Place: Kuala Kangsar, Perak

Time: 9.15pm

Date: ‎ March 25, 2017

DR Mahathir Mohamad is having the best of both worlds.

An as opposition leader, he has the freedom to whack Prime Minister Najib Razak on a laundry list of issues, ranging from 1MDB to the weather. As a revered Malay leader and longest-serving prime minister, he also knows that he can say pretty much say what he likes and get away with it.

This reality was evident on March 25 when he visited Kuala Kangsar.

As he arrived in the front yard of a two-storey wooden house on the outskirts of Perak’s storied royal town, the crowd cheered “Hidup Tun! Hidup Tun! Hidup Tun!” (long live Tun).

They clapped and pressed against the line of Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu) ushers escorting Dr Mahathir. Many craned their arms over the burly young men in the hopes of snapping a picture with their smartphones.

Traffic in front of the house had come to a standstill.

Villagers, traders, farmers and office workers on motorcycles crammed the road shoulder to see a man they revered as a former prime minister.

“I wanted to see and hear him for myself,” said Hamid Abu Bakar, 58, a petty trader who had stopped by to listen to the ceramah.

“It’s Dr Mahathir, our former prime minister, here at our village. Who doesn’t want to meet him? It’s not easy to see someone like him.” 

The former prime minister seemed to be lifted by their excitement when he arrived with his wife Dr Siti Hasmah Mohd Ali in a black minivan at 9.15pm.

Dr Mahathir gamely stepped into a makeshift smaller tent where the other speakers – Bersatu president Muhyiddin Yassin; party deputy Mukhriz Mahathir; and Perak Bersatu leader Hamidah Osman – were waiting.

By the time Dr Mahathir started his speech at 10.10pm, the tent had swelled to about 2,000 people.‎ It was a far cry from the pomp, glamour and ceremony that usually accompanied him when he travelled across the country as PM and Umno president. There were no air-conditioning nor police escorts and the microphone died a few times during his speech.

But the man who was Umno’s longest-serving president slid into his new-found role of opposition party leader easily.

He launched into a 40-minute tirade of why his old party Umno and its current president Najib must be defeated at the next general election.

And just like other ceramah, he began by accusing Najib – a man he brought up in Umno and made prime minister – of raiding the public coffers.

“I brought him up because I idolised his father, Tun Razak, but he is nothing like his father. I saw that he liked to throw money around,” Dr Mahathir said of Najib.

“Prime ministers do not have much money. I know because I was one. There was enough to eat and buy clothes. No one knows when my children got married.

“But when his child got married, it was a big deal. They spent RM3 million on imported flowers but no one was allowed to take pictures inside the wedding hall,” he said recounting Najib daughter’s lavish wedding in March 2015.

“Where did this money come from? If the PM didn’t have money, then it must have been stolen,” said Dr Mahathir to cheers from the crowd. 

It was reported that Najib’s aide said that the entire cost of the function was borne by the family of the groom, Kazakh Daniyar Kessibayev.

Since the ceramah was next door to the Padang Rengas parliamentary constituency where strident critic Nazri Abdul Aziz is the MP, he could not resist throwing some barbs the tourism minister’s way.

“We have an administration led by a thief but what is strange is that it still has the support of people, including Nazri Aziz. He can support a thief for a boss. When we do that, we are also thieves.”

The ceramah was capped off by the launching of Perak Bersatu’s campaign to take over Perak from the BN. At 10.50pm, his aides ushered him into the minivan for the drive to Ipoh where he boarded a private jet back to Kuala Lumpur. – April 3, 2017.