Sea change in Sri Lankan mindset required

The brain-drain of our talented Sri Lankans in the various diasporas of the world makes me cry, because Mother Lanka has lost its best resource. The passing of the “Our Dynasty” in 2005 marks the end of an era and the coming of President Mahinda Rajapaksa is a seminal moment in our history. There is no use of crying over spilt milk and as said by Dale Carnegie ‘Develop success from failure’.

By Trevor Jayetileke

There is no easy way or magic formula to prosperity. 500 years of colonial rule has left our psyche/mindset cast in stone and averse to change. Our resilience to any of our problems has been buttressed on the dependence of others, but we pride ourselves as an independent nation.

Charity they say begins at home, but today the government/politicians take it for granted that our women who work overseas send home the bacon which they eat first.

The latest Central Bank statistics estimate the remittances to be above 2 billion USD this financial year which is the biggest revenue earner.

Considering the social cost, has our moral compass tilted to its lowest rectitude?

The Central Bank has Rs.200 billion in reserves mainly due to receipts/moratorium as a result of the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004, but most of the victims/dependents are still languishing in their predicament. The western province is the fortunate microcosm of our multi-cultural ethnic, lingual society, and questions our ‘Brotherhood of Man’ of the whole, which hopefully will be rectified by the “Maga Naguma” movement.

The free market economy since its inception in 1977 failed to show its “Human Face”.

The way forward is to use our resources (natural and human) which have been donated to others through ultra-nationalistic policies of our leaders. The nationalization of the port of Colombo in 1958, the closing of the military and naval bases in China Bay in 1959, and the nationalization of the petroleum industry in 1964 destroyed the hopes and future prosperity of our people. In a recent interview, Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore was quoted as having said that our leaders were visionless and the iconic Raffles stands as testimony to his view and so does the Petronas Towers of Malaysia.

The brain-drain of our talented Sri Lankans in the various diasporas of the world makes me cry, because Mother Lanka has lost its best resource. The passing of the “Our Dynasty” in 2005 marks the end of an era and the coming of President Mahinda Rajapaksa is a seminal moment in our history. There is no use in crying over spilt milk and as said by Dale Carnegie ‘Develop success from failure’. Rajapaksa seen in the print media at the Non-aligned summit in Havana stands tall with his South Asian counterparts some of whom have been to Oxford or trained at Sandhurst, but the Thurstan-educated and trained Rajapaksa is a king in the making of our region.

With only 10 months under his belt Rajapaksa has displayed his fine balance of ideology, pragmatism and shrewd politics by taking the economic bull by the horns like a ‘Bold Matador’. The loan agreements for the Colombo South Port Project which was gathering dust in the hard basket was signed. The political football - the Norochcholai power plant -has finally been goaled. The finishing touches to our oil exploration programme are been finalized to be kicked off shortly. All these are job/wealth creating infrastructure that have been on hold by our decision makers/politicians who have held the country and its people to ransom. As far as the future of Sri Lanka is concerned the best is still to come. It’s time to buy in the stockmarket when almost all shares are at historically low ‘bargain basement prices’.

Our ‘latent asset’ is our Tamil brotheren, as Martin Luther King has stated “We live together as brothers or die together as fools’, together we could have the last laugh.

(Jayetileke is an Australian-based consultant in energy, logistics and utilities who was a participant at the recent Commonwealth-Sri Lanka Investment Roundtable).