In a statement, Patriot president Brig-Gen (Rtd) Mohamed Arshad Raji said Anifah had “conveniently” chosen to rebut “a mere few points” while ignoring the rest of Ignatius’ evaluation.
He said Anifah had also brushed aside several relevant points in Ignatius’ blog post, going as far as to dismiss the analysis as a “rant”.
Anifah had been responding to Ignatius’ post titled “GE14: Last Chance for Change”. The minister had said it was rife with “wild, unsubstantiated accusations, based on anger but devoid of facts, opinions masquerading as facts”.
Citing Ignatius’ claim that Putrajaya had been extraordinarily incompetent and fiscally reckless, Anifah argued that Malaysia’s fiscal deficit had been reduced by more than half from 6.7% to 3% between 2009 to 2017, after Prime Minister Najib Razak took office.
However, Arshad said Anifah had overlooked the fact that fiscal deficit reached such high levels to begin with due to bad management.
“This is associated with unscrupulous wastage, leakage, and abuse. Deficit financing, which is the gap between revenue and spending, has to be met by borrowing. By 2015, our government debt had climbed to RM627.5 billion from less than RM300 billion in 2008. In April 2015, our government imposed the GST, which to date has contributed an annual RM45 billion to the coffers.
“In March 2018, government debt was around RM632.3 billion, or 52% of the GDP. This figure does not include the contingent liabilities guaranteed by the government, such as loans taken by GLCs, which is estimated to be another 25% of the GDP. At this rate of climbing debt, we are close to the forced selling of our national assets.”
He said other points of Anifah’s rebuttal were “overly shallow and mere ranting like a politician and not a minister, and unworthy for us to comment on”.
“As a minister, how Anifah responds determines the sincerity of the government he represents, and how much trust the people can have in our politicians and those in power.
“We advise him to walk the streets frequented by the urban poor as well as the heart of the rural inhabitants. Talk to them about cost of living, food prices, travelling costs, the GST, and ask them how much savings they have.”
Arshad said Patriot was non-partisan and that if its statements in the last few months appeared biased against the government, it was because the arguments were compelling and those targeted were always in denial mode.
He added that Patriot always strove to be objective and had given due credit to the government where necessary.
“We hope Anifah takes our ‘biased commentary’ as constructive criticism which he has professed to welcome,” he added.
Anifah questions ex-envoy’s credibility as ‘political analyst’