What good is a Malaysian prime minister who isn’t also the finance minister?
It may be the norm the world over for the two prime political positions to be divvied up between separate individuals – even in Xi Jinping’s “one-man rule” China – but in Prime Minister Najib Razak’s Malaysia, the premier and finance minister are one and the same.
The practice was first established by his former mentor and now rival Mahathir Mohamad, and there are no signs that Najib is contemplating giving up the roles.
The premier is expected to dissolve parliament within weeks to hold a national vote that will pit him against Mahathir. While esoteric compared with other hot-button issues, such as the rising cost of living, the dual role of the country’s premier is expected to be a key talking point at the hustings.
Mahathir, who held the reins as premier from 1981 to 2003, has said he will not repeat his two brief stints as a dual prime minister-finance minister if given the mantle of power once again.
The 92-year-old in 2016 quit the United Malay National Organisation (Umno), the linchpin of the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, because of Najib’s handling of 1MDB, the state fund that lost billions of dollars and is the subject of money-laundering investigations in at least six countries.
Critics of Najib’s economic management have seized on the pre-election buzz to shine the spotlight on the pitfalls of a premier holding the finance minister portfolio, even amid quiet acceptance that he is poised to keep both portfolios.
In a 2017 book analysing the prime minister’s vast economic clout, the country’s top political economist Edmund Terence Gomez wrote that the current governance structure “lays itself open to checks and balances being deeply undermined” and made space for the abuse of power.
This month, the Hong Kong-based financial magazine FinanceAsia ranked Najib second last among the finance ministers of Asia’s top 12 economies.
Najib, the magazine said, was a “prime example” of a finance minister who had “through their actions or speeches detracted from the credibility and prestige of the institutions they represent”.
For Gomez and others, the 1MDB losses are a prime example of…
