A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (46 page)

My view has not changed. Students who indulge in demonstrations and violent politics cannot devote enough time to their studies. Malaysia is still a developing country and we need to have good, educated people to drive and sustain our development. For this reason, vast public funds are poured into education and even then, only the lucky ones are admitted into universities. Whether they are on scholarships or not, much of the expenditure on education is borne by the public.

During my time it cost RM50,000 to finance a medical student for just one year. That is equivalent to the annual pay of a senior civil servant. When someone goes overseas for a Master’s degree, the Government spends RM1 million of taxpayers’ money on that person. Would the public be pleased to know that government scholars are spending their time demonstrating instead of studying? True, governments may need to be prodded and even exposed to agitation, but whoever wishes to do this should do so in his own time and at his own cost. The public has a right to know that its money is being well spent.

Malay students in particular must not waste time and public money because their numbers have always been small and for that reason they must study harder. They are given ample opportunity to study, not simply to encourage their own personal upward mobility but to help balance the unequal development of the different races in Malaysia. The NEP’s objectives will never be achieved if we fail to produce enough well-educated Malays, yet if those NEP objectives are not achieved, the Malays will be the first to complain. The University and University Colleges Act can be repealed once students are mature enough to understand that they are there to acquire knowledge, improve themselves and contribute to the development of the country. Perhaps it is now timely to consider whether it might be relaxed a little.

With the demonstrations over, I turned my attention back to my priorities as Minister. These were to increase the opportunities for higher education—especially for Malays who could not afford to go abroad to study—and to place more importance on the sciences rather than the arts. Science had a lot more to do with the work we faced, for at that time we needed engineers, doctors, architects and others with professional degrees. We had to start by literally forcing students into the science stream. Those who achieved a certain level of results were simply moved there. It was not a popular decision and there was a lot of resentment, especially from Malay parents who feared their children would now face more difficulty in passing their examinations. It was far easier in the arts stream, from which you emerged with a Bachelor of Arts degree after three years at university. Parents could take pictures of their children in that all-important graduation gown, mortarboard and tassel, which they could then proudly put on display in their houses.

But the reality was that apart from a career in the administrative and education services, graduates from the arts stream were practically unemployable. They were certainly not suited for the business field. The Government had assumed that with a BA, graduates were intelligent enough to carry out administrative work. That assumption was not completely wrong, but they still had to be trained to be administrators and managers.

I was very much involved in getting Malay to be used as the main medium of instruction in schools. I believe that a common language can contribute to nation-building, a sense of identity and unity among people of all races. It was always my intention to have students proficient in Malay as well as in English as a second language. Malaysian students should at the very least be bilingual, while most Chinese and Indian students will naturally end up being at least trilingual. But when we switched to Malay, most Malays came to think very misguidedly that English was irrelevant. They ceased recognising its importance and stopped studying it. These days most of our Malay-educated graduates cannot speak or write even a simple sentence in clear, correct English.

We have long started seeing the effects of this attitude. When we recruited our Malay graduates into the Civil Service, for example, we found that most were not able to function properly because their English language skills were so poor. In the service they were required to meet foreigners, negotiate with them and participate in conferences. We do not even have Malay interpreters fluent in English, an essential international conference requirement as poor understanding or misinterpretation can be disastrous. No one may fully understand what important documents state. Worse, and even more dangerous, they may nonetheless think that they do. Officers lacking a command of language that is equal to the tasks they face become frustrated because they cannot argue with clarity and force. In the end, they develop an inferiority complex.

I had long worried about the quality of education in Malaysia. The creation of public and private higher education institutions increased tremendously to meet fast-growing demand. To ensure that proper international standards were maintained, “twinning” arrangements with established foreign institutions were encouraged. Twinning reduces cost as the early years can be done in Malaysia while only the final year or last two years are done abroad. The degrees awarded would then bear the names of the respective foreign institutions. Such twinning arrangements also helped us overcome the problem of not having enough places in local universities, which already suffered from a shortage of teaching staff. Significantly, it mostly benefitted non-Malay students, who could better afford the cost of private education.

As Education Minister I was rather unpopular with the teachers—unfairly so, I thought. They were always asking for better pay and former Ministers of Education had tended to accede to their demands. When I was Prime Minister, I remember being furious when one Education Minister approved increased allowances for teachers amounting to RM90 million a year without clearing the idea with the Cabinet first. It threw the whole salary scheme into disarray when other government servants in different ministries, but of the same level and in the same Civil Service category, demanded similar allowances.

During my schooldays teachers valued their jobs. They were highly respected and were considered learned people. Even if a teacher was in a Malay primary school, he was thought to be much better informed than the rest of the people from the 
kampung
 and even the towns. But today, almost anyone can become a teacher. Unfortunately, our culture these days adheres to mediocre standards. We do not like anyone to stand out, so whoever works too hard or shines too much is unlikely to be appreciated by the community. As the Japanese like to say, if you see a nail standing out, you hammer it in.

There is of course some basis to the teachers’ complaints of overwork, but teaching is a special profession. It is a calling with very different demands from any other profession or corporate job. It is about shaping the young to face the adult world. It involves a great deal of work outside of school hours, including supervising extracurricular activities. But teachers keep comparing themselves to people in other jobs. In Malaysia today, job opportunities are abundant. In the days when there were fewer jobs, you would have been glad to be a teacher or indeed, to have any job at all.

