Reflections on Mahathir’s planned departure

by Khoo Boo Teik

Will things remain the same after his departure?

And now the end is near. Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s leaving. But evidently he didn’t get to do things his way which is why he’ll take another fifteen months to transit from office.

For many people, this makes for an exciting time. Mahathir’s announcement of his resignation, aborted ‘live’ on television, was not a sandiwara. Yet it has been packaged and repackaged as melodrama.

Since June 22, we’ve been subjected to a lot of trivia about Mahathir’s resignation, hype about the man himself, and fortune-telling as regards his succession. Much more will overwhelm us in the countdown to October 2003 unless we stay focused on key issues raised by Mahathir’s 21 years in office and his impending departure.

Stability Or Instability?

No issue worries more people than ‘stability’. It’s often claimed that Mahathir’s has been ‘an impossible act to follow’ and the absence of his ‘firm guiding hand’ will leave a power vacuum. However, Malaysians old enough to reflect upon the entire Mahathir era should laugh at any simplistic depiction of Mahathir as ‘The Great Stabilizer’.

Of course, Mahathir has always been a conservative law-and-order politician. He so treasured stability that he regarded any challenge to his power as something bordering on anarchy. Yet he himself caused, catalysed or was party to practically all major instances of instability that have happened within UMNO, the Malay community and Malaysian society since 1981.

Let’s recall: in each decade of the Mahathir era, there were UMNO’s eruptions, the constitutional crises involving the royalty and the judiciary, and episodes of mass ISA arrests. All these took place amidst two economic recessions.

Let’s not forget: the past 21 years were not a period of Mahathir-guaranteed calm. They were a time of social and economic transformation punctuated by political instability. How was this so?

An Axis Of Discord

Mahathir became prime minister on July 16, 1981, the mid-point of the New Economic Policy’s 20-year span. By then, the stability of Malay politics, NEP’s success and the efficacy of economic policies were dependent on the performances of ‘the party of the Malays’, the ‘Malay-dominated bureaucracy’ and the ‘Bumiputera Commercial and Industrial Community’.

As the dominant party in government, UMNO had to supply the political power to impose NEP’s ‘restructuring’. The bureaucracy had to show the capacity for implementing NEP. An emerging class of Malay capitalists had to produce convincing results to vindicate NEP and the support they received from the state.

Then the tensions appeared. UMNO supplied the political power but built itself a business empire. The bureaucrats implemented NEP but came to control vast economic resources. Individual Malay capitalists emerged but they were impatient with the constraints of ‘Malay trusteeship’.

Politically connected groups and factions soon arose from the ranks of party, bureaucracy and class. Many were very influential coalitions but their agenda were no longer mutually supportive.

All of them staked their claims on NEP but pursued disparate interests. They began to fight for power, access to resources, and opportunities for money-making. By and by, they turned the links between party, bureaucracy and class into an axis of discord.

(I feel obliged to say I’ve not borrowed from George Bush Jr’s self-serving so-called ‘axis of evil’ here, having myself analysed this notion of an axis in Malay politics in an academic essay that predated September 11, 2001.)

The clearest sign of this trend of intra-Malay conflict was UMNO’s factionalism. The factionalism worsened as each leader of a ‘camp’ or ‘team’ and his or her boys, girls and ‘Gurkhas’ jostled for party positions and state projects.

Intra-Malay Divide

During the Mahathir era, each of the components of the party-bureaucracy-class axis underwent troubled fortunes.

The bureaucrats were the first to lose ground. Mahathir, with Musa Hitam initially, and then with Daim Zainuddin, disciplined the ‘public enterprises’ in the name of civil service reforms, privatisation, and ‘holding NEP in abeyance’. To this day, the bureaucracy is burdened with criticisms of inefficiency and waste, and hasn’t recovered its early NEP pre-eminence.

Big Malay businesses, especially the huge UMNO-connected businesses, prospered under Malaysia Inc. but were the next to suffer. The consequences of the July 1997 East Asian financial crisis have stigmatised them as cronies who needed a great deal of rescuing.

