DEWAN Rakyat Speaker Tan Sri Azhar Azizan Harun took everybody by surprise when he described the eighth prime minister of Malaysia as an “overlooked reformist” which “many choose to overlook for whatever reason they may have”.
He said this during the launch of the book ‘Muhyiddin Yassin: Leading a Nation in Unprecedented Crisis’ by Abdul Mutalib Razak yesterday.
Was Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin a closet reformer but who never came out of the closet?
Azhar is dead wrong when he said that Muhyiddin “never asked for the job” of prime minister.
I should know because Muhyiddin had asked me for DAP’s support to be prime minister way back in July 2016 – the cloak-and-dagger meeting at Le Meridien Hotel in Kuala Lumpur – but I declined to do so as DAP was committed to maintaining Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim as the prime minister candidate.
“His five failures”
Muhyiddin will forever be remembered for five failures, namely:
- The infamous Sheraton Move conspiracy, which stole the people’s mandate in the 14th General Election and toppled the Pakatan Harapan (Pakatan) Government;
- His illegal and unconstitutional declaration of a six-month emergency and his failures in imposing emergency rule;
- The beginning of more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, where Malaysia had the worst health minister in the world and Malaysia plunged from a country with a good record in fighting the pandemic to a country with one of the worst records in the world;
- His failure to Malaysianise his political thinking to graduate from a “Malay first” to a ”Malaysian first” political leader, and;
- The largest, most bloated Cabinet of 32 ministers, 38 deputy ministers and four special envoys with ministerial ranks.
But Muhyiddin’s political life, which culminated in his becoming the eighth prime minister but with the shortest term of 17 months, had one saving factor – his uncompromising position against the 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) scandal, for which he was dismissed as deputy prime minister in July 2015 and later sacked from UMNO in June 2016 by Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
“Failed as education minister”
It is difficult to say that Muhyiddin’s political life was one of success for the nation, as he failed as education minister.
His Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025, aimed at keeping Malaysia above the global average and being in the top one-third of countries with international education standards by 2025, is a flop.
This is because Malaysia is below the global average and not in the top one-third of countries in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) international assessments.
“Corruption battle was a flop”
The battle against corruption was also a flop.
When Muhyiddin was prime minister, Transparency International (TI) released its Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 2020 in January 2021, and there was a drop in score from 53 points to 51 points, which resulted in a six-point fall in ranking from 51st place to 57th.
In January 2022, the TI-CPI 2021 was announced under a new prime minister, Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob, and the score fell another five points to 48. The ranking, on the other hand, fell another 11 points in ranking to 61st place.
Malaysia is likely to fall to the lowest score and rank since 1995 when the TI-CPI 2022 is announced in January 2023.
Fighting COVID-19
Malaysia was doing quite well in the fight against COVID-19 in the first six months of the pandemic, but the situation deteriorated badly after that period.
Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking placed Malaysia in 16th place out of 53 countries with economies of more than US$200 bil in January 2021. When Muhyiddin resigned as prime minister in August 2021, Malaysia was ranked in the 52nd spot.
Myth-makers claim that the Muhyiddin Government had passed its greatest test in the COVID-19 pandemic. This is not the truth. In fact, it’s the opposite.
The COVID-19 pandemic had, in fact, provided the Muhyiddin Government an opportunity to hide its weaknesses and internal contradictions.
But thanks to the frontliners and Malaysians who rallied behind the Government because of the enormity of a COVID-19 disaster, we survived, despite the unnecessary deaths of 35,956 people and over 4.6 mil COVID-19 infections.
“The original sin”
The original sin of Malaysia’s COVID-19 crisis was the Sheraton Move conspiracy and the initial mishandling of the pandemic, which sparked several waves of COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown of the country.
If this did not take place, there would be no Movement Control Order (MCO), Conditional Movement Control Order (CMCO) and Recovery Movement Control Order (RMCO).
An emergency was declared on Jan 11, 2021, when Malaysia had 135,992 COVID-19 cases and 551 COVID-19 deaths.
Six months later at the end of the emergency on July 31, 2021, we had 1,113,272 COVID-19 cases and 9,024 COVID-19 deaths – some five times the number of COVID-19 cases and 16 times more COVID-19 deaths.
If the emergency was justified, then it should be extended on Aug 1, 2021, given the exponential worsening of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The exponential increase of COVID-19 cases and deaths since the declaration of emergency has shown that the emergency, which suspended Parliament and the state assemblies, was the wrong prescription for the COVID-19 pandemic, and, in fact, gross abuse of executive power.
However, Muhyiddin’s greatest failure is his inability for his political thinking to graduate from “Malay First” to “Malaysian First” and be a prime minister for all Malaysians.
But that is another story. – July 30, 2022
Lim Kit Siang is the Iskandar Puteri MP, DAP supremo and a veteran lawmaker.
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Focus Malaysia.
