Anwar’s Mixed Record in Malaysia
Concerns UMNO wags the government dog
Eighteen months after he came to power – and at least 24 years after he began his campaign to become prime minister – the Unity coalition government of Anwar Ibrahim, at age 75, is struggling to find enthusiasm from voters in a by-election this weekend which it won previously by a very comfortable margin.
The by-election in the country’s wealthiest state, Selangor, is a result of the death of the incumbent legislator from Anwar’s coalition partner the ethnic Chinese Democratic Action Party. His urban, moderate ethnic Malay-oriented party has an overwhelming majority. A loss in the by-election wouldn’t cause a shift in power but it will be a referendum on Anwar and his government, analysts say. His party is also bracing itself for another by-election in his own home state of Penang where a legislator is critically ill.
Nationally, and in the bigger picture, Anwar can count on some unlikely successes economically. He has lured Elon Musk away from Indonesia, with Anwar announcing Musk has agreed to collaborate with the government with facilities involving SpaceX, the satellite internet service Starlink, and electric vehicles near Kuala Lumpur, and invest in a local charging network. He is aggressively piling up additional foreign direct investment pledges, reaching RM926. 3 billion (US$195.28 billion) at the end of 2023 against RM914. 9 billion year-on-year.
The country is described as a major beneficiary of the Covid-triggered breakup of China’s supply chains. It has ratified the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which furthers its integration into the global economy. The World Bank forecasts Gross Domestic Product growth at a relatively respectable 4.3 percent in 2024 and 4.5 percent in 2025 supported by rising private consumption and business activity and with inflation between 2.0 percent and 3.5 percent although there have been few major legislative initiatives by the government on the economy or pressing social problems.
Anwar is said to be proud of a judiciary appointed on merit rather than political loyalty and a civil service that is being returned to political neutrality although the judiciary’s image has improved under the current Chief Justice Tengku Maimun, who has appointed and promoted jurists of integrity. She was appointed by Mahathir Mohamad in 2019 when he was prime minister.
But balanced against this are some disturbing issues well at odds with the three decades Anwar has enjoyed in international capitals as a reformer and defender of free expression, religious freedom, and a free press. The country has fallen a nearly unprecedented 35 places in the Reporters Sans Frontières international ranking on press freedom, from 73rd of 180 countries to 107th amid widespread complaints that Ahmad Fahmi Mohamed Fadzil, a former actor and writer serving as the Minister of Communications, is strangling free expression, with arrests of bloggers and shuttering of publications.
Promises to do away with laws such as the Official Secrets Act (OSA), the Sedition Act, the Communications and Multimedia Act, the Printing Presses and Publications Act, and increasingly other areas of the Penal Code, have disappeared, stifling speech on politically and socially sensitive matters.
A year ago, Anwar shocked those who regard him as committed to secular government by saying the role of the Malaysian Islamic Development Department (Jakim) should be expanded in the country’s national development policy framework. If anything, the religious divide has been allowed to widen between dominant ethnic Malays and the country’s minorities, particularly the Chinese, who make up 20.8 percent of the population mostly without the prime minister speaking up to defend pluralism.
Malaysia’s education system, which in an impartial analysis in 2019 was found to have failed “in imparting competence in basic skills such as reading, mathematics and science to the average student and promoting academic excellence in talented students,” in a complete reversal of what his forces expected, has turned increasingly toward Islamization, with Hadith teachings incorporated into the national school curriculum instead at a time when extensive reforms are needed to cope with a technocratic, globalized world, critics say. Anwar has proposed expanding the scope and power of Sharia courts as well.
But what concerns many is the way the scandal-scarred United Malays National Organization is dominating politics despite coming into Anwar’s Unity government holding only 26 of 222 seats in the Dewan Rakyat, or parliament, the weakest period in its 75-year history. Today the critics say, UMNO appears to be virtually running the country, with the party’s leader, Abdul Zahid Hamidi, magically freed from indictment last September on when he was actually standing trial on 43 charges of corruption and bribery, who was actually standing trial when he was elevated by Anwar to the deputy premiership. Prosecutors in September last year requested that all charges be discharged in a motion “not amounting to an acquittal” although they theoretically can be restarted at some point charges under the law.
Consider these events in UMNO’s favor. Despite what his supporters say is Anwar’s pride in an independent judiciary appointed on merit rather than political loyalty, former Prime Minister Najib, the party’s leader, kingmaker, and moneybags has had his 12-year sentence for corruption in the country’s biggest financial scandal reduced to six years and his fines cut to RM50 million (US$10.6 million) from RM210 million. UMNO officials are fighting to have him released on house arrest, claiming that Sultan Abdullah, the former king, signed a purported “supplementary decree” which allows him to serve his sentence under house arrest.
