Features
75 Years (3): Tom Nairn, AJ Wilson and the Break-up of States
Rajan Philips
Tom Nairn, widely known for his 1977 book, The Break-up of Britain, considered by many as “the most significant book on British politics of the past half-century,” passed away on January 21, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was 90 years old and had become a “guru figure” for Scottish Nationalists over the last few decades. Tributes have poured in from across Scotland’s political spectrum, both nationalists and unionists, including First Minister Nicola Sturgeon who would have been seven years old when Break-up first appeared, her predecessor Alex Salmond, as well as former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the Scotsman from Glasgow. To writer David Greig, Nairn was “Scotland’s intellectual engine of civic contemporary nationalism.” Others have called Nairn, Scotland’s greatest modern philosopher.
The break-up book was not primarily an exposition or celebration of Scottish nationalism, but a breakdown of the crisis of the British State. In his 1977 introduction, Nairn acknowledges that “although no main part of the book was written in Scotland, that country’s problems were never far from the inspiration of all of them.” The introduction includes a list of Scottish intellectuals who helped him with comments and suggestions for the book, and the list includes Gordon Brown. Brown would have been 26 then, still six years before becoming a Member of Parliament, and was working on his PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh, titled The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland 1918–1929. The two had collaborated earlier, in 1975, in publishing the “The Red Paper on Scotland”, which Brown edited and to which Nairn was the lead contributor.
Gordon Brown stayed with the Labour Party in Scotland and in Britain, to become Britain’s longest serving Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister. Nairn broke away first facilitating the formation of the Scottish Labour Party and then blessing its incorporation within the Scottish Nationalist Party. Brown’s passionate campaign against independence during the 2014 referendum was a factor in 55% of the people of Scotland voting against independence, a verdict that left Nairn hugely disappointed.
Brown was generous in his adulation of Tom Nairn after his death, describing him as “a great writer, thinker, intellectual and good man,” and acknowledging that Nairn “disagreed with me on many things but his books and scholarship will long be remembered.” Anthony Barnett, a former co-editor of the New Left Review, has called Tom Nairn and Gordon Brown “two towering political intellectuals,” who for nearly half a century “have wrestled over and shaped the Left’s view of the United Kingdom.” One of them (Brown) “directly shaped the Kingdom itself,” while the other (Nairn) played a direct “role in the emergence of modern Scotland.” Their “joint story” remains to be told.
Their story would be similar to the often-told Canadian story of Pierre Trudeau and Rene Levesque, two French Canadians and their intellectual and political fight over the status of Quebec in Canada. Here again, Trudeau as Prime Minister of Canada was able to thwart the attempt of Levesque, as the Premier of Quebec, to achieve quasi-separation for his Province through a constitutional arrangement called “sovereignty association.” As a political intellectual, Trudeau was quite dismissive of the statist aspirations of nationalism and characteristically said: “It is not the concept of nation that is retrograde, but its claim to sovereignty.”
Wilson’s Break-up
Eleven years after the publication of The Break-up of Britain, AJ Wilson published the first of his trilogy on the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka and titled it, The Break-up of Sri Lanka, perhaps emulating Nairn’s break-up title in Britain. Professor Wilson was not an advocate of political causes but a respected academic and Sri Lanka’s pre-eminent political scientist. The fact that Wilson was the son-in-law of SJV Chelvanayakam, Q.C., the father-figure leader of non-violent Tamil politics, did not diminish his reputation as an objective and detached academic. The affinal relationship certainly gave Wilson an intimate view of decision making in Tamil politics even as it gave him uniquely congenial access to Sri Lanka’s political leaders across the island’s many divides. Wilson was known for his affinity toward and admiration for Leftist leaders, NM Perera and Bernard Soysa; and his writings showed intellectual empathy for Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike and his well-intended, but failed, efforts to reconcile Sinhala-Tamil differences.
