianggap kunci kestabilan politik. Namun, apabila meneliti rekod pemerintahan Mahathir sepanjang lebih dua dekat bergelar Perdana Menteri, beliau sendiri gagal membuktikan kemampuannya menyatukan orang Melayu. Sebaliknya, Mahathir lebih dikenali kerana mengutamakan kepentingan kroni termasuk keluarganya. SUMBER: https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/659484 Mahathir menjadi Perdana Menteri keempat pada 1981 bersandarkan imej sebagai pemimpin moden yang mahu membawa Malaysia ke arah pembangunan pesat. Namun, di sebalik retorik pembangunan bangsa, era pemerintahannya menyaksikan perpecahan politik Melayu yang semakin ketara. Pada 1987, berlakunya pertembungan antara Mahathir dan Tengku Razaleigh H...