IT is his second time in high office, but this time around Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad has a different agenda to fulfil, and a finer appreciation for achievements of the less easily quantified kind.

To have been able to unify Pakatan Harapan’s different parties, and to be trusted by former political foes to lead the motley coalition, is no mean feat.

PH has proved its critics wrong over their predictions that the pact’s collaboration would be short-lived, Dr Mahathir said in a recent interview with the media in conjunction with the PH government’s first year anniversary,

“They said this coalition is fragile and will break up very quickly, but that has not happened.”

“We have stayed together, we have worked together and we are very united,” he said.

The 93-year-old acknowledges his past enmity with some members of his cabinet and his PH colleagues, saying that being entrusted by one’s former adversaries to lead them is an achievement in itself.

Dr Mahathir’s holds the record for being Malaysia’s longest-serving prime minister (1981 to 2003).

Under his leadership, the Barisan Nasional government clamped down on political opponent DAP, whose leaders such as Lim Kit Siang, Lim Guan Eng and the late Karpal Singh were detained under the Internal Security Act during Operasi Lalang in 1987.

Then PAS leader Mohamad Sabu, who is now Amanah president and the Defence Minister, was also caught in the political dragnet.

A decade later, Dr Mahathir was vilified by critics at home and internationally, over his sacking of Anwar Ibrahim who was his deputy prime minister, who was subsequently put on trial for corruption and sodomy.

Anwar’s fall from power led to the start of PKR, then known as Keadilan, led by his wife Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail while Anwar was in jail.

Dr Wan Azizah is now Dr Mahathir’s deputy while Anwar, who is PKR president and Port Dickson MP, is slated to succeed his former nemesis as prime minister in about two years’ time under an agreement.

The bad blood of the past has not been forgotten, although PH leaders when asked about it have often said that it was time to move on to fight a bigger goal of taking over Putrajaya from the Najib Razak administration.

Bent on ousting Najib, Dr Mahathir came out of retirement, quit Umno in 2016, formed Bersatu and forged an alliance with PKR, DAP and Amanah, which were then in the opposition. 

For the first time in Malaysia’s history, the opposition coalition managed to unseat Najib and BN in the 14th general election on May 9 last year.

“They chose me as their leader and until now, I am still their leader,” Dr Mahathir said.

Successes and blunders

On his cabinet, Dr Mahathir said he is happy with his ministers’ performance over the past year, despite many of them being novices.

He named curbing corruption as among the government’s successes. He is pleased that the wrongdoers have been caught and subjected to the rule of law, “unlike the past when the law was abused”.

He pointed out that people were not complaining as much as they used to about bribery and malpractices in the government, and that the government departments are functioning more efficiently so that the approval process is easier and faster.

Dr Mahathir, who chairs Bersatu, said criticism of PH came from those who were the cause of the very problems that the government now had to resolve.

But the government has managed to balance cost savings while honouring commitments to certain mega projects, such as the East Coast Rail Link, which contract has been renegotiated to shave RM22 billion off the original construction cost. The Bandar Malaysia project has also been revived, he added.

Despite these achievements, Dr Mahathir said the government cannot go around singing its own praises. He also acknowledged there are some areas where PH has fallen  short.

He said PH had made a misstep in its election promises to abolish toll without first  studying the financial implications. It only realised belatedly that the move would incur some RM30 billion in compensation to the highway concessionaires.

The RM30 billion, Dr Mahathir said, would be better spent on other initiatives.

He said the government was giving further scrutiny to other promises, such as abolishing the death penalty.

On criticism that PH had merely re-packaged some of the BN government’s initiatives, Dr Mahathir said the difference is that these are now being implemented without corruption.

“We do the same thing, but without corruption,” he said, citing the awarding of dubious contracts and alleged cronyism under the previous government. 

Among the former government’s initiatives that have been rebranded are the Permata and IM4U programmes, which have been renamed Genius and Impact, respectively. – May 8, 2019.