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Friday, October 3, 2014

High petrol prices - YES, IT'S MAHATHIR'S FAULT! He thought he was a genius but ...

High petrol prices - YES, IT'S MAHATHIR'S FAULT! He thought he was a genius but ...
Petrol hike again, whose fault is it? I would blame Dr Mahathir Mohamad and those who believe owning a car symbolises one’s social status.
Imagine if we did not have the stupid national car project but an efficient public transport system that would rival those in Singapore, Hong Kong, Kyoto, Berlin, London, Shanghai and Seoul, there would be far less traffic jams, cars and pollution.
That would also mean less traffic accidents and road casualties, more buses and trains, and less need for toll roads and petrol.
Imagine if Mahathir had demonstrated half, I say HALF, the passion that he has for mega projects such as the loss-making Proton for building world-class universities and technological innovation, Malaysia would most probably have broken out the middle income trap by now.
Mahathir thought he was a genius who could with the national car industry boost Petronas’ income and create more entrepreneurs through road construction and toll collection, but what we have now is simply never-ending congestion, a heavily underdeveloped public transport system, substandard taxis and hooligan drivers, and petrol and toll hikes.
Still, many see Mahathir as a visionary despite all the misery he has caused the nation.
Musa Hitam once said by the time Mahathir achieved his ‘visions’, they had become outdated and, worse, the people’s nightmare.
How true.
But the saddest truth is that many Malaysians continue to regard Mahathir as the best that ever happened to Malaysia. Some have even praised him for having the guts to stand up to the increasingly politically active royalties.
The thing is, Mahathir is fully cognisant of the fact that Umno is a well-oiled political machine that can ill afford to be exploited by others.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Umno had to rely on MCA taukehs for election campaigns. The late Tunku once said it was rather embarrassing that Tan Cheng Lock and Tan Siew Sin were made to foot the campaign bills.
In those days, Umno delegates, largely made up of teachers and civil servants, came from the countryside to attend the annual general assembly in Kuala Lumpur and slept in school halls for the night, a far cry from today when the Putra World Trade Centre turns into a gigantic bazaar and Umno delegates put up at luxury hotels, not to mention their spouses who never miss the opportunity for a spending spree.
For two decades, Mahathir fought tooth and nail to transform the once cash-strapped party into a political gravy train, churning out one lucrative contract after another just to keep himself in power and to make his cronies happy. He knows full well the moment when Umno loses control over business, it would spell the end of it.
Morphing into a cash cow
On his watch, Umno morphed into a cash cow that is insatiably addicted to quick profits and money. One reason why there is a dearth of technological innovation in Malaysia is because the government has never really been interested in research and development (R&D), while the politicians and their cronies are racing against each other to build more highways, condos, shopping malls and houses.
After all, selling land and chopping down trees for dam and road construction as well as property speculation would guarantee far quicker returns than real and long-term investment in education and sustainable industries.
Thus, when Mahathir criticised openly the Johor state government’s attempt to grant the sultan the executive powers to run the housing authority back in June this year, he did so to send a message that Umno must remain in the driving seat of economic development as the godfather of Malaysian politics. Not MCA, not the federal states, and certainly not the royalties.
Furthermore, he must ensure all the Malay rulers stay out of politics, otherwise it would make his son Mukhriz Mahathir’s future premiership - if he makes it at all - one fraught with challenges and uncertainties.
So, for those who have been quick to applaud Mahathir for being ‘audacious’ enough to speak out against royal interference, they must be reminded that at the time when Mahathir was seeking to redefine the constitutional role of the Malay royalties and to clip their wings, he was simultaneously cracking down on political dissent, muzzling the press, undermining the independence of our judiciary, and nipping any fledgling social movement in the bud.
Abdul Aziz Bari, the constitutional expert and a casualty of the sedition dragnet, concedes in his book 'The Monarch and The Constitution in Malaysia' that the seminal work comes across as somewhat sympathetic to the rulers because it was based on his PhD thesis written in the 1990s, a period when all the checks and balances were succumbing to Mahathir’s excessive executive powers one by one, leaving the monarchy almost like the last man standing in the face of the formidable Mahathir regime.
A cunning politician, Mahathir is nevertheless no different from any of us. In fact, he is very much one of us, a man whose worldview was shaped by colonial racism and whose dignity was repeatedly trampled. His racist attitude is probably no worse than an average Malaysian, which explains why his recent remarks on ‘the lazy Malay’ provoked once again heated reactions from the general public, with many rushing to register their concurrence: I told you!
What Mahathir is adept at
And this is what Mahathir is adept at: making one racist statement to stir up racist sentiments, thereby deepening communal distrust among the people. Just when the non-Malays thought Mahathir had again hit the nail right on the head, they forgot that Vincent Tan, Ananda Krishnan, YTL and Lim Kok Thay, too, were beneficiaries of Mahathirism.
And it was in Ananda’s house that the peace plan between Mahathir and Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah was reached in 1996 that brought Semangat 46 to a close!
Which is why YTL has been rather disingenuous to complain about cronyism. Instead of denying himself as a crony, he should have lamented some cronies are now more equal than others!
For the country to move forward, the people must bid farewell to Mahathirism, including the false promises of nation-building and the bankrupt Wawasan 2020. The first step towards what I would call ‘the process of disenchantment’ is for everyone to stop seeing the man as someone ‘great’, for he is not. He is just an ordinary Malaysian who grew up with deep emotional wounds and is as an adult bent on punishing others to compensate for his own low self-esteem.
The only difference is that he once had the executive powers to exact revenge and to demand loyalty with money, albeit in the name of ‘development’. If anything, Mahathir as a politician should serve as a warning to all the present and future political aspirants that, while he is very much one of us, we must never be one like him. -M'kini

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