Zeti’s most treasured letter is from Siti Hasmah

PUTRAJAYA: Former Bank Negara governor Tan Sri Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz has shared how she treasured a letter Tun Dr Siti Hasmah Mohd Ali wrote to her in 1998 as a source of encouragement and inspiration.

To this day, she said, she still kept Dr Siti Hasmah’s handwritten letter sent to her when she was just appointed governor of Bank Negara in 1998.

“I have received many letters from all over the world and the country but the letter that I treasure most was her handwritten letter, which was more than two pages with words of encouragement,” she said when launching Kasih Malaysia at Seri Perdana here yesterday.

Kasih Malaysia is a charity and welfare organisation of wives of Pakatan Harapan leaders.

Dr Siti Hasmah is the organisation chairman.

In her speech, Dr Zeti recalled the time she met Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad in 1978 when she was a student at University of Pennsylvania in the United States.

Dr Mahathir was then Deputy Prime Minister.

“I was a poor student living on a Mara loan, which of course I have paid back.

“When I was finishing my dissertation I received a phone call from the Federal Bureau of Investigation telling me the deputy prime minister of Malaysia wanted to meet some Malaysian students and I was the only one they could find,” she said.

While she was not sure if it was a genuine call, she decided to meet Dr Mahathir and during their meeting, she told him that she was studying capital flows.

“Dr Mahathir then told me our country needs people with that kind of knowledge. He told me to ‘hurry up, finish your dissertation and come back to serve Malaysia’,” she added.

Twenty years later, in 1998, during the worse point of the financial crisis faced by Asia, Dr Zeti said Dr Mahathir appointed her as governor of the central bank. — Bernama