She said she had dared to dispute Mahathir, who was prime minister for 22 years till 2003, and they had run-ins when she was in his Cabinet.
She said she had once countered Mahathir in front of eight others when he spoke about a deputy needing to be loyal to his president.
“I told him outright that I disagreed with him. No one should be loyal to the president,” she said at a meet-the-people session in Pendang, Kedah, this evening.
“You have seen me cry, but you have not seen my anger,” she said.
Also present were PH’s Pendang parliamentary candidate Wan Saiful Wan Jan, and Sungai Tiang and Tokai state candidates Abdul Razak Khamis and Mohd Firdaus Jaafar.
Rafidah, a former international trade and industry minister, was responding to a comment by a member of the audience that the tears she had shed at the Umno general assembly in 2002 had shown her loyalty was to Mahathir, who was then Umno president.
This had happened after Mahathir announced that he was resigning from all posts, including that of prime minister, at the assembly.
“When he was my PM, I told him I supported him because he ran the country well, not because he is Mahathir,” she said.
“I told him: ‘I support you because of what you stand for.’”
Rafidah also said she disagreed with those who said Malaysia’s prime minister was a gift from God.
“We are all gifts from Allah. Our parents gave birth to us. We did not come from a tree, nor did we come from monkeys,” she said.
Rafidah said that she would not be campaigning for the opposition if Prime Minister and Umno president Najib Razak, and Umno vice-president Hishammuddin Hussein were anything like their fathers.
Najib is the son of second prime minister Abdul Razak Hussein while Hishammuddin, who is now defence minister, is the son of third prime minister Hussein Onn.
“If they were like their fathers, God willing, I wouldn’t be here. And Tun Dr Mahathir wouldn’t have come out of retirement (to challenge Najib’s government),” she said.
“I would sleep soundly and you wouldn’t be sitting under tents listening to an old man at a ceramah,” she said.
Mahathir, 92, is PH’s candidate for prime minister if the coalition wins the 14th general election (GE14) on Wednesday.
Rafidah also said politics was not about flesh and blood, but about who was qualified to serve.
She said Najib and Hishammuddin seemed to be qualified at the initial stages of their political careers, but they did not follow the “good things” their fathers had done.
“They are just tarnishing the good names of their fathers,” she claimed.