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• People power throng the city to cry enough is enough as living in Lanka turns into a daily act of raw courage

With nothing left to offer or lose but their blood, toil, tears and sweat, people took to the streets on Tuesday to converge at the Galle Face Green to demonstrate their outrage at the terrible curse that had swept the land and made living in Lanka an act of raw courage.

The massive throng came from all walks of life, from all social ranks: the rich and poor, the grassroot and urban, the high and low; they came in their thousands, in one swirling mass of unrest, to protest against the traumas that levelled all equally in the tears drenching the land.

They came with grief: they bore to the Green their anguish, bottled up in their hearts, to lay bare their naked existence, stripped of the basic wants; and, within earshot of the fortified seat of government, to make known their potent protest at being denied the modern day necessities of life; and to awaken the Government to the fiduciary duty it owed to the people, to remind it of the unwritten covenant between the governors and the governed to provide the bare wherewithal for existence.

The list of shortages was pathetic: no dollars, no power, no fuel, no gas, no medicines, no milk powder, no cement, no fertiliser and, bereft of it all, no light at the tunnel’s end. Instead of the promised vistas of prosperity and splendour, only the stark spectre of a once fertile land turned waste.

The gazetting of over 300 items as non-essentials last week, restricting its imports either by heavy taxes or by license — non-essential to the government but, perhaps, essential to the daily life of people — was another heavy trident — the symbolic three-pronged relic of a faith once embraced by many adherents with evangelic zeal but now forsaken – the people would have to bear in stoic helplessness.

The burdens the people bore were many but they had borne them with remarkable patience. Now they had come to the end of their long tether and broken free. Unleashed, and in new found freedom, they came with gusto to the Green not to win political right or seek higher pay but to hold the masters accountable for their wretched state.

They shed aside their hues and answered the clarion call, rallying around the SJB leader, Sajith Premadasa, not because they necessarily subscribed to his political creed nor saw him as the new messiah but because this fast maturing politician, leader of the Opposition in Parliament, no less, had provided them the outlet to give vent to their seething pent up frustrations and anger at seeing the lights go out, one by one, on their lives, and on the nation.

But it was not merely to engage in mass catharsis that the people gathered at the Galle Face Green but also to demand change. The cry for change was blowing in the breeze, it was heard in the whisper of the trees, felt in the rumble of the ground, change was swirling all around and the national mood was enveloped in it. Things had come to a sorry pass, there had to be a complete system overhaul.

EYES OF RAGE: Protestor at Tuesday’s rally stares in anger over country’s mass shortages (Photographs by Tavish Gunasena)

Consider the catalogue of problems that beset the nation:

A government in disarray with dissent rife;

with once independent institutional pillars that barely prop up Lanka’’s Democracy, under threat and fast collapsing;

with corruption oozing gangrene from every pore of every organ of State, poisoning the entire body politic;

with selective law enforcement making a mockery out of justice, and the Attorney General withdrawing high political cases in mid trial, for want of evidence to proceed

with an agricultural policy gone terribly awry, leaving Lanka’s rice fields barren of crop

with an already mismanaged economy further mangled by egoistic officials’ arbitrary decisions;

with the human rights inquisition at the UNHRC in Geneva, not effectively countervailed;

with India and China, with credit life lines loftily thrown to save the drowning, in return for economic assets coupled with loan repayment, sharpening their knives to carve out the spoils of the carcass

COFFINED HOPES: Protesters outside Presidential Secretariat give vent to fiery ire

with international debt hovering in the stratosphere and  foreign reserves lying flat on  the ground, with foreign liabilities far exceeding foreign assets, Lanka has been left perilously on the brink of bankruptcy.

If this be the sorry state of affairs smearing every facet of State, compounding the economic woes more has been the Government’s intransigent refusal, until this week, to seek the succour of the IMF for a bail out. Though this will not wreak instant miracles, it will, at least, give a breather, a respite to lessen hardships.

It will also give an assurance that the nation is on chartered course to its desired destination; instead of wandering round the bushes, searching for some mythical homegrown remedy, akin to blind men in a darkened room, searching for a black cat that is not there.

As the Roman statesman Seneca said, if one doesn’t know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.’ Luckily for Lanka, a favourable IMF wind was blowing in Lanka’s direction to dictate the set of her sails and, though the voyage maybe storm-tossed, to steer her to safe port.

The IMF team arrived in Colombo on Monday to brief President Gotabaya Rajapaksa of the fund’s assessment of the present crisis but its mission chief Nozaki had told Reuters earlier that the ‘IMF has not received a request for financial support from Sri Lanka, but the staff stands ready to discuss options if requested.’

