Quora Answer: Who was a Better Prime Minister, Mahathir bin Mohamad or Lee Kuan Yew?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Who is a better Prime Minister, Mahathir bin Mohamed, or Lee Kuan Yew?”

To be fair, Mahathir bin Mohamed is still very much alive.  As such, his entire legacy is not yet over, although he is not exactly covering himself with glory here.  Lee Kuan Yew passed away four years ago, so his book is closed.

Mahathir bin Mohamad was born of an Indian father, with ancestry from Kerala, in India.  This is public record.  And yet, that did not stop him becoming a Malay nationalist.  In the late 1940s, and early 1950s, he made his name leading protest movements denouncing citizenship for non-Malays in the Malayan Union.

He stood as an über-nationalist in 1964.  He wrote “The Malay Dilemma”, where he blamed the economic plight of the Malays on the British, the Chinese, and the Jews. There is some merit in those arguments due to colonial policy, but he went overboard and advocated an apartheid system of Malay supremacy.  If there is one thing we can give him credit for, is his consistency when it comes to his unabashed racism, and Malay supremacist nationalism.

Mahathir also pandered to the religious right.  He is still the advisor for Perkasa, the Malay Ku Klux Klan, and their advocacy of hostility towards the “pendatang”.  This is also public record, and they have not been shy in their rattling of the keris.  Mahathir, as prime minister in his first stint, created JAKIM, and gave them a billion-ringgit budget.  These were cynical attempts to trade national unity for shoring up the Malay vote bank.

When it comes to economic policy, whilst he has presided over growth, his rule was also one of missed opportunities, trade protectionism, and vanity projects.  The two car companies come to mind; now he wants a third one.  Petronas Towers is another vanity project that wasted funds to raise a phallic symbol to the sky on clay foundations.  He built Pelabuhan Klang, but neglected to create a substantive logistics, and manufacturing network to support it.

Mahathir also advanced his version of crony capitalism, a system that Mohammad Najib bin Abdul Razak took and expanded to an outright kleptocracy.  Mahathir has been, without doubt, the longest serving politician in Malaysia, and holds the longest stint as Prime Minister.  His legacy is a Malaysia that is still decades away from developed status, still mired in corruption, still stymied by structural weaknesses in the economy, and still ineffectually picking fights with Singapore.

Lee Kuan Yew, for all his faults and inadequacies, dragged Singapore into the developed world from an island nation of no resources, with the largest slum in the world.  His legacy is one of social engineering on a scale not seen in modern times, that has actually benefited a people.  There is really nothing to compare.  Mahathir is still hilariously out of his league here.