Kehebatan Perdana Menteri, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad atau Tun M sebagai pemimpin bukan saja diukur pada usianya yang masih gagah tapi ucapannya dengan lantang di peringkat antarabangsa membuatkan pemimpin dunia lain gerun terhadapnya.

Menteri Belia dan Sukan, Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman yang turut mengagumi Tun M tampil mendedahkan kepada khalayak mengenai tuduhan segelintir pihak beranggapan ucapan negarawan itu bukan disediakan Tun M sendiri.

Tun M sekali kali menarik perhatian dunia ketika berucap pada Perhimpunan Agung Pertubuhan Bangsa-Bangsa Bersatu ke-73 di New York, Amerika Syarikat baru-baru ini.

Syed Saddiq menyatakan beliau pernah mempunyai pengalaman bekerja dengan Tun M sebelum ini sambil menyifatkan Perdana Menteri itu seorang yang pakar terhadap kerjanya.

"Ketika kami (Pegawai Tadbir Diplomatik) terbabit dalam Policy Talk secara mingguan (berhadapan dengan pilihan raya), kami menyediakan keseluruhan ucapannya.

"Fakta dan angka, ayat demi ayat. Apabila menghantar draf kepadanya, beliau memberitahu perlukan masa untuk meneliti draf tersebut.

"Kami fikir kerja kami sudah selesai tapi kejutannya, beliau memberikan draf yang ditulis dengan tangan yang mengubahsuai hampir keseluruhan draf yang kami tulis," katanya menerusi Instagramnya, @syedsaddiq.

I don’t understand the jealousy by some attempting to discredit Tun M by alleging that his UN General Assembly speech was all scripted and not prepared by him. That he merely was parroting what was given to him by the PTD officers. . . I have had the privilege of working with Tun M & throughout my experience, he is the master of his own work. . . When we ran the weekly Policy Talk for Tun M (prior to election), we initially scripted his whole speech. Facts and figures, sentence by sentence. After sending our draft to him, he told us that he needed some time to go through it. We thought our work was done. To our surprise, he came back with another hand-written draft, altering almost everything we wrote. Our draft was filled with red lines and “please include this” memos everywhere. It was as if he was marking a paper ? I have been writing speeches for so many politicians and corporate leaders before this, but Tun M truly takes the cake. . . It did not end there. We saw that he omitted one important line in his speech, so we added it in without notifying him. I personally thought that it wasn’t something he would notice as it wouldn’t change the content of his speech. Again, to our surprise, when he was LIVE on FB, he paused and said, “I think you got this wrong. I don’t remember adding this in”. Demi Allah, my face immediately turned red in shame. How can he notice something so unnoticeable? How much of a perfectionist is this man? . . From the second session onward, we ended up just preparing talking points and did not bother scripting the whole speech as we knew that he preferred to talk without a script. . . He writes his own speeches, He writes his own blogposts, He even does a lot of the research work on his own. . . It truly was challenging working with Tun. We knew that we had to give him our best, and almost always, out best was never enough? What i learnt was invaluable. I’ll never trade the experience for anything else. . . It is because of that experience, i feel compelled to tell the story behind Malaysia’s most notorious perfectionist, our beloved Tun Mahathir. . . I can only wish that i’d be like him one day, inshaallah.

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Ujarnya, Tun M adalah pemimpin yang sangat bertanggungjawab terhadap ucapannya sendiri.

Malah, Syed Saddiq juga memberitahu beliau bersama kumpulan PTD itu pernah melakukan tambahan pada ucapan tanpa pengetahuan Tun M.

"Sekali lagi kejutan ketika Tun M secara langsung menerusi Facebook, Tun M berhenti seketika dan memberitahu 'Saya fikir kamu buat silap. Saya tidak pernah menambah perkataan ini'.

"Demi Allah, muka saya jadi merah padam kerana malu. Bagaimana Tun M boleh tahu perkara yang tidak diberitahu? Bagaimana beliau seorang yang sempurna?," katanya.

Teks oleh: Elrafaei Sapi

Foto: IG @syedsaddiq