YOURSAY | ‘Would those figures have gone unchallenged if not for Loke’s sharp eyes?’

PMO concedes to bungling figures in televised address

Malaysia Bharu: The pressing question is whether the mistake involving government cash handouts in response to the Covid-19 pandemic was a genuine accounting error, an error due to sheer incompetence, a typo, or was it an error at all?

Would those inflated figures the actual book figures remain unchallenged if not for former transport minister Anthony Loke's sharp eyes?

The matter does not end with the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) merely admitting to the bungle. This is not about missing the forest for the trees.

What is at stake is the almost RM250 billion that was announced as the cost of rescue packages for the Covid-19 onslaught and its fallout. These huge provisions declared by Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin were neither sanctioned by Parliament nor accounted for in a transparent manner.

So were the erroneous inflated figures in Muhyiddin’s address to the nation, and its retraction by the PMO, a reflection of the elephant in the Perikatan Nasional (PN) room?

Boeyks: They admitted their “mistake” which was spotted by a former minister who was replaced by the backdoor coup. For us taxpaying rakyat, we would not be able to detect such fraudulent figures.

How can such mistakes occur? Were they genuine mistakes or plain incompetency? Now how about the other figures quoted?

The recent uproar with regard to Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) bills is another example. TNB did not properly explain the bill calculations.

“Mistakes” also happened in my water bill which I managed to get corrected. Thankfully, it did not have the impact as my TNB bill did because the sum involved was much less.

Anonymous 79: If the government could make mistakes on these small things, how are they going to manage our country properly? There are now many people out of work and a lot of businesses are closed.

Where are the smart people in the government? There is no use in giving the public nice numbers but in the end, the situation on the ground is different.

Cogito Ergo Sum: Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz, as finance minister you are responsible for all figures that the PMO and all ministries declare in the national budget. It speaks volumes of your competence in managing the nation’s depleted coffers.

You were caught because there was a sharp former transport minister who knew the numbers. I am surprised no one counter-checked the numbers before the prime minister made a fool of himself on national TV.

Anonymous 5237890145285379: I salute the PMO for admitting the error. This is probably one of the rare occasions that I can remember the government admitting they were wrong.

There is nothing wrong with the admission - at least, the PMO is humble enough. We should give credit to them.

P Pillai: It is brave and admirable of Zafrul to have admitted to the errors, but disappointing that the PM made the announcements without checking. Hopefully, heads will roll.

Anonymous_15897060865429524: This is why I don’t buy the Covid-19 figures completely from our authorities and I take them with a bucket of salt.

I don’t trust the ability of these people to get their numbers and data analytics right. They don’t have the minds for it.

Gen2: When you are scared of meritocracy, you get poor quality officials giving wrong information to leaders who themselves are of questionable quality.

More so, how are they not to retract when Loke had pointed out in his revelation that the PM's figures were more than 10 times the actual amount?

Doc: I can understand if the numbers were off by a few hundred to a few thousand. It could be an error.

But if all these figures are off by hundreds of thousands to millions, that sounds like either the government is trying to hoodwink the rakyat or the PM has no idea of what is happening on the ground.

PurpleLion5218: A point to note is that under Pakatan Harapan, we had several ministries that were well managed and responsible.

Yes, some have fallen short, but this was due to inherited mismanagement by the previous BN government. The credibility and honesty displayed by several Harapan ministers were exemplary.

Now under PN, we have had several ministries underperforming. A responsible and efficient government would have owned up by itself and apologised. But it was not to be.

PN or BN, please be wary that we have a set of opposition members who have studied the past government’s mistakes and now know the dubious and sinister approaches taken by several ministries, especially relating to allocations and expenditure of public funds.

You will be exposed in Parliament to show your ineptness and lackadaisical attitude in everything and anything. Previously, it was much easier under Najib Abdul Razak.

But keep doing this now and you would have the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) knocking on your door. Worse still, you would not be accepted by the rakyat in the next general election.

GalaxyM: Good and competent politicians like Loke from Harapan were replaced by many half-baked and self-serving ones in PN.

This is continuing the rot and decadence inherited from the bad old Umno-BN days. What a terrible disappointment to Malaysians of all races.

Phanga 1742: It seems like the supposedly top-notch banker turned finance minister gave Muhyiddin the wrong figures. How are you going to run a country well if you make mistakes like this?

Or was it actually an attempt to bluff the rakyat? Luckily, the opposition pointed out the discrepancies.

Iphonezours: This is unacceptable. To whichever ministry was involved in providing the wrong information, weren’t all the figures checked and verified before passing them to the PM for his public address? 

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