Murale Pillai
Published: May 13, 2026 11:35 AM
Updated: 1:43 PM
COMMENT | It bothers me not that former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad has finally owned up: “I failed to unite the Malays.”
He failed despite holding the reins of power for 22 long years, sharing the bonds of faith with “his people”, who place a premium on the unity of the ummah, and lording over the machinery of government and the judiciary as if they belonged to him.
His failure speaks volumes about his character, abilities and mental make-up.
But what really bothers me is that he succeeded in dividing us, in a country built by the blood, sweat and tears of our forefathers from near and afar.
How did he succeed in this grim and ghastly business of pitting citizen against citizen for his own ends, using a devious mix of both party politics and a misplaced self-belief that he alone knew how to make “his people” great again to the exclusion of the rest of us?
Published: May 13, 2026 11:35 AM
Updated: 1:43 PM
COMMENT | It bothers me not that former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad has finally owned up: “I failed to unite the Malays.”
He failed despite holding the reins of power for 22 long years, sharing the bonds of faith with “his people”, who place a premium on the unity of the ummah, and lording over the machinery of government and the judiciary as if they belonged to him.
His failure speaks volumes about his character, abilities and mental make-up.
But what really bothers me is that he succeeded in dividing us, in a country built by the blood, sweat and tears of our forefathers from near and afar.
How did he succeed in this grim and ghastly business of pitting citizen against citizen for his own ends, using a devious mix of both party politics and a misplaced self-belief that he alone knew how to make “his people” great again to the exclusion of the rest of us?
Dr Mahathir Mohamad, during his reign as the fourth prime minister
For a quick answer to this sordid question, we must turn to the classic novel "Things Fall Apart” by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe.
The standout line is the one spoken by Obierika to his close friend, the angry and unsettled main character, Okonkwo, on how clan unity in Umuofia village had been wrecked by the coming of the white missionaries and colonialists.
Here it is: “He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
How ironic that Mahathir, who railed and ridiculed the English colonialists for the enduring presence of Indians and Chinese in Malaysia, gleefully put the knife on the bonds of kinship and tradition that held us together, turning us into a Malaysian Umuofia.
A blunt and rusty knife
Older Malaysians will remember a time before this knife-crime when politicians were not racially bipolar; when they didn’t suffer this obsession to reduce everything into a racial binary of Malays and non-Malays.
Of course, there were serious divisions in our society before he was appointed prime minister in 1982, and these can be traced back to colonial rule and the feudalism of the past.
Under British colonial rule, there was no income tax until just before Merdeka in 1957. There was much “old wealth” held largely by a few Chinese towkays and tycoons in Penang, Malacca and Singapore.
The old federated Malay states of Perak, Selangor, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang had benefited enormously from the tin and rubber industry, the mainstay of the Malayan economy, and where men and women toiled from dawn to dusk for a pittance.
For a quick answer to this sordid question, we must turn to the classic novel "Things Fall Apart” by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe.
The standout line is the one spoken by Obierika to his close friend, the angry and unsettled main character, Okonkwo, on how clan unity in Umuofia village had been wrecked by the coming of the white missionaries and colonialists.
Here it is: “He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
How ironic that Mahathir, who railed and ridiculed the English colonialists for the enduring presence of Indians and Chinese in Malaysia, gleefully put the knife on the bonds of kinship and tradition that held us together, turning us into a Malaysian Umuofia.
A blunt and rusty knife
Older Malaysians will remember a time before this knife-crime when politicians were not racially bipolar; when they didn’t suffer this obsession to reduce everything into a racial binary of Malays and non-Malays.
Of course, there were serious divisions in our society before he was appointed prime minister in 1982, and these can be traced back to colonial rule and the feudalism of the past.
Under British colonial rule, there was no income tax until just before Merdeka in 1957. There was much “old wealth” held largely by a few Chinese towkays and tycoons in Penang, Malacca and Singapore.
