Shafie Apdal was my hero during his tenure as our Consumer Minister, He was positive, the world is a bed of roses, enjoy it, and now I find he is no more with that Ministry, but doing something with Unity, Culture, Arts and Heritage. Read his antics while he was my favourite Minister, but now, I object to him being placed in some obscure Ministry. His dynamic approach to consumerism is lost, but not to worry, the Malaysian unity, culture, arts, and heritage will definitely be improved by his presence. Please support him.
I read in Bernama,
Shafie also agreed with the proposal by Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim last night making it compulsory for all political leaders including ministers, their deputies, parliamentarians and state executive councillors to attend an integrity course or programme.
“If it is a course that leads to their having good cultural values, why not? Ministers too sometimes have to attend events that enable us to receive information and knowledge.
“So we do encourage our people to participate in that sort of thing to ensure that they have better knowledge,”
Now I am happy my favourite Minister will have integrity, knowledge, and most of all information. Please Apdal join up.
Really…I guess this guy never buy his own groceries…
We have a lot of clueless ministers here in Malaysia. But this particular one, who goes by the name Datuk Mohd Shafie Apdal, minister of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, gets a special mention today. You can read the Harian Metro article to get background first.
According to him, apparently basic necessities price such as bread, milk, sugar, coffee, etc. in Malaysia is:
- under control, (of course, except for the periodic increase due to demand from the manufacturers and wholesalers…)
- never goes up, (next year is the general election ok, so enforcement officers are everywhere to ensure “correct” prices are used. Just wait till March 2008)
- and is going down. (what a whole bull dung of lie).
Malaysian ministers have this habit of comparing similar price from other countries. They conveniently said highway toll is cheaper in Malaysia compared to Singapore, petrol is cheaper in Malaysia compared to Brunei, and so on.
Is it? How about doing proper purchasing power parity (PPP) to equalize purchasing power between these countries instead? For example, using the Big Mac Index, implied PPP in Malaysia is 1.71 while Singapore is 1.12 to the US dollar. And Malaysia per-capita income is USD 12,100 while Singapore is USD 28,100 in 2005. Assume monthly toll price is USD50 for both Malaysia and Singapore. Our across causeway neighbor only spend 2.1% of their income for toll, while we Malaysian spend 4.9% just to pay the toll. Not so cheap anymore, isn’t it?
Shafie Apdal said basic necessities price is reasonable — Bitubique
