Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced the sack the head of the state statistics agency, after releasing data showing last year’s inflation rate hit a 19-year high of 36.1 percent.
Africa Today News, New York reports that Sait Erdal Dincer was just the latest in a series of economic dismissals by Erdogan, who has sacked three central bank governors since July 2019.
Erdogan has railed against high-interest rates, which he believes cause inflation — the exact opposite of conventional economic thinking.
The 2021 inflation figure released by Dincer angered both the pro-government and opposition camps.
The opposition said it was underreported, claiming that the real cost of living increases was at least twice as high.
Erdogan meanwhile reportedly criticised the statistics agency in private for publishing data that he felt overstated the scale of Turkey’s economic malaise.
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Dincer seemed to sense his impending fate.
‘I sit in this office now, tomorrow it will be someone else,’ he said in an interview with the business newspaper Dunya earlier this month.
‘Never mind who is the chairman. Can you imagine that hundreds of my colleagues could stomach or remain quiet about publishing an inflation rate very different from what they had established?’
‘I have a responsibility to 84 million people,’ he added.
Erdogan did not explain his decision to appoint Erhan Cetinkaya, who had served as vice-chair of Turkey’s banking regulator, as the new state statistics chief.
‘This will just increase concern about the reliability of the data, in addition to major concerns about economic policy settings,’ Timothy Ash of BlueBay Asset Management said in a note to clients.
The agency is due to publish January’s inflation data on February 3.
In December, opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu was refused an appointment with Dincer and turned away by security guards when he sought to enter the statistic agency’s headquarters in Ankara.
He had accused the agency of ‘fabricating’ the numbers to hide the true impact of the government’s policies and slammed it as ‘no longer a state institution but a palace institution’, in reference to Erdogan’s presidential complex.
Also on Saturday, Erdogan appointed a new justice minister, naming former deputy prime minister Bekir Bozdag to replace veteran ruling party member Abdulhamit Gul.
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK