Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Can't Agree More With Kadir Jasin, Najib Not Beyond Stricture

Hantu Laut

I was once his ardent supporter but now filled with utter disgust with the kind of ineptitude, playing with religious fire and an economy that self-prophesying for imminent decline.

I have, on many instances, in my past postings wrote on the need to abolish subsidies and dismantle all monopolies and let prices find its own level. 

A government interference in a free market economy is a sure recipe for disaster, it's only a matter of time before the roof came down on us Malaysians. 

It makes one wonder why a cuppa in a Singapore hawker's stall is cheaper than a cuppa in a Malaysian hawker's stall when our neighbour has the highest per capita income in the world and higher standard of living and we still caught in the middle income trap and in all probability going down further south.

Najib must not forgets, the ball is in his court.

Najib is not beyond criticism for his inaction, only he can make the changes and take full blame for any undoing of his government.

I couldn't agree more with Kadir Jasin in his article reproduced below.


Najib is not above criticism, says former NST chief editor



Pro-government supporters should realise that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak is not above criticism for Putrajaya’s cost-cutting measures which had resulted in price hikes, says a former editor of an Umno-linked newspaper.
Veteran journalist Datuk A. Kadir Jasin (pic) wrote that Najib and his advisers were not above criticism when the public react to Putrajaya's way of managing the national economy.
"It was Najib and his advisers during the general election who promised the people that prices will not be raised. So, who is going back on their word?" he asked in a posting in his The Scribe blog yesterday.
He also questioned whether the prime minister was an absolute monarch who could not be criticised or questioned.
"Or is he a living saint who is free from any kind of slip-ups?” asked Kadir, who was the group editor-in-chief of the New Straits Times when Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad was the prime minister.
Since September, Putrajaya has introduced a series of cost-cutting measures to rein in a chronic budget deficit which includes a reduction of fuel subsidies, removal of subsidy for sugar, allowed an increase in power tariffs and confirmed the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST).
Putrajaya is also mulling a revision of toll rates while the 20% rebate offered to frequent users of tolled roads in the Klang Valley is being scrapped.
The increasing cost of goods and services had also triggered a protest on New Year's Eve by an undergraduate non-governmental organisation, Turun, which attracted more than 10,000 people.
In defending his strident criticism of Najib, the veteran journalist also rebuked his critics who had claimed that he only lambasted the prime minister on “economic management but did not offer advice and pointers”. Read more.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't like can migrate, lah.

Anonymous said...

Why should we migrate? We are the Son of the Soil and we will continue to support people who point out the glaring weaknesses of leaders such as Najib who only seems to know how to placate his ego-inflated wife.

Like you HL, I also used to support Najib but the mark of a true leader is how he behaves in a crisis and now we and the whole world know that Najib is a fairweather leader and not fit to lead a multicultural country like Malaysia. He doesn't lead but hide behind a silk screen and refuses to take unpopular stand for his political expediency.

If only he realises that this is surely going to be his last tenure as the PM, he would be more decisive and firm in reigning in rising extremism in the country, come what may. Sadly he remains impotent!

Purple Haze said...

Tun Dr M was a leader. While I do not agree with what he has done to this country, he is still a shrewd politician and while he was PM, he certainly got everyone on the same page.

He dealt with crisis quite competently, ensuring his actions garnered the results he wanted. Whether those results were for the good of the country will be up to historians and the rakyat to decide.

We are now having conflicts due to the ambiguities caused by Tun Dr M's actions and one of the main thrusts was the control of the judiciary by the executive.