Financial Times

The marketisation of national economies is rapidly empowering markets to deliver increasingly more attractive, delightful and desirable products. This is an impressive fact that the world is fortunate to witness.

However, Sri Lanka looks increasingly like an exception to this fact of life. The goods and services which we generate, for the most part, seem mediocre at best. Indeed, it is difficult to conjure up an image of a Sri Lankan product that any of us could rave about, even in those moments when we are least small-minded.

To be sure, there are exceptions to almost any rule. But what has made our industry so backward that nearly 30 years after the seeds of marketization were first sown, we remain without a single local product that is deemed highly desirable by consumers across the island?

Go to any supermarket, is there anything that is manufactured locally which one would be keen or enthusiastic to buy? Necessity might force us to walk out of a supermarket with a trunk full of goods. But are we taking a trunk full of goodies home?

Or take a commonplace example like sausages. It was not too long ago that in this country sausages actually tasted good, and by all accounts were hygienically safe to eat.

However, there has been a commoditisation of sausages; and it is a good thing; notwithstanding the question of their wholesomeness. Yet sausages no longer feel like real meat and there is no taste to speak of. Nor could we mention publicly salmonella bacterium in the context of sausages without incurring the wrath of our “blue chips”! Or again, think of hospitals; only be warned that the thinking of it might make you feel fear, revulsion and nausea.

One could enlarge, as much as the next man, the list of products in both goods and services industries whose finish is mediocre. However, to avoid growing weary in the enumeration of them, it would be well to sum them up in the form of a question:

Does it not seem as if businesses are growing at the expense of the finished product’s safety, vitality and desirability, showing little more than scant regard for the character at once of technologies, skills, designs, inputs and training required to make a good product?

All businesses, needless to say, live under the necessity and compulsion to achieve economies of both scale and scope continuously. Sometimes this compulsion is inextricably linked to the drive for market dominance.

However, there is no compulsion to remain engaged in any industry, let alone seek market dominance. Besides, why would you want to remain engaged if neither necessity nor reason propels you to make a good product – unless of course you are either contentedly happy with mediocrity or cynical?

The politico-economic climate is often blamed for allowing the quality issues to fall by the wayside, when businesses plan for growth. But here even big businesses with the power to marshal the nation’s wealth appear to take a rough and ready approach to growth.

The prevalence of industrial mediocrity is no doubt broadened by poverty. But as the world is making increasingly plain, poverty itself is inextricably linked to the society’s institutionalised habits, to its customary ways of doing things. As the crude pragmatism that turned Colombo municipality into a fiasco has reminded us – it is a strong national tendency to be practical to the point of cynicism.

The businesses that grow and dominate markets without investing in appropriate technologies and skills are compelled to lower the character of safety, desirability and whatnot of their goods and services, in order to achieve savings in cost proportionate to the increased volumes.

This so obvious that one wonders why big business persists in being timid when investing. Why bother to grow, if the risk of doing it properly is a risk not worth taking? Why not simply find a more dignified route to wealth?

However, there are exceptions to this timidity. An example of such exceptionality, which comes readily to the mind, is that of the Lion brewery that approached its growth with appropriate technologies and skills, even though as a mass marketer it could have done with less.

Politics is not the sole architect of our industrial mediocrity. There is something far more foundational that renders both our industry and our politics, largely if not wholly, mediocre, uninspired and unheroic.

In this country, at the heart of big business is a crudely pragmatic moral compass – and it is keeping the economy at least partly from witnessing heroic growth.

It requires more than the mere love of gain to commit freely and wholly to the realisation of the imaginative possibilities that reside in an industry. However, the complete self-surrender to a vision of the better is not the shortest route to fame and riches.

There is a saying in the language of the Old Testament that strength without the courage to act righteously is brutality. Our big businesses - lacking in a vision of greatness to draw inspiration from, and living in mortal fear of failure like a social climber - are brutalising the market.