If Anwar doesn't resign as the finance minister, he should at least hire a second finance minister.
It will be a waste of money of course, because then you will be paying two people to do the job of one, but hiring two people to do an important job is still better than paying one person that cannot do the job.
It should be beyond clear by now that Anwar can't do the job of a finance minister.
He might have served twice as a finance minister, he might have been celebrated as the Best Finance Minister in the World once upon a time ago, he might be able to read a prepared text about finance and economy in a confident manner, but anybody with a functioning eye, ear and brain can see it as clear as daylight that Anwar is absolutely clueless about the subject of finance or economy.
He is so clueless, that I am 101 percent sure that if you ask him something basic like how will the performance of the ringgit affect our GDP growth, instead of answering your question, he will probably just ask you for your phone number if you are pretty or tell you about Mandela, his time in prison and lavatories in schools.
In the 90s, when he was the finance minister, it was fine. The economy was doing well back then and having a clueless finance minister is not a problem when the economy is doing so well that it is basically running on its own.
Even the village idiot can captain a ship when the weather is fine.
When the seas get choppy and a storm is approaching, however, you need a captain who knows what he is doing, to have a decent chance to make it out of the storm alive.
Experts are already warning that the ringgit might breach the 5-ringgit to the dollar mark in the not-too-distant future. This comes at a time when for the first time in our history, thousands of citizens are queuing up for hours to buy rice.
To make it worse, Anwar is not only a clueless finance minister, he is also a part-time finance minister.
Not only can't he do the job, he is not even going to the office. The latest budget has all the hallmarks of a budget that was created by a team that was not supervised by anyone. It has an insipid and not well-put-together feel to it, which likely comes from it being worked by a team who thinks that the boss not only does not know what he is talking about, the boss is not even going to show up to work. Even the best employee will give a half-baked job when this is the case.
I think it is high time that someone tells Anwar: " Dude, enough already. We know you don't know what you are talking about. We are just humoring you because you are big-shot and we didn't want to embarrass you. But enough with the fun and games already. Things are getting serious. You need to stop fooling around and let somebody who knows what is going on take charge."
Don't hate me for telling you that your emperor is naked, dear friends. Like the kid in the fable, I am just telling you what you already know.
Nehru Sathiamoorthy was a columnist at FMT, a frequent contributor to the South China Morning Post, a mathematics teacher in the Klang Valley, and a seeker of the meaning of life. So far, there are three things that he holds to be unequivocally true. The first is that the purpose of life is to pursue happiness, the second is that you cannot be happy unless you carry your fair share of the world's weight and the third is that you can never underestimate your ability to take your own side.
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