Editorial

The increasing number of protests countrywide must surely be, as far as the Government is concerned, an unwanted and unwarranted headache on top of having to grapple with mounting issues at home and abroad.

Some of these protests are politically motivated, but some are spontaneous, motivated purely by self-interest involving their livelihoods; all part and parcel of the ‘noise and chaos’ of a democracy testing the patience of a Government on the edge and keeping it on its toes.

The strategy to counter these protests is getting to be somewhat ham-handed and clumsy. The recent requests to the Police chief to take to task those engaged in street demonstrations on the grounds that they are violating quarantine regulations under the COVID-19 pandemic, and the legality of acting on a mere request letter of a public servant is a bad precedence, and under serious scrutiny. In making such a request, the health officials may have even overstepped their own lawful regulations of October 2020 in the process. They were clearly under “orders from the top”. The Police is topping this request up with the Penal Code provisions on ‘unlawful assembly’ to quash these mini-uprisings.

Video footage of the manner in which the Police used strong-arm tactics to break up some demonstrations this week didn’t look good and ultimately did no favours to the Government. It even did more harm than good for the very quarantine laws in place because of the bodily contact between the coppers and the demonstrators, notwithstanding the fact that both were wearing masks. The latter seem wiser to the earlier Police strategy of arresting protestors for not wearing masks. When in some other parts of the country, long queues of people lining up for their vaccine jabs were breaking all the social distancing rules, this exercise of breaking up demonstrations on the grounds of quarantine laws was made to look farcical. Yesterday’s relaxation of rules to open cinemas and hold weddings add to the irony.

While the politically backed protestors received the third-degree treatment (the Government has just introduced new anti-torture laws), countrywide demonstrations in smaller numbers and less vocal, but positively more sincere, kept snowballing. Lots on the fertiliser ban were happening. With their elected representatives from the Government compromised, the message from these farmers in the different electorates was meant to resonate in high places in Colombo.

The President is on one-track to stop the import of chemical fertiliser; and the farmers — big and small — are howling. The hurrah boys talk of the cancer causing ingredients resulting from the use of chemical fertiliser but the weight of evidence from social, economic, plant and agricultural experts is heavily stacked towards the view that a sudden switch to organic fertiliser would have disastrous consequences. While tea, rice, vegetable and other farmers fear crop losses, some even predict prospects of famine at the extreme. Medical experts say the food pipe is not the main cause of cancer in the country, though it is one of them.

Even in military strategy, there is a time for tactical retreats. The overall objective is the end-game. Not the battles but the war. The President knows that best. In the meantime, the Government might lay some greater emphasis on bringing the Fertiliser Manufacturing Corporation plant that was sold for scrap not long ago, and other agro-industrial plants, even those that once manufactured mamoties and the like, back to the fore. It is all about achieving the Government’s otherwise holistic objective in a better planned and scientific way, while maintaining democratic freedoms and the right of protesting.

And, another probe on the national airline

The national airline, SriLankan has been brought down to terra firma from its otherwise dark and cloudy skies scrutinised as it were this week by a Parliamentary oversight committee. COPE – the Committee on Public Enterprises, which made a not-so-startling announcement in the process that the carrier is losing Rs. 84 million a day by its very existence.

This ought not to surprise anyone, certainly not the country’s Parliamentarians and financial supervisors. And these COPE deliberations are certainly not the first, almost surely not the last scrutiny into its finances. Not long ago, a prospective foreign partner who came to study its accounts ran off saying the airline badly needed a “haircut” – in economic parlance, massive restructuring.

Only two years ago to this month (July 2019), a Presidential Commission of Inquiry probed deep into the airline’s affairs. It submitted its findings — and its recommendations — to then President Maithripala Sirisena only to have the report kicked into the long grass because the findings were heavily critical of those VIPs with whom he was currying favour for his own personal political survival.

These very VIPs are now back in the saddle and apart from asking the airline’s board to provide a ‘business plan’ within a month (one would have thought the Chairman would have had one to submit straightaway), will the committee act on the PCoI findings and recommendations?

The airline and its one-time subsidiary, Mihin Lanka, had ‘sacred cow’ status and were run with pathetically symptomatic lack of financial discipline and managerial skills by successive Governments. Most directorates were packed with party stooges and relatives, most with no clue of how the airline industry is run.

The way the VIPs of the time ended the airline’s partnership with one of the world’s topmost airlines, Emirates, over an incident involving the free booting entourage of the then President was a classic instance of how a national airline should not be managed. The PCoI displaying a sense of utter despondency said in its report that only “karmic consequences” will flow to the culprits.

The sitting Chairman of the airline tried to defend the high salaries paid to some of its senior management. The committee’s line of questioning seems to ask if these salaries were justified for an institution that is draining the public purse.

The airline continues to run on political whims and fancies. Take the recent announcement of starting flights to Moscow. Nobody needs to second guess where that directive comes from.

The binge spenders of yesteryear, including those who made their fortune on procurements are facing corruption charges in the United Kingdom, not Sri Lanka. To expect any positive outcome even from these new investigations is to expect pigs to fly.