Then came UMNO’s turn. The party dominated government, monopolized policy-making and created a sprawling business empire. Precisely so, when bad times threatened all rival coalitions, UMNO became the main arena of intra-Malay conflict. The 1985-86 recession preceded UMNO’s split between Team A and Team B. The 1997-98 recession precipitated the persecution of Anwar Ibrahim. After that, it wasn’t unthinkable for one-half of the Malay voters to consider UMNO ‘irrelevant’.

In short, the deepest faultline of politics under Mahathir was this intra-Malay divide which was not provoked by UMNO’s doctrinal differences with PAS. This particular divide was deeply rooted in NEP and Mahathirist political economy.

Thus, this divide will persist as long as mainstream Malay politics is ‘cabled’ through UMNO as a clearing-house for contracts and projects, and the rapid transit to instant wealth which UMNO leaders purport to deplore.

Unsuccessful Clones

Even at his clearest or his most powerful, Mahathir couldn’t secure the integrity of that party-bureaucracy-class axis for long. That’s a good indication that the foreseeable prospects of bridging the intra-Malay divide are not bright.

Political economy again provides the main reason. After 21 years of Mahathirist policies, the Malaysian economy may roughly be divided into three sections. One privileged and powerful section is made up of manufacturing multinational corporations (MNCs). They receive all kinds of incentives and, for them, global competitiveness is decisive.

Another large section comprises small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs). Most are oriented towards the domestic market. Some have become subcontractors to the foreign MNCs. Malay SMEs, still dependent on state support and protection, make up a politically significant component of this section. A larger component is more resilient and non-reliant on the state, but, being largely Chinese-owned, it is not terribly influential.

The third section comprises Malay, non-Malay, and often inter-ethnic conglomerates. These are politically powerful corporate entities. The vast majority of them congregate in banking, resource exploitation, construction, real estate, gaming, tourism, transport, utilities and services, and selected import-substituting industries. They swagger (or used to) in these domestic sectors where state regulation, protection and patronage make the difference between success and failure.

Inspired by Japan and South Korea, Mahathir had great hopes that these conglomerates would mature into world-class exporters who would spearhead Malaysia’s global drive. But July 1997 badly battered these conglomerates.

Sadly for Mahathir’s economic nationalist dream, Malaysia’s corporate clones of the Japanese zaibatsu and sogoshosha and the South Korean chaebol were not genetically modified to succeed without state-provided crutches.

NEP politics used to make this domestic conglomerate section of the economy highly contentious. This section will remain politically unstable in the near future because it is insecure when forced to face the ‘challenges of globalization’.

It is especially the vulnerability of the prominent Malay corporations among those conglomerates that has set the tone of current debates over Malay competitiveness which are likely to intensify in the post-Mahathir period.

Dangers After Mahathir

Recent replays of old debates over ‘Malay competitiveness’ (or the lack of it) suggested as much. These debates were often linked to education, especially tertiary education, for several reasons.

First, the field of education in this country remains highly competitive, and educational achievement is widely used as a yardstick to measure ‘ethnic competitiveness’.

Second, UMNO had an axe to grind with Malay students and academics who spurned the party after September 1998.

Third, there was substance to Mahathir’s criticisms of the performances of Malay students and academics – even if the national under-achievement of our students and academics, by international standards, is not entirely or exclusively a ‘Malay problem’.

At the UMNO general assembly Mahathir spoke as if he was trapped between Malay corporate weaknesses and Malay educational under-achievement. Maybe that’s why Mahathir apologized for having ‘failed the Malays’ – when surely he meant they had failed him.

UMNO’s elite grasped that much. They sought to placate their president by urging a ‘change of the Malay mindset’. That phrase is as hollow as the much abused ‘paradigm shift’ of the 1990s.

Yet the totality of those recent criticisms of Malay attitudes and values practically revived Mahathir’s old ‘Malay dilemma’ as if his lifelong Malay nationalist vision was unfulfilled.

One part of Mahathir’s ambition was to achieve Malay ‘parity’ with the non-Malays. In the early 1990s, Mahathir proudly pronounced that the Melayu Baru had ended the ‘Malay dilemma’. No one had reason, then or now, to doubt the security of the post-NEP ‘Malay condition’.

It’s true that even now many Malay entrepreneurs, professionals, civil servants and middle-class elements can’t contemplate giving up ‘Malay rights’. But that’s not because Malays are culturally or genetically incapable of competing with non-Malays or other people. It’s because these specific social groups and classes – like their counterparts elsewhere in the world – won’t voluntarily give up ‘rights’ and ‘privileges’ which they habitually receive.

