Anwar does not know what he is talking about?

The following article was forwarded to me a few days back. I am conflicted as to what to do with it because it raises questions about our PMX that need to be answered. Does Anwar know what he is doing? The article is already doing the rounds on the NET and after much thought, I decided that I should share it in this blog of mine for one reason and one reason alone: you need to read it and ask yourself if it is true or false.

By: Nehru Sathiamoorthy

For the second time in a row, Anwar fumbled badly when dealing with a question related to the economy.

The first time, when he was asked about whether Malaysia could be a first-world nation by a female university student, he fumbled his way out of answering her question by flirting with her.

“If I was younger, I would have asked her for her phone number,” Anwar quipped to sidestep the student’s question.

This time, thankfully, he did not decide to flirt with Mariko Silver, a former deputy assistant secretary of international policy under the Obama administration, when she posed him an economics-related question.

Instead, he decided to blabber on aimlessly for 5-10 minutes and befuddled his interviewer to the extent that she gave up on pursuing her line of question altogether.

I am not going to bother analyzing what Anwar was mumbling about in the interview. All I will say is that when he was asked a question related to the economy, he decided to goreng an answer that spanned from Mandela to his time in prison to lavatories in schools, in a manner that reminded me how a clueless student would write about a topic that they have no understanding about in a SPM essay question. They would drone on and on as if they believed that just the sheer length of their answer would compensate for their lack of knowledge about the subject. If you are interested, you can watch the full interview here or the redacted version here.

By now, it really should be obvious to anyone with eyes, ears, and a reasonably functioning brain that Anwar doesn’t know much about the economy.

He might have been the finance minister back in the 90s and he might be a finance minister today, he might have won the title of Best Finance Minister in the World once upon a time ago and he might be able to read a prepared text about the economy in a confident fashion, but by now, I am quite confident that Anwar doesn't understand even the rudimentary things that you would expect somebody with the basic understanding of economy to know, like how raising the interest rate might affect GDP growth.

I am quite confident that Anwar doesn’t have even a basic understanding, because although we have known him for 30 years, none of us has ever seen him address an economic question in an impromptu and confidence-inspiring manner.

The test of mastery of an intellectual discipline like economics is your ability to handle any question posed to you on the subject on an impromptu basis. If you can’t do that, it doesn’t matter what your position is or how many titles you have won, the fact of the matter is, you have no idea what you are talking about.

Anwar, by the way, has a bad habit of not realizing the difference between addressing an issue and talking about an issue.

When you address an issue, you are supposed to put it to rest. When people urged him to address Zahid’s DNAA in parliament a couple of weeks ago, for example, we didn’t just want him to talk about it in any which way he pleases. We wanted him to address it in a manner that would put the doubt in our minds to rest and inspire confidence in our hearts.

Any fool can talk about anything in an aimless fashion, but you have to be a person of substance and consequence to address something in a meaningful manner. This is where we find Anwar lacking.

I am not even blaming Anwar for not having the basic mastery of the economy.

It is okay if he doesn’t understand the economy. Everybody cannot be expected to understand everything in this world. He is a politician after all, not an economist. The problem I have with Anwar is that I don’t think he is aware that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

An educated person is not only a person who knows a great deal about something, they are also a person who knows what they don’t know.

When you know what you don’t know, at least you will be intelligent enough to know that you have to find someone who knows about what you don’t know, in order to deal with it.

What is worrisome about Anwar is that he shows signs of presuming that he knows things that he doesn’t know about.

That is why he struts confidently into interviews and question-and-answer sessions to take on subjects that he clearly has no competency in.

That is why he confidently answers questions that he really shouldn’t be answering at all.

That is probably why he took on the role of the Finance Minister.

If Anwar could just honestly say, “Look, I don’t understand enough about the economy to be talking about it, but I got people who are smart enough to deal with it and break it down to me, so don’t worry, I am on top of it”, that is fine.

But if he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, this is dangerous, because when you have a person who assumes that they know about things that they don’t know, the more they are lost, the faster they will go.