Sunday Times 2
How to make our country great again
View(s):Donald Trump wants to ‘Make America Great Again’. British Conservative Brexiteers wanted Brexit to keep Great Britain as Great Britain.
Every nutty and potty politician around the world wants to make his country to be ‘Great’ — whatever it means. And the cry of the Sinhala politicians right through 73 years after Independence has been to take Lanka back to the Great and Glorious Days of Sinhala kings such as Dutugemunu and Parakrama Bahu the Great.
The scale of the greatness of a nation has varied down the course of history. In this era of the Almighty Dollar, the absolute scale of measurement of ‘greatness’ is the amount of dollars a nation has, the GNI –Gross National Income. According to this scale, the nations have been categorised into three broad bands: rich countries, middle-income countries and low-income countries. Sri Lanka’s GNI has been fluctuating rapidly from 2019 and the World Bank recently projected our GNI to drop drastically this year — by 9.2 per cent — described as the worst contraction ever. You should know who is responsible for this debacle.
In 2019 the World Bank upgraded Sri Lanka to an upper-middle-class country and to the status of a lower-middle-income country when the GNI dropped a year later.
On Wednesday, Cabinet Spokesman Bandula Gunawardena said Cabinet approval had been granted to re-classify Sri Lanka as a ‘low-income country’ considering the decline in its per capita income from 2020. This will provide access to concessional funding from certain institutions of the World Bank. The President’s Media Division, however, refuted the claim and said Sri Lanka will continue to be a middle-income country but will pursue ‘a reverse graduation policy ‘for a limited period of time’.
Our focus is not on the semantics and metaphysics of the World Bank and other international institutions of high finance such as the IMF– even though it is an existentialist issue for the nation. Our concern is the political impact of voluntarily downgrading the international status of Lanka. Have we not voluntarily kicked ourselves back to the status of the poorest of the poor nations on earth? We have officially rejoined the mendicant band of nations with the begging bowl in hand pleading for aid from the rich. Rather depressing, isn’t it that after not many Poya Full Moons ago our nattily dressed ex-Minister of State for Finance and ex-Central Bank Governor Nivard Cabraal declared that Sri Lanka could do without the GSP Plus concession?
Status or ‘Thathvaya’ in society is deeply embedded in the Sri Lankan conscience. Call a three-wheel driver, ‘Thamuse’ (‘you’ in simple Sinhala), you risk abuse and even assault. It should be ‘Thamunnanse’ (your honour) — ‘nanse’ being an honorific term attached to a teacher (Gurun-nanse) or monk (Swanmin-vahanse). Doctors are not simply addressed as doctors but ‘dostara mahattaya’ like engineers ‘engineneru mahattaya’.
Visit parliament or view debates on TV. More and more MPs are seen in flashy coats, blazers, and imported ties. Sartorial elegance — at great cost — among the representatives of humble origin is on the rise while debating standards and that of their behaviour….. well, you know all about it and needs no elaboration. Even on TV, the male ‘stars’ have shifted from open shirts to jackets, blazers and imported ties despite the 30 degree Centigrade heat and 80 percent humidity. The studios are air-conditioned, they say. But is the real reason being the status that a jacket and tie confers on the wearer rather than the comfortable open-neck shirt which the hoi polloi wear?
However, there is logic in the return to lower-income countries if more dollars will be available (all loans of course not gifts) because the country is scraping the bottom of the barrel for dollars. Middle-income status with no loans coming in would be like the ‘clean suit empty pocket’ — the Cabraal way. But is the surrender of status worth the amount of loans that would come our way? Has the access to loans through low-income countries been estimated? That perhaps is why the President’s Media Unit says Sri Lanka will remain a middle income country but pursue a reverse policy of graduation’ for a limited period.
The people will want to know what all this means. The basic strategy of reverting to a low-income-status country is paradoxical: Getting into the status of poverty to get rich or poverty alleviation through poverty. It is in line with the logic of our times.
Perhaps the logic of Confucius the Chinese sage is worth pondering: In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.
| Military clowns enact a judicial comedy against ageing heroine Aung San Suu Kyi, the 77-year-old woman fighting for the democratic rights of her 55 million people will go down in history as one of the greatest fighters for democracy in our era. Last Wednesday, a court set up by the military junta of the country in the main prison premises of Naypyitaw, the capital of Myanmar, imposed two to three-year prison sentences on her to be served concurrently. Adding up previous convictions since her arrest on February 1 last year, she has now been sentenced to a total of 26 years. And more charges are to come. Suu Kyi will be 103 years old when she completes the 26 years of prison sentences! This is the continuing judicial comedy of the military junta that seized power on February 1 last year ousting the undisputed leader who won a landslide victory at the last general election. She has been the face of the Opposition for three decades. A previous military government put her under house arrest in 1989 which continued on and off for 15 of the next 22 years. The National League for Democracy (NLD) came to power after winning the 2015 general election ushering in a truly civilian government since the 1962 military coup of General Ne Win. Only Suu Kyi had been able to break the continuous military rule through free elections. The strategy of the junta is not clear. They had spoken of holding elections next year. The offences she has been found guilty of could be used to disqualify her as a candidate for any forthcoming election, observers have said. The trial that ended on Wednesday accused Suu Kyi of receiving $ 550,000 as a bribe from a business tycoon, Maung Welk, earlier convicted for drug trafficking offences and sentenced to prison for 15 years but released under the government of General Thein Sein. After release from prison, this business tycoon had business relations with former generals. Under Suu Kyi’s government, he had won major development project. In a confession he has declared that he had donated $ 100,000 to Suu Kyi’s charitable organisations and $ 450,000 for purposes he had not specified, reports said. Suu Kyi had denied all the charges. Former President Win Myint has been charged with five other corruption charges. Western nations, the United Nations and ASEAN countries have to some extent applied sanctions on the Myanmar junta which have not been effective. Myanmar has been living in isolation since 1962 when Gen Ne Win staged a military coup and took over the country. Since then successive military juntas have been ruling the country save for brief periods when Suu Kyi ran civilian governments but with the military as partners.  a protester holds a portrait of detained Myanmar civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi The country is overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhist. Sri Lanka in South Asia is also a Theravada Buddhist country sharing strong historical and religious ties with Myanmar. The constitution of Sri Lanka accords the foremost place to Buddhism and commits the government to protect it. Protection of Buddhism elsewhere is not in Lanka’s foreign policy even though it is believed that foreign policy is a projection of domestic policy. Lanka, contrary to the policy decisions of many countries in Myanmar, had a representative J.M. Janaka Bandara presenting credentials to Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the man who led the bloody coup to dethrone a democratically elected government. Sri Lanka is also reported to have bought a large quantity of rice from Myanmar which would have helped the military regime with its foreign currency problems. A lone old woman in solitary confinement still unites and leads her people to fight for their democratic rights as terms of imprisonment are piled on her in a judicial comedy enacted by a gang of military clowns. | |