Marhaen Dan Rakyat

  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 ...

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 menafikan bahawa beliau merupakan seorang pemimpin diktator sepanjang 22 tahun menjadi Perdana Menteri. Penafian itu bagaimanapun tidak berasas sama sekali. Bagaimana seorang politikus yang pernah mencetuskan Ops Lalang 1987, mengubah struktur kehakiman melalui Krisis Kehakiman 1988, membubarkan UMNO dan menubuhkan UMNO baharu, tetap menegaskan dirinya bukan diktator? Kesemua peristiwa itu bukan direka atau ditokok tambah oleh sesiapa. Ironinya, semua kejadian terbabit berlaku di bawah pentadbiran beliau, bukan secara kebetulan tetapi keputusan serta tindakan yang Mahathir sendiri benarkan. SUMBER: https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/370126 Ops Lalang pada Oktober 1987 merupakan antara detik paling gelap dalam sejarah politik Malaysia. Lebih 100 individu termasuk ahli politik pembangkang, aktivis, pendidik dan pemimpin masyarakat ditahan di bawah Akta Keselamatan Dalam Negeri (ISA). Meskipun Mahathir sering mendakwa bahawa P...

Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s latest remarks about Malaysia’s football naturalisation scandal were clearly meant to sound like a statesman’s moral warning, a lecture on honesty, integrity, and national shame. But for many Malaysians, it came across as tone-deaf and hypocritical. When Mahathir condemns “powerful individuals who think they are above the law,” he conveniently forgets that his own political career was built on precisely that principle. It was during Mahathir’s long rule that Malaysia’s judiciary endured one of its darkest episodes. The 1988 judicial crisis, which saw Lord President Tun Salleh Abas and several Supreme Court judges dismissed, marked a turning point in our history. It was Mahathir’s government that eroded judicial independence, punishing judges who dared to rule against the executive. The courts were turned into tools of political convenience, and the damage took decades to repair. For someone who once insisted that “judges must follow government policy,” Mah...

On October 21, 2025, the High Court will finally hear Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s RM150 million defamation suit against Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim. Already postponed twice and reassigned to its third judge, the trial is more than a personal clash between two old rivals. It is a reckoning laced with irony: Mahathir, the very man who hollowed out Malaysia’s judiciary, now seeks its protection to salvage his legacy.  The case stems from Anwar’s remarks at the 2023 PKR congress, where he accused a “leader of 22 years and 22 months” of enriching his family. Mahathir’s fury—demanding damages and a retraction—rings hollow in light of the political economy he engineered. For decades, he presided over a system where politics and business blurred into state patronage, elevating a Malay elite that included his own children, whose fortunes now run into the hundreds of millions. For Mahathir to present this as slander rather than an open truth is less about justice than about rewriti...