Columns

There is more than a trace of Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the lofty disdain with which the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe coalition leadership lectures to Sri Lankans on its inherited economic woes. One tale succeeds another, all equally stupendous and some patently deserving of ridicule.

Achieving monumental confusion
First we were told that recovering the Rajapaksa hidden loot would save the country from economic ruin. Instead months of procrastination followed with lapses in basic legal processes. One notable example last year was unsuccessfully attempting to move a foreign court to freeze the off-shore bank account of a Rajapaksa scion without first initiating a domestic legal inquiry into charges of money laundering.

Then the Budget was amended multiple times by a Government anxious to placate its various supportive lobbies, resulting in further economic strains. Next we were told of an investor who would proverbially appear like the savior-Prince and rescue the country from impending financial doom. Compounding this nonsense, the Government announced more than a year after the change of regime that the Rajapaksa debts were far higher than what was previously believed. True to form, the knee-jerk reaction was to declare a typically lazy quick-fix of higher taxation with minimum clarifications, leading to even more economic uncertainty and investor trepidation.

Is the ‘yahapalanaya’ (good governance) regime achieving all this monumental confusion solely by itself? If so, this is no mean feat in the most oxymoronic sense. Sri Lanka’s economic woes originated due to the monstrous financial profligacy of the Rajapaksas. That much is clear. But has not poor fiscal management since last year worsened this situation? The Central Bank bond scandal implicating this Government’s choice of Central Bank Governor still remains unresolved moreover.

Devilishly ill-timed move
Overall the lack of foresight and wisdom in government decision-making is truly startling, whether it concerns economic policy, agriculture policy or reconciliation and constitutional reforms. For instance, inflicting higher taxation on the people was announced just prior to the Parliament lavishly approving increased allowances for its (un)worthy members. At the very least, this was a devilishly ill-timed move.

The increases were occasioned by potential additional sittings on new fangled oversight committees and as part of a proposed Constitutional Assembly. ‘Yahapalanaya’ ideologues masquerading under trade union (and sundry other) hats are quick to justify this. But as the civic-minded ‘DecentLanka 2015′ observed in response, these are public duties which should not incur additional financial remuneration.

Meanwhile the Sirisena Presidency appears to have replaced its ‘people’s mandate’ to keep a watchful check on government with a ‘pirivena mandate.’ The President engages in almost daily perorations on good living even as he extravagantly declares a potential ban on a growing list of items, from cigarettes to alcohol. Certainly excessive drinking and smoking are irrepressibly bad habits. Yet this puritanical compulsion to act as the moral arbiter of the ‘common good’ is deplorable. We saw this earlier in Presidential outbursts threatening corporal punishment on organizers of the Enrique Iglesias concert.

There are other incongruities. The Ministry of Agriculture justifies an obscenely high rental for its premises and cuts fertilizer subsidies while engaging in a frantically publicized drive towards a toxin-free agriculture policy. The overall objective of this policy may be salutary. But the manner in which it is sought to be done lacks commonsense, to put it mildly.

Inability to deal with its own saboteurs
Above all, the high point of government idiocy was demonstrated over the electricity breakdown as some ruling politicians shouted sabotage. Reasons for the two transformer blasts in Biyagama and Kotugoda which led to the worse power outage in decades may be a tad more pedestrian, given that engineers had been hopelessly warning of shortcomings in Sri Lanka’s electricity system a while ago. Regardless, the President called out the army to protect sub-stations of the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB). So were saboteurs expected to come with weapons to attack? The second explosion of the Kotugoda transformer took place despite army protections. So what does that tell us exactly?

The very meaning of sabotage is stealth. But this political leadership appears to be extraordinarily incapable of dealing with saboteurs artfully disguised as ‘yahapalanaya’ advocates in its own ranks. Or was this all a choreographed padding over of the ineptitude of its Ministers? Whatever it may be, the Prime Minister’s way of dealing with challenges is apparently to threaten. Initially the media and the doctors were alleged to be siding with the Rajapaksas. Now the engineers will probably be accused of trying to torpedo the Government. This is classic McCarthyism exemplifying the leveling of allegations of subversion without actual proof. Where will this all end?

And it seems as if Sri Lanka cannot now do anything without ‘foreign assistance,’ from constitutional reforms to reconciliation, with even further expenditure of public funds. Proceeding apiece from comedy to farce, we were informed on Saturday by the easily flustered Deputy Minister of Power and Energy that investigating the two ‘suspicious’ transformer blasts will be done with ‘foreign assistance.’ Why do we not hand over the leadership of this country, lock, stock and smoking barrel to ‘foreign’ expertise? Incoherence is made worse by pompous ignorance on the part of these worthies.

Avoiding being backed into a corner
Indeed, this seems to be a run-away Government driven by a small coterie of power brokers jostling in Colombo whose collective arrogance is only exceeded by a profound inability to reach out to the people. The alarmingly surging crowds at the Mahinda Rajapaksa led Hyde Park meeting this week listening enthralled to the same old chauvinistic and racist rhetoric was a direct result of the criminal irresponsibility of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe coalition in frittering away its good governance mandate. It is simply not enough to boast, as the President did this week, that such opposition meetings are only possible due to ‘yahapalanaya’ liberality.

The Prime Minister has said that before long, his detractors will also join them. But absent general course correction in political leadership, that is a wish only for the wittingly credulous. Increased rumblings of public anger hold out ominous warnings. If this Government finds itself backed into a corner sooner or later, this will be emphatically due to its own fault, apart from Rajapaksa saboteurs.

Time will prove this. But by then, it may be too late for this country and its people.