Najib faces trial on several other counts of corruption in connection with the failed 1Malaysia Development Bhd start-backed investment fund, but critics are asking when those trials will move forward, eight years after 1MDB’s 2016 collapse with US$5.4 billion missing.
The charges against the former “court cluster” of top UMNO officials accused of corruption, including Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor, Abdul Azeez Abdul Rahim, secretary-general Ahmad Maslan, and Bung Moktar Radin seem to have disappeared into an indeterminate future. Najib’s wife Rosmah Mansor was found guilty of corruption in September of 2022, fined MYR$303 million, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. But 21 months later, she remains free on appeal and there is no indication when the appellate courts will take up her petition.
The architect of UMNO’s resurgence is the 71-year-old Zahid, a Perak native who was raised by a Chinese stepfather and who speaks fluent Chinese, who has used UMNO’s position in a shaky coalition – its ability to pull it down by leaving– as a fulcrum to get what he wanted. He also out-politicked significant opposition in UMNO to manage to waive any near-term election for the party’s top two positions, generating rank-and-file outrage. That ensures that Zahid has another two years as party president.
Zahid secured the defense ministry portfolio for the party, first for Mohamad Hasan, then later for Mohamed Khaled Nordin, formerly the non-executive chairman of Boustead Holdings, a scandal-enwrapped conglomerate that has been at the center of cost overruns and contracts for non-existent ships for decades. Malaysia’s defense contracts have been a long-time source of massive corruption and a wellspring of funds for UMNO in the purchase of tanks, aircraft, patrol boats – some produced, or not, by Boustead – and submarines, another notorious scandal in the 1990s that netted tens of millions of dollars for UMNO coffers.
Zahid himself took the Ministry of Rural and Regional Development, which is responsible for rural, regional, and community development as well as administration of programs for Bumiputeras, the Orang Asli, rubber industry smallholders, land consolidation and rehabilitation, one of the biggest ministries in the government, with a huge budget. Thus UMNO ended up in two of the country’s most important ministries, with the ability to direct projects to ensure voter loyalty to UMNO.
The ethnic Chinese-dominated Democratic Action Party, which holds the biggest single number of seats – 40 – in the Dewan Rakyat, has been sidelined but does not dare protest lest they kick off trouble before what analysts called a “green wave” exemplified by the sudden rise of PAS and by Bersatu’s theft of UMNO party wheelhorses, reflecting the growing Islamization of segments of the electorate. PAS’s success puts pressure on the government and contributes to the growing marginalization of minorities.
Overall, Anwar’s critics say, despite the spots of success, he is what they anticipated before his elevation – fiery orator, idealist, but distracted from the job of actually governing. UMNO during its decades of dominance did one thing. It learned how to lead, and, with its continued ability to obstruct policy perceived as contrary to its interests, to advance its own via ketuanan Melayu, or Malay nationalism, and opportunist Islamist policies, it is both staying alive and probably waiting to pounce. This weekend’s elections will begin to tell the tale.
Nothing new, John Berthelsen. After all, what do you expect from a totally racist, totally corrupt country and its ruling regime with a steadfast Third/Fourth World mindset whilst holding pretensions to become an advanced economy and a First World state? It was clear from the start Anwar Ibrahim was never in the driver's seat as prime minister. He got there not by the grace of voters but that, given that his own party PKR had performed poorly in the last election, although a bit better than Umno, that he would be presiding over a weak regime that could collapse at any moment. It was by the grace of the last king who, out of desperation, asked Anwar Ibrahim to form government -- in conjunction with Umno and the DAP along with two other parties from the Malaysian Borneo states of Sarawak and Sabah. What the then king should have done, if he had the guts, was to call for fresh elections.
This in part explains the kinds of shenanigans that have been played out since 2022 by the so-called Unity government with shawls itself in the ridiculously pompous mantra of Madani -- a typically vague and pretentious philosophy that would herald "good governance" after the last 67 years of uninspiring, corrupt and racist governance. What the people have seen of this Madani Unity regime is purely sickening comedy and pusillanimity of the ruling Malay regime. It's clear Malays couldn't even run a chook raffle to save their miserable lives. Anwar Ibrahim couldn't even make a final decision, despite his boasting that he was on top of his game, over his Madani rice price cap caper. That's how brilliant a finance minister he has turned out to be yet again, as he was back in 1997-98 when he was lost in total confusion and cluelessness about what to do with the onset of the Asian financial tsunami that very nearly brought Malaysia's economy and, worse, its entire financial system to its knees.
