Mahathir Mohamad vows to stop corrupt protégé
MALAYSIA - Mahathir Mohamad is 92 and by his own account should be enjoying a “nice time” during his retirement. But instead, Malaysia’s arch political puppet master and former prime minister is returning to the political fray, bent on toppling his former protégé and reclaiming power when the country goes to the polls on 9 May.
This time around, the man whose ambitions and political grudges came to influence every major power shift in the country for decades has his sights on bringing down the current prime minister, Najib Razak, a man he dismisses as “corrupt”. Mahathir insists it is with “great reluctance” that he is running for prime minister again. If he wins, it will make him the oldest leader in the world. “It’s still quite unexpected,” he tells the Guardian in an interview in his airy office in the administrative capital Putrajaya. “I thought I would retire and have a nice time, but people demanded, kept on asking me to do something. Eventually I’ve had to form a party. I’ve had to be directly involved; I have no choice.” Mahathir ruled Malaysia with a notoriously iron first from 1981 to 2003, but now gives off the air of a world-weary academic who is allowing himself to be martyred for his cause. “This election is personal. I feel betrayed by him, I can’t help it. Najib cannot separate personal things from political workings,” he says, describing in a tone of great injury how Najib has banned anyone in government from being in contact with him, even those Mahathir has known for years. There is a certain irony to his vendetta against the current prime minister. Najib was groomed in office by Mahathir and was once described as his protege. But their allegiance turned to animosity in 2015, when Najib was implicated in the 1MDB scandal, when $2.6bn of a government fund that Najib himself set up went missing and was embezzled around the world. Some $681m of 1MDB money is alleged to have been transferred directly into Najib’s bank account. While Najib denied the allegations and cleared himself of any wrongdoing, the Malaysian government investigation is widely regarded as a farce, with not a single person arrested. According to Mahathir, the scandal was the moment he realised that Najib was “not the man I thought he was”.
(The Guardian)