MAHATIR Mohamed, Malaysia's former prime minister and the engineer of its economic modernisation, visited Egypt on Monday to share with the local business arena his country's experience. During his speech at the conference "Post revolutionary Egypt" held by the Egyptian Federation of Industries, Mahatir stressed that democracy comes with a cost and that Egypt has to know how to deal with the consequences of giving its people more freedoms. "Democracy means that people resort to their elected parliament to get their needs met and only when this fails do they go into the streets and organise demonstrations. The problem with demonstrations is that they drive investors away." Mahatir, who during his 22 years as prime minister helped turn his country from a distressed economy into one of the world's largest industrialised nations with industry accounting for 90 per cent of its GDP, stressed that Egypt should not depend on borrowing from abroad to deal with its post-revolutionary economic challenges. "Malaysians refused the IMF and World Bank's assistance because we wanted our economic decisions to be independent." In the early 1990s Mahatir put forward his country's 2020 vision which aimed at changing it from a developing country to a developed economy and is based on industrialisation and a market economy in addition to an overhaul in Malaysian working habits starting with going to work as early as 8am, organising regular training workshops and fighting corruption. Mahatir stepped down in 2003.