With the countdown to meltdown already begun, and counting, the Cabinet took a policy decision to let Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa engage with the International Monetary Fund to seek technical support to find solutions for the current economic crisis, its spokesman Ramesh Pathirana said on Monday.

The IMF team met the President, Tuesday midnoon, and formerly received the request to extend its help to bailout Lanka. But had they been asked too late in the day, when the economy had turned terminal and too far gone for resuscitation from its moribund state?

Later the IMF delegation in their hotel retreat would have been horrified to find firsthand, played out live-in-action, a people’s march for change. And realised, perhaps, the magnitude of the crisis was such that the monetary and fiscal remedies they had in their Washington vault, may not alone suffice to pull Lanka back from the brink, with the crying solution lying beyond the ambit of the IMF brief.

THE THRONG: Torchlit scene outside the old Parliament

On Thursday there was more disturbing news. SJB’s financial pundit, MP Harsha de Silva, responding to Wednesday’s Presidential address, warned that the IMF had identified Lanka as a country that can no longer service its debts. He said: “The IMF is legally prohibited from lending to countries that can’t repay its debts. As a first step we have to restructure our debt. We have to talk to our lenders and persuade them to let us restructure. They will not agree unless the IMF gives a guarantee. If the President thinks we can simply solve this problem by going to the IMF, he has been ill advised.’’

According to the IMF rules, however, though the IMF cannot lend if a country’s debt is unsustainable, it can do so if the country is taking steps to restore debt sustainability.

Hardly had the dust settled on the Galle Face Green, after Tuesday’s massive SJB protest, when the youth wing of the JVP, which holds itself as having a monopoly on protests, the Socialist Youth Union stormed the scene again on Friday afternoon to forcibly enter the Presidential Secretariat. The SYU had launched a protest march from Technical Junction to the Presidential Secretariat to protest against shortages and queues and sale of state assets.

But that will not be the end of the season for protests. The JVP, which has held several rallies in the outstations plan to hold more. The SJB has already announced it intends to hold protest rallies in the districts, kicking off the first in Matara soon.

But not all, especially government supporters and even some in the opposition, think that street protests serve any purpose, that it is futile. They join former disgraced Minister Mervyn Silva – the one who tied a public servant to a tree as punishment – in glibly posing the question: ‘Did those who attended the SJB protest freely get their gas or petrol the following day?

Still in their soft beds and preferring others to do hard battles for them, they fail to fathom the purpose and power of protest to dawn social change. The Tunisian who took part in the Arab Springs in the 2010s which led to other parts of the region, was not seeking to get a free bunch of grapes the following day but for his government to address the crisis existing in his country.

Even in Sri Lanka, protests are to remind the Government that though we, as a nation, may have withstood many foreign invasions, faced severe famines, braved terrorist threats and undergone economic crises in the hoary past, we elect governments to prevent it from happening in the present age, not to test our mettle by putting us through the furnace and see how best we have withstood the fire.

NAMAL: Hydro highlife Namal levitates on water in idyllic Maldivian isles It might seem somewhat out of touch with the present Lankan pulse beat for Sports Minister Namal Rajapaksa to be giving a public exhibition of gliding on water with the aid of a futuristic jetfly water pack in idyllic Maldives when his fellow countrymen can hardly move about on roads for want of fuel. Yet, duty is duty, however unpleasant the task. But according to a report in the Daily Mirror on Friday, social media hasn’t quite taken a sunshine to the story but apparently has, in the worst possible taste, sought to vilify and condemn him for his levitational feat. Envy, nothing but pure envy. But sporty Namal remained nonchalant. It was part of the job, one of those chores one has to do for king and country. He told the newspaper: “I’m in the Maldives for a day for the Maldives national sports awards. We cannot face a crisis by hiding. We have to go to the people also and need to promote Sri Lanka secure tourism. We cannot hide inside a shell and complain. We need to look for solutions. We understand the frustration of the people but we need to work hard to get out of this situation. Positive engagement is the way forward.’’ Couldn’t agree more. Positivism to beat negativism and all that blah, blah. Spot on. Only one thing puzzles. If he was striking a blow for tourism in Lanka, what on earth was he doing promoting ‘jetskiing’ and ‘jetflying’ in the coral, crystal clear blue waters of the Maldives? And if levitating on the hydro highlife in Maldives is the hard work needed to pull Lanka out of this mess, no doubt, Lanka’s youth generation will gladly volunteer to do hard labour in the Maldivian isles.