Malaysia's prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad is not one to shy away from making headlines at every opportunity.

Take his invitation to the G8 chinwag in Evian last week. Mahathir's minders hailed it a success, principally of his stature and importance. But that's another bit of cant by Malaysia's tightly controlled media.

Example: what dent did Mahathir make at the G8 from the sidelines like a benched footballer? Zilch. Why? Because in world terms, Mahathir is insignificant and inconsequential.

He offers no panacea for any of the world's most harrowing problems, especially in the Third World, whom he represents as leader of the dilapidating Non-Aligned Movement, which is epitomised by unscrupulous leadership.

Ludicrous proposal

In Evian, Mahathir suggested that the First World gives a 'fishing rod' to the Third World so that it may overcome its many developmental problems. This proposal is as ludicrous as several other blithe Mahathir-isms in recent years.

Given the history of the increasingly intractable problems that the Third World has been facing since independence from western colonialism and even before Mahathir again causes serious embarrassment to Third World peoples by exhibiting his ignorance of the pervasive issues that dog the developing world.

Simply put, any experienced fisherman knows that dangling a fishing rod over any water won't necessarily catch fish on occasion, no matter what the bait.

Mahathir and his advisers have been closeted up in his Putrajaya fairyland for far too long if they can only come up with such flaccid idiocies.

Even if Mahathir were to now respond by suggesting that the First World throws a dragnet to the Third World, he would again plainly be ignorant of the cries that went out in the early 1970s.

At the time, when the Bretton Woods System was crumbling, howls for a new international economic order were already quickly falling on deaf years - and increasingly so since then.

For what jettisoned Bretton Woods was an emergent global financial order rooted in monetarism and controlled by the western industrialised nations amid the powerful reconfigurations of the next phases of the geopolitical world order.

And, like it or not, Malaysia under Mahathir was also forced to adopt monetarist policies by the 1980s.

Nothing has since changed. Not after the Third World debt crises, which continues unabated. Not after the East Asian economic crisis. Not after the economic crises that have bedevilled the G7 states (plus Russia) before and after Sept 11, 2001.

Indeed, nobody has conclusively shown that Sept 11 has forever changed the world order so that we now need to think about the world, and relations between and within countries, with distinctive difference to the pre-9/11 world order.

The problem with Mahathir's "clarion call" - to which, incidentally, no one paid any heed - isn't so much that it is daft but that he was deflecting blame yet again to the usual suspects - the First World - for creating the Third World's problems in the first place.

Such scapegoating 30 to 53 years after the end of colonialism, is predictable but old and tiresome. Mahathir and other Third World leaders desperately need new material.

Ducking responsibility

The international economic order is the international political order. Inequities between the industrialised and developing nations continue.

But Mahathir couldn't be honest in admitting that there have been massive inequities - which continue to grow - between and within developing and less developing states. Some of these remain firmly mired in long histories of uneven and under-development.

Mahathir's canard and hype are more evident as he conveniently uses the World Bank's recent praise for Malaysia's banking sector reforms. He would never accept the World Bank's or the International Monetary Fund's criticism of his government's lack of real economic reforms.

Yet it is precisely this praise by the World Bank that powerfully distinguishes developing nations like Malaysia from less developing nations like those in Africa and elsewhere.

To concede these differences would be to admit that Mahathir's blaming of the First World for Third World problems is a hoax since it would shift the focus sharply, and rightly, to post-colonial regimes and their historic inability to create meaningful development outcomes because of embedded corruption.

Take the thievery of President Robert Mugabe (photo) of Zimbabwe - whom Mahathir supports - who has robbed his country blind and has sent the economy spinning into hopeless bankruptcy.

There is political chaos as well as deepening poverty amidst famine-like conditions among his people, apart from Mugabe loyalists. There is spiralling murder of and racism against white Zimbabweans, backed by state-sponsored terrorism and repression.

The Mugabe regime is one of dozens in the developing world that are singularly to be blamed for creating their own problems, but for which they won't accept responsibility.

These regimes are not unlike illiberal regimes like that of Mahathir in Malaysia and the corrupt junta in Burma, or indeed the desperately troubled and inept ones in Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia and other countries.

Chosen few

It is time for the people of the Third World to rise up and demand honest and open governments with the full panoply of democratic institutions, even if these are moulded according to indigenous variants.

But these 'democracies' will be worthless if their institutions don't rigorously accept and codify the practice of good and transparent governance, and accountability and responsibility through the democratic rights of citizens and political representation by opposition groups.

For too long, such regimes have dangled fishing rods over their own waters, caught big fish and profited through corruption and cronyism.

Since the East Asian financial crisis and the removal of former Finance Minister Daim Zainuddin (photo) and corporate figures like Halim Saad and Tajuddin Ramli in Malaysia, Mahathir has been nurturing a new breed of Malay cronies.

The same is happening in South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki's rule, modelled on Malaysia's 'political economy' with all its dire consequences for corruption and racism.

These regimes, protected by repressive state structures and institutions of their own making, have stymied developmentalism to serve only a chosen few.

It is time for the likes of Mahathir to demonstrate honest and decent leadership instead of habitual hype and humbug by indecently and pusillanimously shifting blame to the First World. This argument just doesn't wash anymore.