COMMENT Leaders bother about their legacy, long-tenured ones especially.

Having had 22 years in the saddle, former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad has to be concerned about his; that's probably why he took care to handpick his successors and was and is, at pains to take them apart when they appear to go off-track.

His first successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, yielded without much of a fight, beaten more by his loss of the ruling government's supermajority in Parliament, than by his own wobbly leadership style.

Mahathir's second successor, Najib Abdul Razak, did not retrieve what his immediate predecessor Abdullah ( photo ) lost but improved on what Umno obtained in terms of seats at the polls, buffering himself from the more stinging of Dr M's broadsides.

Reinforcing the flak jacket that his partially better showing at the polls provided him, Najib has adopted an 'attack is the best defence' policy in response to Mahathir's salvoes, pegging his tormentor in defence and succeeding somewhat in diffusing the notion that his misdeeds pale in comparison with his predecessor's.

Weary admission

A sign that this strategy is succeeding is in Mahathir's weary admission in the last couple of days, since he began his campaign in earnest early this year to unseat Najib, that the latter is likely to see out his prime ministerial term which ends in 2018.

Mahathir claims that Najib's well-fed claque of supporters in government and in the legislature are indifferent to his alleged misdemeanors, even as these have caused the Malaysian currency to plunge and the economy to slide in a pall of mistrust.

Najib's continued rule Mahathir fears, and has predicted, will see the BN government voted out at the polls in 2018, the overhang of unsustainable debt and crippling corruption combining to sink BN's prospects.

Obviously, Najib does not share this view and believes that by 2018 he would have enough time to exorcise what is now widely referred to as the “elephant in the room”, the debt-plagued state wealth fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) , that critics say is the biggest financial scandal in our history in the teeth of the PM's supporters contention that it is a project that needs more time to realise its potential.

To critics what is most abnormal about the 1MDB issue is the RM2.6 billion that found its way into Najib's personal bank accounts which the PM says was a private donation to his party from an unidentified Middle Eastern source and was not used for personal gain.

Mahathir and a legion of critics say the 'donation' was a diversion from 1MDB and on those grounds it was larceny on a stupendous scale, requiring the PM to quit and those complicit in the embezzlement to be arraigned.

Mahathir's relentless attacks on the 1MDB issue, aided by sensational revelations in blogs and foreign media reports, are being deflected by counterattacks from Najib's minions to the effect that anti-liberal conduct during Mahathir's 22-year premiership have rendered the former PM lame in his targeting of the present incumbent.

This has forced the 90-year-old elder statesman into a sometimes desperate and unconvincing defence of authoritarian episodes during his lengthy tenure when the draconian Internal Security Act was used against critics and his muzzling of the press and the judiciary stamped him as anti-liberal.

Dictatorial ways

Some of the same critics who felt the lash of Mahathir's dictatorial ways are still around and though they are scathing about Najib's administration, they look upon Mahathir as having weakened the very public institutions that are now seen as supine before Najib's depredations.

They have only a muted regard for the residual decency and valour of Mahathir's attempts at preserving the rule of law against the rampaging executive in Najib and view his efforts as trying to close the door after the horses have bolted the stable.

The opposition's muted respect is better than the outright cynicism with which those in Umno who don't like Mahathir, like Backbenchers Club chairperson Shahrir Samad ( photo ) and Tourism Minister Mohd Nazri Aziz, view his criticisms of Najib: they think him unprincipled and a hypocrite - Nazri especially has said so.

It all comes back to the constraint on glasshouse dwellers against throwing stones.

No amount of special pleading in behalf of Mahathir can obscure the fact that his authoritarian past is now a deadweight on him as much as his target is, as he argues, an albatross around the nation's neck.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.