Outgoing Finance Minister AMA Muhith feels that he is "lucky" about his decision to step down from the post of minister.
“In one way it is good. I was not driven away, but could choose to retire,” he said with a smile on his last working day in the finance ministry at the Secretariat on Monday.
The senior Awami League leader had helmed the finance ministry for two consecutive terms Sheikh Hasina's government, but chose to retire instead of contesting the 11th nation parliamentary election.
However, a day after the election, Muhith said that he had no objection to continuing to work for some more days if Sheikh Hasina called upon him to do so.
But Hasina dropped several senior leaders of the party from her new cabinet on Monday, according to bdnews24.com.
In addition to Muhith, several senior leaders including Tofail Ahmed, Amir Hossain Amu and Matia Chowdhury were relieved of the post of minister.
"It is my great pleasure that I did not need to quit, but chose to depart myself. That's why I am very grateful to the prime minister," said Muhith.
Muhith will be 85 years old on Jan 25.
"At this age, Allah has kept me in such a condition that I ran a complex ministry like ministry of finance in a complex country. Now I need to retire. "
Claiming credit for removing Bangladesh’s stigma as a ‘beggar’s country’ in the last 10 years, he said, "No country in the world will dare to call Bangladesh a beggar’s country any more. I feel happy because of my involvement in the transition period of the country. We are in power for the third time in a row and will stay for the next five years. In the next five years, the country will advance, and we will be invincible. "
Muhith tied the record of 12 national budgets as the finance minister of Bangladesh. The late M Saifur Rahman had overseen same number of budgets.
Muhith, a former bureaucrat, said he wished to spend his retirement reading books.
"There is no shortage of tasks in Bangladesh. I have 50,000 books in my collection. All have not been read yet. I will read them now. And I’ve written 34 books. Of these, 12 are English. And I’ll write more."
While forming the government in 2009, Hasina entrusted the finance ministry to Muhith, who had presented two budgets under the rule of HM Ershad.
Before presenting the 5th budget under the Awami League-Grand Alliance government in June 2013, he had said he did not want to be a minister even if he participated in the 10th parliamentary election.
But following the 10th parliamentary election, the Awami League came to power and Muhith took charge of the finance ministry once more. In June 2016, he declared his 10th budget for the Awami League government.
Sheikh Hasina chose AHM Mustafa Kamal as a finance minister for her new cabinet bringing a decade of Muhith’s tenure to a clase. Kamal has been in charge of the planning ministry for the past five years.