The first thing I did when I became Minister of Education was to call together all the heads of the teacher training colleges and give them a long lecture about the need to work hard and be dedicated. After that impassioned plea, all they said was that the pay was not sufficient. I could not give them more than other government employees of comparable status because that would only cause other employees to demand for more. Since that day their pay has been revised many times, but it has never been enough. I had always thought I might inspire people but over the years I have found that I cannot. I have given talks to UMNO Youth about commitment, about the evils of corruption, and so on, but when it comes to question time, their questions are always about something else. I have given special talks for hours on how people can achieve success and be counted among the most advanced in the world, but my audience would inevitably dispute my views and the session would end up in confusing arguments. My frustration levels would shoot up after these sessions.

Overall however, I do not think I did too badly as Education Minister. I was able to calm the universities down and get them to function once again as places of higher learning, not political agitation. More students studied the sciences. More attention was paid to the national schools. And with the twinning arrangement, poorer students who could not get into local universities because of the quota system now had another option.

Meanwhile, important changes were taking place in UMNO. With the death of Tun Dr Ismail in 1973, Tun Razak appointed Tun Hussein as the new Deputy Prime Minister. Some party leaders were unhappy with this choice as Tun Hussein had been an outsider for a long time. He had remained associated with his father and the other political parties the latter had formed. Since Tun Hussein’s return to UMNO in 1969, he had never been prominent as a politician and was regarded simply as an ordinary party member. Now the feeling arose that it was Tun Razak, his brother-in-law, who had ensured his spectacular rise through the ranks. The party and public reaction to Tun Razak’s announcement of his Deputy, as I recall it, was hardly enthusiastic.

For my part, I thought Datuk Harun Idris would have made a better Deputy Prime Minister. He was certainly much more of an UMNO type of leader, popular with the activist youth wing and widely regarded as a Malay nationalist. But he had run afoul of Tun Razak, and as things turned out, the appointment of Tun Hussein as Deputy Prime Minister was to prove fateful for my own political future.

ENDNOTE

[
1
] People either love or hate this pungent, thorny fruit, but it is one of the most popular fruits in Malaysia.
 

Becoming a member of the Cabinet in 1974 marked a new stage in my political career, but it also closed one door to me: the practice of medicine.

Until then I had been both a politician and a doctor. It had not always been easy juggling both lives, especially since Hasmah was then also working as a rural Medical and Health Officer. We were often only able to see each other at dinnertime. Even then, the nights did not go undisturbed. Earlier, when she worked as a Registrar at the Alor Star General Hospital’s maternity ward, the telephone in our house would ring so frequently that I once pulled it out of its socket in sheer frustration.

After 20 years as a doctor I had to leave that world behind me; for good, as it turned out. The rule is simple: once you become a Cabinet member, you must give up all your other activities to prevent any possible conflict of interest. I had some regrets. I have always liked working with my hands so I knew I would miss the satisfaction that surgery gave me. I would also miss being able to ease other people’s pain and cure their illnesses, but I consoled myself by saying that I would now have the chance to help more people throughout the country. My patients were very encouraging, and told me that I was going from treating them to treating the ailments of the nation. And while I had grown to love medicine, I felt that I was now moving to my true vocation.

As a young man I had thought that law would be the best platform to launch me into politics, but I discovered that medicine had taught me many lessons about what it takes to be a good politician. One of the earliest things I learnt as a medical student at the King Edward VII College of Medicine, for example, was how to conquer my fears.

I had grown up afraid of death. When we were children, our elders had told us stories about ghosts and monsters coming after us as a way of making sure we would all come home before dark. It worked, and by 7pm all of us would run home, afraid that monsters would get us if we stayed out too late.

At school I was afraid to look at drawings of human skeletons. When I went to university, I walked past the anatomy lab during the first day of lectures. Even the sight of bodies covered with white sheets sent chills down my spine. The idea of handling those bodies was even more frightening. Strangely, it had not occurred to me that as a medical student, this was exactly what I had to do. All I had thought about was becoming a doctor, a person who could cure illness and bring people relief. Dissecting dead bodies was the last thing on my mind.

I summoned all my strength to overcome this fear, something I had practised from a young age. When I was a boy I had been afraid of dogs. I had been brought up to think of them as ferocious animals, an idea that was confirmed when a friend of mine was attacked and bitten by one. When I was about 12, during a visit to my uncle’s house, his dog started to chase me and I ended up running into the outdoor bathroom and slamming the door shut after me.

My uncle later told me that I should not have run but should have stood my ground and faced the dog. He also taught me that pretending to pick up a stone from the ground was usually enough to scare the dog away. The next time a dog approached me I remembered his advice. I gritted my teeth and resisted my usual urge to turn and run. I remained where I stood and stooped as if to pick up a stone. This time, it was the dog that ran away.

Back at the medical college, the day I realised I had to handle the corpses, I actually thought of giving up medicine. I wrestled with this fear until I remembered that even the girls would have to do the same thing. I had the idea that girls must naturally be timid and scared of the same things that scared me, but oddly enough, it did not seem to bother them. Indeed, no one talked about being afraid of dead bodies.

Ashamed of myself, I decided I had to overcome my fear. I went to the lab where the second-year students were being introduced to anatomy and asked one of them to uncover one of the corpses. It was a Chinese man and he smelled strongly of formalin. I put my hand on the cadaver. It was cold to the touch. I told myself it was dead and could do me no harm. Slowly, by facing my fears, I managed to reach a point where dead bodies no longer frightened me.