Editorial

Amidst the emergence of more new evidence regarding Sri Lanka’s worst-ever medical scam—which led to the distribution of counterfeit, untested, unregulated medication to government hospitals—pressing questions remain about how every official guideline introduced to minimise, if not eliminate, this type of dangerous, barefaced fraud was allowed to be flouted.

There are at least two known concerns here. One is that decisions were made at the highest levels of the Health Ministry in 2022 to buy medication, including non-essential ones, from handpicked companies at prices far above market rates. The instruction was to procure these stocks from the favoured suppliers regardless of pending orders that were soon to be delivered. There is clear documentary evidence of medicines bought at the height of a dire economic crisis at inflated prices.

The second is that decisions were also made at the highest levels—and approved by the Cabinet based on memoranda submitted by the then Health Minister—to set aside established procurement and regulatory guidelines for the purchase of medication on grounds of “urgency”.  It was not conveyed that at least part of the problem was a deliberately fabricated “urgent situation,” which allowed this pretext to be used for corruption procurement. It cannot be ruled out that supplies were deficient. But there were reasons other than a dollar crisis—including glaring mismanagement—for these deficiencies. The shortage was, at least in part, perpetuated for the sake of making a fast buck from unchecked medical procurements.

Every gatekeeping mechanism failed or was flouted. The National Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA) Board handed over its authority to one politically appointed man to do as he pleased with waivers of registration. The then Health Minister got Cabinet clearance for procurements to be done through the Health Ministry’s Medical Supplies Division, which is not a purchasing arm. An emergency procurement process introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic was allowed to be continued.

Neighbouring India was dragged into this elaborate deception. The Cabinet was told that medical purchases had to be expedited as the Indian Credit Line (ICL), under which there was an allocation for health supplies, was about to expire. Cabinet merely rubber-stamped emergency procurements. Rarely do Cabinet Ministers question their colleagues; it is a ‘you scratch my back; I will scratch yours’ policy in there. But even while these various porous Cabinet memoranda were being submitted, plans were being devised by a small group in the Health Ministry and the NMRA to give out dud tenders for dud medication. Not all of the tenders—the vast majority of which were single-source unsolicited proposals—were paid for by the Indian Credit Line, despite the paperwork saying the opposite.

The only reason the human immunoglobulin scam came to light was that patients who received the counterfeit injection showed adverse reactions. When this was reported, officials panicked.

Several arrests have been made, but the key players have gone unpunished and have received fresh appointments under which they hold significant authority, including over procurements. There is no excuse for the unconscionable abuse of public trust—and of the institutions and positions that they held in the public trust—that occurred under their watch. There is no rule in any book that allows a blind eye to be turned to what happened.

Sugar scams, garlic scams, fertiliser scams, etc., etc., this country has them all. How can a medicinal drug scam of this proportion, largely affecting the health of the poorer citizens, also go the way of the others, into the limbo of half-hearted criminal investigations?

Moving with the world amidst regressive laws

President Ranil Wickremesinghe was asked by an undergrad in Jaffna during his recent tour of the Northern Province why most of their syllabus is in the English language and whether these books cannot be translated into the local languages.

A populist leader would usually respond by saying he would promise that, but the President urged the student and her colleagues to learn international languages, especially English, because the world was moving towards a universal community speaking one uniform language, and that would be English. Earlier, Members of Parliament with a short-sighted eye on their next re-election voted against a Council of Legal Education move to have the curriculum for law students shifted to English.

The President said the new world was embracing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with great enthusiasm and an equal measure of trepidation, but countries around the non-English-speaking world, including China, are brushing up on their English language skills so that they could get ahead of others in the AI field.

At Davos, Switzerland, this week, where the world’s captains of industry and political leaders met to exchange ideas on the world economy, the subject of AI was very much at the forefront of discussion. The IMF’s CEO, Kristalina Georgiana, said they had done a sample survey of countries that were preparing for the arrival of full-blown AI and found that the economically advanced nations (this included Singapore) were ready to meet its challenges and benefit from it, but the poorer countries—those in the Global South—were at the bottom of the list.

She said that in their estimates, at least 40 percent of the existing jobs in the world would be affected by the advent of AI, and as much as 60 percent in developed countries. Sri Lanka, as a country that exports labour to rich countries and relies so heavily on their remittances to pay for its imports, is bound to be in for a future shock once AI invades the world labour market. What measures are being taken on the brink of this technology revolution?

The IMF chief also warned that, internally, AI would stoke social tensions even further when those who can access the benefits from AI would have greater advantages over those without such access. Already, professional associations have begun discussing the availability of AI and the radical changes it will make in their respective fields, like medicine, law, engineering, IT, etc.

And yet, while the futuristic President sees the inexorable currents of the new technology in motion, his government is under fire for recommending questionable laws, like the one on online safety. Though a necessity due to the abuse of the internet by anti-social and criminal elements, the drafters of the proposed law locally have exploited that necessity to further their political agendas by slipping in regressive anti-democratic provisions with vague definitions. They have presented a bill mismatched with a presidential worldview and an entire world that is moving in a different direction.