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That long running comic opera has reached its denouement. Or so, one hopes! For hope is all that is left for a public that lies battered by a pandemic on one side and problems in governance on the other that have brought a people to their knees with no one left to raise their hopes but the deities.

Not that appeals to the powerful have not been tried before. At one time magic pots were sent floating down rivers to save us from Covid. Then magic portions were turned out and swallowed by ministers and others like duty free aperitifs as TV cameras filmed it all and a public in awe queued outside for their share of the decoction.

Still Covid spread undaunted and unabated until the decoction was sold down the Mahaweli like a hoodwinked public. A Task Force was deployed to combat the evil force, armed with American Pfizer and Chinese Sinopharm as a sign of our neutral foreign policy. And so the drama of several acts and many scenes rolled on as some people cheered and others jeered.

The queues outside supermarkets and the state-run Sathosa where the public gathered to buy their two pods of garlic that suddenly disappeared and as suddenly reappeared (at higher prices of course!), lengthened and curfews were clamped, extended, shortened and lifted all together so people could shop. Fine, but where was the money to buy even if the milk food, sugar, dhal, rice and everything was there to purchase? It is the mafia that done it, they said!

So the comedy dragged on with various ministers, state ministers and other know- alls sticking their oars into it all with no end in sight as the farmers claimed their right to appear on stage and play their part.

In the early days of Sinhala cinema comic relief (which those who crowded the cinema’s cheapest seats called “comit”) was provided by a character duo named Manappuwa and Josie Baba. If one recalls those nascent days it is because of the recent antics of the country’s government whose decision-making on chemical fertiliser has varied from yes, no and maybe to never, maybe and ultimately yes you can have your chemical fertiliser if you cannot feed on the Chinese manure.

Whether this application of the reverse gear after adamantly refusing to go back on the ban that deprived local farmers and tea, rubber and coconut plantation owners of the chemical fertilisers and weedicides they had been accustomed to as far as my memory goes, was prompted by the decision of the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to withdraw some new laws in the face of mounting farmer protests, one could only speculate.

But it sure seems to have had some influence on decision-making at home as the deleterious effects of the India’s new laws on the political fortunes of the Modi administration facing elections at different levels became all too obvious even to the dumbest of policy advisers among the Viyath Magaeans (if one might coin a name) that inhabit the world of political make-believe.

Local farmers and other affected parties would surely remember the day in April when the coming ban was announced. It was not April 1st though that might have been a more appropriate date for this foolish advice to have been passed on to the president who had spoken of a time gap of a decade to turn the country’s agriculture ‘green’ through the use of organic manure.

Such a time line made sense for any person with a basic knowledge of agricultural practices would know that one cannot abandon time-honoured methods overnight and still produce healthy harvests. This, one  learnt, in the early days in a school situated in over 50 acres of which some were cultivated farm lands and when agriculture was introduced as a subject for the SSC.

So the intriguing question is who persuaded President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to jump the gun, as it were, and take this hasty and ill-conceived decision. If Lenin found that taking one step forward and two steps back could prove tactically exigent, the president was eventually made to take several embarrassing steps back.

Several names have been mentioned in the print and electronic media and the song and verse that have found the long drawn out fertilider drama a rich source for satire and public titillation. Some mentioned the name of a Buddhist monk and a medicine man whose speciality is paedriatrics not agriculture while still others name an academic from that gathering of intellectuals called Viyath Maga who is believed to know more about drugs (meaning medicines) rather than agriculture.

Wherever such advice came from and whoever it was that encouraged an immediate stop to the use of chemical fertiliser had misled the decision makers when almost the entirely of the agri-scientific community had advised against such foolishness.

Meanwhile, Agriculture Minister Mahindananda Aluthgamage who seems to see some sort of mafia behind every bush and every protest, claimed the ‘fertiliser Mafia’ was the cause of much of the trouble. But soon after Basil Rajapaksa became finance minister in July, he changed course which saw media headlining the change as “Basil lifts ban on import of chemical fertiliser” throwing a new spanner into the works as it were.

Meanwhile, the president claimed he was holding steadfastly to his original goal of a “green agriculture” which should have warmed the cockles of the green UNP except there was only a solitary green in parliament and that rather faded too.

To add to the fiasco, a Chinese company that had supplied samples of an organic fertiliser Sri Lanka was to buy had it rejected by the local experts saying it was contaminated bacteria and was not “sterile”.

That aroused Chinese ire with the Chinese embassy here also intervening in the fray causing a diplomatic row. And that too with our all “weather friend” who appeared to spot some winds of change.

That led one writer to ask “Does the government know whether it is coming or going?” That was silly. If it knew that would it be where it is now?

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London)