The President has made political decision to put forward some kind of compromise.
If you look at it from an economic lens, this is not a good decision because we need the money. If we cannot find the money from VAT we have to find money from somewhere else and I don't know where that else is at this moment.
VAT it is a democratic tax, you can't avoid it. The rich and the poor man has got to pay it.
The President said as much in his speech, the problem is spending by government. We are now at the wall of what can be raised from the citizens.
To take care of your spending, you either to cut it or raise the revenue, at the moment the gap is becoming wider and wider and it is not helpful.
If you borrow money you have to pay back and you must pay interest on that money, you cannot avoid it.
We borrowed a lot of money and invested in the railways which today is not returning any investment and costing us money everyday.
I think we are in a difficult moment, we need to make difficult decisions and we cannot avoid them.
I feel that MPs have been playing populist politics, they have been saying things that make people feel better but really having negative effect on the economy.
All I can say to MPs is that we are living beyond our means, you are a good example of people living beyond their means as anybody in our economy and we simply got to cut costs.
We can keep delaying cutting costs or somebody will come and cut them for us. That is what will happen at the end when we go down this road, the wall is in front of us we got to slow the car down and turn it round.
IMF did not push us to this edge, the narrative is typical nonsense. We are the ones who went to the Eurobond market and borrowed billions of dollars and spent it on the railways and the issue now is we cannot pay our bills.
IMF is just stating the obvious that we are overspending by a wide margin and therefore we got to raise our revenue. The decisions IMF are proposing will have to be done.
The longer we delay to do what IMF is asking the worse the situation becomes.