Who’s the One who raises prices please stand up!

Who’s the One who raises prices please stand up!

Now, senior government leaders and ministers, mind you, are up and about pointing their fingers and extolling businessmen and traders. Traders are being warned, coaxed and appealed not to “raise” prices. They are being asked to be reasonable and not to take the “opportunity” at the latest and most alarming oil price hike ever. Consumers are urged to be "smart", to shun such traders, to seek fair prices. As if consumers have a choice, they have to buy fuel wherever they are! Imagine even FOMCA came up with such gibberish!

But it wasn’t the traders who drew the first hike, it was the government. Now anyone knows fuel is a basic commodity and anyone with a two cents worth of economic sense knows the effect of pulling the oil subsidy away.

What is does is to transfer a burden which a government ought to provide for the benefit of all its people. Has the cash situation or the government coffers been dried up to load this back to the people?

They knew prices will rise, they knew the effects especially on the common Malaysian but they still went ahead. Now it is just reduced to a shameful and pathetic game of cheap propaganda and media spin. So the easiest spin is to blame everything on the traders. Now, even if prices were to rise there is no mechanism to stop it. Raising prices of uncontrolled items is not illegal. Neither is raising oil prices, toll rates nor TNB tariffs for that matter. Who is going to shout and warn TNB or PLUS for it is not going to happen that way.

Now the wife was at a coffee shop just the other day. Two pak ciks were arguing over the price rises watched attentively by others in the shop. One argued that it should not have been so much especially when 30 sen a litre shoots up the price of a cylinder of LPG. The other told him to be grateful for it was still lower than Singapore or Thailand. Now suddenly, they asked the wife, correctly guessing that she is a schoolteacher, “Why don’t we ask the madam schoolteacher here to give her views as someone in the middle?”

So, she told them casually, that we are not Singapore nor are we Thailand. We should not let our peopl! e, our poor, our rural folks suffer price increases and use our neighbours as excuses and twisted justification. She stopped at that.

She told me she would have said more about what is really happening, what has happened to the wealth, what about the revenues of Petronas, why should common folk suffer out of financial inadequacies of the state. Seems people are not happy with the mess they are faced with!

Abu Omar