Ariff Pours Cold Water on Sayed-Khaiyum’s Claims

Reserve Bank of Fiji Governor Ariff Ali has said that Fiji’s economic slowdown in 2023 was already forecast while Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum was still Minister for Economy, raising questions about his claims that the Coalition Government had lost the country’s economic momentum.

Responding to questions from Duavata News, Ali confirmed that the Macroeconomic Committee had anticipated slower economic growth in 2023 compared with 2022, well before the Coalition Government took office.

This comes after Sayed-Khaiyum appeared on a TikTok show and claimed that the Coalition Government had lost the economic momentum created by the FijiFirst Government following COVID-19.

However, an RBF economic update issued in October 2022 had already projected that Fiji’s rapid post-COVID recovery would slow in subsequent years.

Fiji’s economy had contracted by approximately 22.1 percent during the pandemic, meaning the exceptionally high growth that followed was partly a rebound from a severely reduced economic base.

In other words, the slowdown was really a normalization and already anticipated before the change in government, rather than being an unexpected development under the Coalition.

“The deceleration in the growth rate for 2023 was driven largely by a lower growth in tourism compared with 2022,” Ali told Duavata News.

The Governor also confirmed that economic growth in 2024 was consistent with forecasts and remained above Fiji’s historical average.

The Governor’s statement raises questions about Sayed-Khaiyum’s decision to attribute the initial loss of economic momentum to the Coalition Government when the slowdown had already been forecast under his own administration.

Sayed-Khaiyum has also pointed to Tropical Cyclone Winston and the COVID-19 pandemic when discussing the economic challenges faced by his government. Fiji has since faced further external pressures, including the global fuel crisis, which has affected businesses, household costs and economic activity.

Following the Governor’s response, Duavata News wrote directly to Sayed-Khaiyum on 26 October, asking him to identify the economic evidence supporting his claims and explain why he attributed the slowdown to the Coalition Government despite the earlier forecasts.

No response from Sayed-Khaiyum was included in the correspondence available at the time of writing.