Mahathir Mohamad: The Doctor Who Remade Malaysia Twice
On 9 May 2018, aged ninety-two, he won a Malaysian general election against the party he had personally led for twenty-two years, and became the oldest serving head of government on earth. Campaigning at his side was Anwar Ibrahim, the deputy he had sacked, prosecuted and jailed two decades earlier. Even by the standards of a career that had already lasted longer than most countries' democracies, it was an extraordinary thing to watch.
The Doctor from Alor Setar
He was born in Alor Setar, Kedah, on 10 July 1925, into a modest household — his father Mohamad Iskandar a school principal, his mother Wan Tempawan Wan Hanapi distantly connected to the Kedah royal house. He read medicine at the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore, graduating in 1953, and opened the Maha Klinik, the first privately owned clinic founded by a Malay in Malaysia. Half a century later he would still be called Dr M, and the diagnostic habit never left him.
Exile and *The Malay Dilemma*
He entered parliament in 1964 and lost his seat in 1969. After the race riots of 13 May that year he attacked Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman's handling of Malay interests and was expelled from UMNO for it. Out of the party, he wrote *The Malay Dilemma* in 1970 — an argument that Malays required calibrated state support, neither smothering nor abandonment. The government banned it. The ban was lifted in 1981, when its author became prime minister.
He rejoined UMNO on 7 March 1972 and rose fast: senator for Kedah in 1973, Education Minister from 1974, Deputy Prime Minister in 1976, Trade and Industry from 1978. On 16 July 1981, at fifty-six, he became prime minister — the first commoner to hold the office.
Building a Country
He began with a housekeeping campaign, *Bersih, Cekap & Amanah* — clean, efficient, trustworthy — asset declarations for ministers, and the release of some 250 detainees held under the Internal Security Act by August 1982. Then came the machinery. The Look East Policy, announced in December 1981, pointed Malaysia at Japan rather than Britain; he would visit Japan more than a hundred times. Privatisation swept through airlines, utilities and telecoms at a rate approaching fifty a year by the mid-1990s. HICOM was set up to force heavy industry into existence, and Proton, a joint venture with Mitsubishi, became Southeast Asia's largest carmaker by the late 1980s. He built the North–South Expressway, the Kuala Lumpur City Centre, the Multimedia Super Corridor modelled on Silicon Valley, and an entire administrative capital at Putrajaya. Vision 2020, launched in 1991, set developed-nation status as a thirty-year target requiring around seven per cent annual growth and the gradual dissolution of ethnic barriers. By 1995 poverty had fallen below nine per cent.
1997
The Asian financial crisis was where he made his reputation as something other than a builder. With the ringgit collapsing and capital fleeing, every orthodox authority pointed to the IMF. Mahathir went the other way: he pegged the ringgit at 3.80 to the dollar, banned offshore trading in the currency and imposed capital controls. The IMF's own 1999 Article IV consultation conceded that the controls and the peg, initially met with scepticism, had produced more positive results than expected. Malaysia grew 5.4 per cent in 1999 and 8.5 per cent in 2000, ahead of its neighbours.
The Hard Edge
The same decades produced a record his admirers rarely quote. In 1983 he took on the Yang di-Pertuan Agong over royal assent and emergency powers, and after five months of rallies extracted a compromise letting parliament override a royal veto; between 1992 and 1994 he stripped the sultans of legal immunity. In 1987, Operation Lalang put a large number of activists into detention under the Internal Security Act. In 1988, after surviving a UMNO leadership challenge from Tengku Razaleigh by 761 votes to 718, he faced a High Court ruling that UMNO was an illegal organisation; he registered UMNO Baru instead, suspended Lord President Salleh Abas for protesting to the Agong, and had a reconstituted court hand him the party name. Between 1983 and 1992 more than 120 people were executed for drug offences.
And then Anwar. Dismissed on 2 September 1998 without stated reason, arrested on the 18th under the ISA, convicted of corruption in April 1999 and sentenced to six years, then to nine more for sodomy — a conviction overturned after Mahathir left office. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright criticised the trials publicly. Anwar's wife, Wan Azizah, founded the opposition party that would eventually unseat the government, and UMNO lost eighteen seats in 1999.
The Return
He retired on 31 October 2003 after twenty-two years, then the world's longest-serving elected leader, and was given the title *Bapa Pemodenan Malaysia*, Father of Malaysia's Modernisation. He had promised not to become a meddling elder statesman and became one immediately, breaking first with Abdullah Badawi and then, decisively, with Najib Razak. He quit UMNO in 2016 over the 1MDB corruption scandal, joined the new Bersatu party, and led the Pakatan Harapan coalition to the 2018 victory. His second premiership secured Anwar's pardon and release and reopened 1MDB, and lasted twenty-two months: he resigned on 24 February 2020 amid the defections known as the Sheraton Move and formally stepped down on 1 March. He lost his parliamentary seat in 2022 and remained politically active into his hundreds.
Why Mahathir Is Called a Genius
Of all the figures in this collection he has the clearest claim, and it is a specific one: a talent for being unfashionably right. In 1998 a physician with no training in economics rejected the unanimous advice of the international financial establishment, imposed capital controls that were widely predicted to be ruinous, and was subsequently conceded by the IMF itself to have outperformed expectations. That is a falsifiable judgement, made against consensus, that turned out correct. The same instinct built Proton against every argument that a country of Malaysia's size could not sustain a car industry, and Putrajaya and the Multimedia Super Corridor against the view that the state should not pick futures. He then demonstrated it in politics one last time by assembling a coalition with his own former prisoner to demolish the machine he had spent two decades building.
The honest counter-case is that much of it was purchased with methods no functioning democracy would permit. Operation Lalang, the suspension of the Lord President in 1988, the ISA detentions, and above all the Anwar prosecution — the trials that international observers judged unfair and whose central conviction was quashed the moment he no longer held power. Critics have long accused him of authoritarianism and of doing lasting damage to judicial independence; supporters answer that he held a fragile multi-ethnic country together. Both things are in the record. His second premiership collapsed on the same fault line as his first, an unfinished succession, which suggests the flaw was structural rather than circumstantial.
The accurate word is not visionary but tactician. He was a formidably intelligent man whose distinguishing gift was for identifying the assumption everyone else was making and doing the opposite — applied with equal ruthlessness to economics, to Britain, to the sultans, and to his own allies.
Legacy
Malaysia entered his first premiership a commodity economy and left it the world's seventeenth largest trading nation, with poverty far below where he found it and physical infrastructure that still defines the country. It also left with an executive stronger than its courts. *Time* listed him among the hundred most influential people alive in 2019, when he was ninety-four — an assessment nobody at the magazine would have thought to make about a retired prime minister of any other country, and which in his case was simply accurate.
Achievements
- Prime Minister of Malaysia (1981–2003)
- Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia (1976–1981)
- Minister of Defence (1981–1986)
- Minister of Home Affairs (1986–1999)
- Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights — 2005
- King Faisal International Prize in Service to Islam — 1997
- Commander of the National Order of the Cedar
- Grand Cordon of the Order of the Paulownia Flowers — 2018
- Educated at Universiti Malaya and National University of Singapore