The old federated Malay states of Perak, Selangor, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang had benefited enormously from the tin and rubber industry, the mainstay of the Malayan economy, and where men and women toiled from dawn to dusk for a pittance.
There were other divisions too between urban and rural, between Sabah and Sarawak and the rest of the peninsula, between the east and west coast states, between those who attended under-funded estate schools and well-run missionary schools, between those who were very proficient in English and those who were not.
Yes, nation-building is tough, and it takes wise and exemplary leadership to succeed.
But instead, Mahathir saw all these divisions in terms of us-versus-them, and over time, the non-Malays were further reduced in the everyday language of his politics to just “nons”, a sinister echo of the shortened term “Proles” in Orwell’s book “1984”.
And there were still others who fell outside this bipolarism, becoming the objectifying “dan lain-lain”, others. Division and selfishness had become normalised.
Under his so-called “Cekap, Amanah, dan Bersih” (Efficient, Trustworthy, and Clean) administration, schools, school heads, ministries, agencies, academia, government projects, tenders, budget allocations, funding, media, textbooks, sports, entertainment, promotions, appointments and whole industries were all put to his knife - a blunt and rusty one, not the sharp scalpel of a highly competent surgeon.
Fighting over spoils
The egotistical Mahathir, a physically small man, never knew his priorities in nation-building and the economy. He often put the cart before the kerbau (buffalo). Think of all his “catastrophic successes”. Like Pewaja Steel and Proton. And for what?
Given his “I know it all” trait, which he shares with dictators and autocrats, he saw “his people” as mere putty in his hands to be moulded into a form of his own liking.
No, we’re not referring to men like (Joseph) Stalin, Mao (Zedong) or Napoleon (Bonaparte) who, for better or worse, loom large in world history. We mustn't speak of them in the same breath as Mahathir, who belongs to the petty group of dictators and military strongmen who dot the pages of more recent third-world history.
Men like Papa Doc of Haiti and (Rafael) Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Or Suharto of Indonesia. Or (Filipino dictator Ferdinand) Marcos. Or (former Myanmar president) Ne Win. These were the men who liked their faces to dominate the front pages of newspapers.
What they said, did or thought in the previous 24 hours was deemed all-important in the affairs of a nation. They also appeared incessantly on TV. Flipping channels was of little use. For 22 long years, Malaysians, too, were fed a daily diet of how Mahathir was making “his people” great again, if not greater than the non-Malays.
Now they are fighting over the spoils of his “To get rich is glorious whether by fair means or foul” legacy.
Not a day passes without yet another massive corruption scandal, of government funds being siphoned off, of customs and immigration officers running rackets and scams, of using religion to pocket money meant for the poor. And not surprisingly, we have lost our work ethic, too.
Rising above the rot
The rot has now turned into a miasma of incompetence, chest-beating and self-serving pronouncements, but all is not lost.
Those who believe in the power of human agency, of rising above this rot despite the pain of the past, can look for inspiration by turning our gaze to the “Bird’s Nest Stadium” in Beijing that housed the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Thousands of short struts and supports, each designed to cancel out the strains and stresses of this structure, keep it whole as a bird's nest made of bits of dried grass and stems.
And like a bird’s nest, what has kept us whole is the daily multitude of small individual acts and exchanges between the common people of this land, shorn of all hate and malice, and filled with the milk of human kindness.
Think of the untiring nurse in an overcrowded hospital working the night shift, the selfless teacher in the classroom for whom every child is a student, the dedicated civil servant who doesn’t give you the race treatment, the helpful police officer who doesn’t treat a citizen like a criminal, the lawyer doing pro bono work… the list is as endless as it is life-affirming.
We now await the coming of a “I'm Malaysian first” prime minister in the full knowledge that the nation cannot survive yet another knife-wielding one like Mahathir.
MURALE PILLAI is a former GLC employee. He runs a logistics company.
