AMA Muhith will become the first finance minister in the history of Bangladesh to place ten consecutive national budgets when he appears before parliament tomorrow.
The veteran politician will crunch the numbers of a mammoth Tk468,200 crore budget for the 2018-19 fiscal year, in the last budget session of the incumbent government before the upcoming parliamentary election.
Tomorrow’s proposal will take Muhith’s total national budget tally to 12, including the two he placed during the military regime of HM Ershad.
After tomorrow, he will share the overall top place with former BNP finance minister Saifur Rahman, who also placed 12 budget proposals before parliament.
Born in Sylhet in 1934, AMA Muhith joined the Pakistan Civil Service in 1956 and served in different positions in the government of East Pakistan, the central government of Pakistan, and then Bangladesh.
He served as the secretary of the Ministry of Planning in January 1972, and as the secretary of the External Resources Division under the Ministry of Finance and Planning in May 1977.
He went into early retirement in 1981 and served as a consultant on economic and development matters in the Ford Foundation and at IFAD, UN, UNDP, ADB and the World Bank.
The following March he re-entered mainstream national politics as the finance and planning minister for the Ershad government, holding the post until December 1983.
He joined the Awami League in 2001 and was appointed as a member of its Advisory Board in 2002.
After being elected as a member of parliament for Sylhet in January 2009, Muhith took the oath as finance minister and has been in position ever since, even holding his seat unopposed in the 10th parliamentary election in 2014.
Tomorrow’s budget is likely to be the last for the 84-year-old, however, having hinted in February at retiring around December 2018.