The other part of Mahathir’s ambition envisaged that the conglomerates would lead a competitive Bangsa Malaysia to achieve parity with the developed world. Mahathir was optimistic when he set this out in Wawasan 2020.

Then he hadn’t reckoned with July 1997. Today, the global economic and strategic situation won’t make it easier to fulfill Mahathir’s economic nationalism. In fact, the situation is dismal enough to cause Mahathir to sound his warnings, especially for the Malays.

We live in a post-July 1997 and post-September 1998 context. Mahathir would be consistent in vision and analysis if he were to direct his warnings primarily and steadily to the state-sponsored or UMNO-linked corporations. After all they’ve least realized his vision.

Instead, and despite what justification he has for criticising Malay students and academics, for example, Mahathir chose to cast his warnings as the failure of the ‘Malay race’. Perhaps, as he said, he no longer knew what else to do. Perhaps he suffered an uncharacteristic failure of nerve. Maybe he still firmly resists corporate overhaul in our economy.

In any case, he passes off the specific failings of the Malaysian conglomerates as the generalized failure of the Malay race.

It is an old Mahathir habit, and insidious Malaysian habit as well to turn class biases into ethnic prejudices. Presently, it is an ideological diversion which throws a grim shadow over the ill-defined policy of ‘meritocracy’.

It has already caused widespread uneasiness. For instance, an ideologue like Abdullah Ahmad tried to offset the ‘Malay-bashing’ by railing against (Chinese) ‘racism in business’. At least Mahathir once worried that political power could create ‘soft environment’ for the Malays. Abdullah of the unchanged ‘Malay supremacy mindset’ insisted that Malay dominance must be ‘enhanced’. It is as if UMNO’s locked in a do-or-die battle with DAP instead of PAS or even UMNO itself.

It is also risky that ‘Mahathir’s apology’ comes in the twilight of his career. The discourse it provokes can easily revive the worst kinds of pre-NEP Malay anxieties and non-Malay reactions. To that extent, Mahathir has left an unenviable legacy for post-Mahathirist politics.

Successors And Pretenders

If the above observations are correct, it’s too early for anyone to be complacent about the leadership succession planned around Abdullah Badawi.

Past transitions between Malaysian prime ministers have been generally smooth. But they didn’t insulate the political system from the chronic instability of the party-bureaucracy-class axis.

No UMNO leader could stay aloof from that axis of discord. Given his power, policies and personality, Mahathir was so deeply entangled in it that his ‘guiding hand’ couldn’t consistently stabilize that axis. Few people believe Abdullah Badawi has a firmer hand than Mahathir’s.

Abdullah Badawi is arguably the weakest of the four deputies Mahathir has had in UMNO and government. Unlike Musa Hitam or Anwar Ibrahim, Abdullah was not elected UMNO’s deputy president before being appointed deputy premier. Unlike Ghafar Baba, Abdullah didn’t win a contested election as deputy president while being deputy prime minister. And unlike Mahathir’s rise to power in 1981, Abdullah is expected to be a transitional figure in the mould of Hussein Onn.

One isn’t astonished then that UMNO is again rife with echoes of past succession manoeuvrings.

Najib Tun Razak almost lost his last parliamentary election. He declared himself honoured that Mahathir mentioned him as the ‘successor’s successor’. Rafidah Aziz was prompt to suggest that Najib was ‘uncomfortable’ with that mention.

Muhammad Muhammad Taib held no government post after his Australian money-laden briefcase episode. He said he was content to support party tradition. For Hishamuddin Hussein, party tradition meant the old Musa Hitam line that UMNO, not the prime minister, must choose its deputy president.

Meanwhile, and seemingly out of nowhere, the New Straits Times prominently reported on Muhyiddin Yassin’s brother’s remand in prison after his failure to be bailed out on drug-related charges.

Every one of these pretenders to UMNO’s top leadership is a veteran of the party’s fierce fights of 1981, 1984, 1987, 1993, 1996 and 1998. Should we bet that we won’t enter the post-Mahathir scenario to find that the more things change, the more they remain the same?

Now tell us what you think. E-mail us.