PKR does not run the business of governance. Umno does despite its small number of seats in the so-called august parliament (of jokers and idiots). The DAP is a party of gutless Chinese wonders who blow hot air out of their asses, and are rightly dubbed as Malaysia's "new MCA" (Malaysian Chinese Association, which was a part of the old, rotten, racist and hideously corrupt Barisan Nasional coalitional regime ruled by Umno, but a party of, by and for Chinese tycoons who were busy kissing the asses of their Malay masters for government contracts whilst seeking state protection against foreign competitors in the SME sector). So don't expect anything but more bupkis and baloney from the DAP.
The only reason Anwar gave the birdbrain Ahmad Zahid Hamidi the post of deputy prime minister and than the amalgated rural and agri ministries was because Anwar's reign as PM was at best tenuous and he needed, for Malay eyes and crucially Malay legitimacy and Malay votes, Umno to save his political neck. Give him a rope long enough and he'll hang himself again, as he did in 1997-98, and several times as PKR/Harapan leader over by-elections and state elections, and again over economic subsidies and more recently saving the pathetic ringgit from being quashed like a cockroach under the weight of the dominant US dollar (this is another story). Fact is, Anwar is simply a lousy, outb of his depth minister when it comes to the economy and finance (on this point Mahathir was and still is right). He's only good at jawboning his opponents and propagandizing aimed at the Malays. Even the ex-Boustead boss is now minister of defense when he was consistently drowning the hopelessly corrupt and incomoetent Boustead into the deep blue sea. To be sure, incompetent Malays are being propelled into ministries and the bloated Malay-dominated bureaucracy, all of whom would struggle to sell tissue-papers beside Malaysia's public toilets.
But don't expect anything to change. There's a reason why Anwar Ibrahim was in Kelantan and Kedah recently. It wasn't "business" over economic matters but the business of political legitimacy, to win over the ultra-conservative Malays in those states before the elections in 2026 (assuming crook Hamidi doesn't knife Anwar in the back, front and sides before then). There's a reason why the bureaucracy was given a hefty 13% pay hike, to increase what in Malaysia is called gaji buta (literally blind wages) -- again to win the Malay bureaucrats' political support before the 2026 elections. My bet is that Anwar Ibrahim will not stop there. If Malays have relied on state crutches for their livelihoods, there is even more reason those crutches will be reinforced with more special state subsidies for a special race who, laughably, call themselves bumiputera. Anwar is already campaigning harder to win the next poll. He's not governing. He hasn't been governing. It's all showmanship (from the traditional Malay garb that he wears to his fast-paced walk when the cameras are rolling to show he means business).
The one thing that really has stood out for me over the many years I've been watching Malaysia's political economy is just how pathetically predictable the playbook has become. Take a look at its communications minister Fahmi -- what a clown he's turned out to be, taking the old Umno route that one day soon will see him stare down the online and social media (when Malaysia goes with begging bowls to the Microsofts and the Googles and the Apples for "postmodern technological" investments. Anwar Ibrahim would have had to give these transnational firms some hefty financial incentives for them to invest in country like Malaysia; they do not come to invest out of the goodness of their hearts. Of course, the other clown is the home minister, Nasution. He can't tell his ass from his elbow on the best of days.
So what hope is there for Malaysia for what it hopes to become even by 2030? Trouble is -- and maybe even seen as a saving grace for the Anwar regime -- that the opposition of Bersatu, Perikatan Nasional and PAS are worse: they'll take Malaysia to the halcyon years of Talibanistic rule and their dark caves. The best of both evils, I suppose.
Berthelsen, based on his own words, lacks editing skills.
He claimed that I was writing gibberish on Najib. He more than implied emotionally that Najib was big crook. He advised me on letting an Editor go through the gibberish. He claimed that he doesn't edit gibberish.
My jurist pieces on Najib are based on the rule of law, the basis of the Constitution. This is where Berthelsen falls apart. He compiles all anti-Najib material in the public domain into forms of gibberish and passes them off as Opinion.
It's still plagiarism although rewritten, attributed and referenced. There's no originality of thought and no original thinking. It's true that there's no law on plagiarism.
Opinion pieces must be based on connecting the dots for originality of thought and original thinking. That happens in my jurist pieces.
There's no place for emotions in law.
Berthelsen may be handicapped by the fact that he never read law. He has always remained the school dropout who just grew older in Asia but never gathered skills for the workplace.
He exercises self-censorship, imposes censorship, and denies the right of reply on even the content carried by the website. He publishes only if he agrees with the gibberish.