October 20, 2003
BY ERIC ELLIS
Malaysians face the almost
unpalatable prospect that their beloved Dr Mahathir Mohamed – who even helped
design the loos at one of the country’s leading hotels – will soon step down as
Asia’s longest-serving elected leader
The many guests who have stayed at Kuala Lumpur’s Pan-Pacific Hotel are
unwitting witnesses to the prospect that Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir
Mohamed may long remain the power behind his country’s throne. Literally.
The “Pan-Pac” – built in 1985 by Mahathir’s long-ruling United Malays National Organisation (UNMO) but now virtually qualifying for National Trust status after 18 years of Mahathirnomics that has transformed the capital – has a telling detail that perhaps defines Dr M’s exacting, omnipresent leadership: he reportedly designed its toilets.
It’s not as odd as it sounds. In 1981, Malaysia was an economic backwater when Mahathir began a 22-year rule that officially ends on October 31. Starved of the foreign investment transforming neighbouring Singapore and Thailand into Asian tigers, Mahathir determined Malaysia should be all things to all types of investors, attracting Japanese and American technology manufacturers to its abundant land and cheap labour while encouraging oil-rich Arabs to diversify their petrodollars in the mostly Muslim country.
But such investors needed both five-star accommodation and to feel comfortable in it. And Malaysia needed to project itself as moderate and inclusive. So Mahathir started with the basics, proposing Malaysia’s first business hotel, the Pan-Pacific, and then designing a toilet that incorporated Western-friendly seating and Islam-friendly flushing.
World leaders don’t usually involve themselves in bathroom design but as his successor, Abdullah Badawi, might remind himself, the anecdote is very Mahathir. There’s barely any aspect of modern-day Malaysia – now one of South-East Asia’s richest countries – that doesn’t bear his micro-managing fingerprints, from its feisty foreign policy to KL’s Petronas Towers, the world’s tallest buildings.
Whether Dr M, as he’s affectionately known, will show the same attention to detail to Badawi’s premiership is a moot point for 24 million Malaysians, 70% of whom are under 40 and have only really known one PM.
The prickly (particularly to Australians, Americans, Jews and the western media) Mahathir has pointedly said that when he retires just two months before his 78th birthday, he won’t become “senior president”, a typically undiplomatic dig at Singapore’s strongman-cum-philosopher king Lee Kuan Yew, who outwardly retired in 1990 after 31 years as PM only to assume the specially created post of “senior minister” shadowing Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. (Goh, PM for 13 years, still can’t shake the widely held view he is warming the seat for Lee’s son, Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.)
It’s a mark of Mahathir’s absoluteness that, although he has flagged his departure for a year, there’s next to no element of lameduckery about his closing premiership. Likewise, there has been little jostling for positions in post-Mahathir politics. Badawi has exhibited little in the way of ambition, policy or vision that isn’t Mahathir’s.
Indeed, when the leadership was within grasp, Badawi went out of his way to plead with Mahathir to stay as leader. That was at last year’s dramatic UMNO annual conference when Mahathir suddenly announced he would be resigning. The conference hall was plunged into something between sycophantic farce and the sheer terror of the unknown. A Malaysia without Mahathir was unthinkable. Tears flowed, led by a panic-stricken Badawi, who declared: “We will still obey him; there is no question of me trying to upstage him.”
The loyal second pleaded with him to stay and, an hour later, a blubbering Mahathir retracted his resignation. The hall erupted with jubilation. Mahathir the master politician emerged at the peak of his powers, his grip over UMNO and Malaysia as strong as ever.
To be fair, Badawi’s unremarkable track record says more about Mahathir’s political multi-tasking than it does Badawi’s unproven statecraft. Dr M has his raft of ministers but his cabinet functioned more as a rubber stamp of yes-men – and the very occasional woman – than a debating chamber. There was no room for radicals: Mahathir was radical enough. Indeed, through the 1990s, Badawi may well have been the world’s most invisible foreign minister. Mahathir had crafted his spiky persona as not just Asia’s champion but the voice of the Third World. In February, he was appointed chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, with all Axis of Evil members present.
In 1999, Badawi was appointed Home Minister, a portfolio that administers the controversial Internal Security Act, which allows detention without trial for up to two years. Enacted following the anti-communist “Emergency” of the 1950s, it’s the baton Malaysia’s leaders – and the British before them – used to crack dissident heads, most notably Badawi’s predecessor as heir-apparent, Anwar Ibrahim, and his supporters. But ask most Malaysians and it’s not Badawi who is responsible for Anwar’s treatment, it’s Mahathir. Badawi just signed the papers.
Will Mahathir be missed? Absolutely, but perhaps not by Canberra, its attempts to mesh with Asia foiled at every turn by the scheming Mahathir. And certainly by Malaysians, many of whom adore their leader and his Malaysia Boleh! (Malaysia Can!) boosterism, even if it came with some cronyism and corruption.
From November, Dr M says, he will spend more time with his family and indulge his hobby of carpentry. But he’s not likely to be far from the spotlight. As any woodworker knows, a key aspect of carpentry is cabinet-making.