A product first of the University of Ceylon and then the London School of Economics, where he obtained his PhD and DSc, Professor Wilson had contributed immensely to the cause of political education in Sri Lanka directly as a teacher of several hundreds of political science students at Peradeniya, and indirectly through his popular and comprehensive textbook, Introduction to Civics and Government, that reached several thousands of students, in all three languages, in Sri Lanka’s schools until the book was banned by ultranationalist ignoramuses at the Department of Education in the early 1960s. Nonetheless, the book was more than a textbook and remained a constant companion for Sri Lanka’s political intellectuals like Rev. Paul Caspersz and Upali Cooray.
Wilson left Peradeniya in 1973 to accept the position as Chair of Political Science at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada, where he remained until his retirement in 1993. Wilson’s break-up book directly arose out of his experience as a constitutional advisor to President Jayewardene between 1978 and 1983, and as a mediator between the President and the TULF leaders. The book is a historical narrative written by an academic from the standpoint of a political participant-observer. It is worth noting that the median over Sri Lanka’s national problem became totally out-sourced, post-Wilson and post-1983.
Now, several decades after the publications of the two break-up books and notwithstanding their premonitory titles, there has been no break-up either in Britain or in Sri Lanka. That is one superficial way of looking at it. A different view would be that over the last three decades there have been significant changes to the ruling structures of the two countries and they have contributed to the two states remaining unbroken. The truth is also that neither book carried a prognostic message or warning, but rather a critique and an analysis of the crisis in which each state was, and continues to be, embedded.
Tom Nairn went on to live for 45 years after the first break-up edition, revisited, modified or reinforced his arguments against a backdrop of rapid world changes, and wrote and published prolifically. Among the more significant books that followed the break-up are: The Enchanted Glass (1988), a substantive critique of and a polemical satire on the British monarchy; Faces of Nationalism (1997), in which Nairn widens his gaze beyond the British isles to make sense of the explosions of nationalism accompanying the implosions of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia; and After Britain: and New Labour and the Return of Scotland (2000), a masterpiece on Blair’s “pseudo-conservative” Labourists as logical successors to Thatcher’s “pseudo-radical” Tories. In 2008, he targeted Gordon Brown, when he was Prime Minister, with an essay, Gordon Brown: The Bard of Britishness, which was published by the Institute of Welsh Affairs, as a symposium including responses to Nairn by others. As well, a new Verso edition of the Break-up was published in January 2022, 45 years after its first appearance.
Professor Wilson passed way in 2000, twelve years after the publication of The Break of Sri Lanka in 1988. He was in poor health but managed to publish two more books, to complete the trilogy and add to his impressive collection of nearly a dozen books on Sri Lankan politics. The second of the trilogy, published in 1994, was a political biography: SJV Chelvanayakam and the Crisis of Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism, 1947-1977. His last word was published in 2000: Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism: Its Origins and Development in the 19th and 20th Centuries. In between, he wrote articles to the Lanka Guardian and the Tamil Times, expressing his opinion on political events, including the one that he wrote with some optimism for positive changes when Chandrika Kumaratunga became Sri Lanka’s President in 1994.
Tom Nairn and Nationalism
Tom Nairn was born in Freuchie, Fife County, Scotland, not far from St. Andrew’s. After high school, he went first to Edinburgh College of Art but changed course for a degree in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a stint at Oxford. Already steeped in Scottish history and culture, along with those of the Kingdom and the Empire, Nairn went to Italy on a British Council scholarship, where he learnt Italian and took to Gramsci. He would later recall that “If you were a Marxist [in Britain] you were a Stalinist or a Trotskyist, … but I was insulated against that by my Italian experience.” He was a compulsive writer, an academic and an activist. His academic activism, while a lecturer in 1968 at Hornsey College of Art, north London, in support of a sit-in protest, led to an administrative dismissal and quiet disbarment from teaching in British institutions. As a peripatetic academic, he roamed from Europe to Australia, before returning home to teach and write.
Nairn was a natural fit to the group of leftist intellectuals and activists who took over the publication of journal New Left Review (NLR), in London, in the 1970s. The journal had been in publication from 1960, launched by a group of British Marxists who, on the one hand, rejected the politics of the Labour Party and the legacy of Stalinism in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and, on the other, identified themselves wholeheartedly with the then vigorous Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The NLR became a conduit in English for the continental schools of Marxism and a respected forum for disseminating and debating the writings of interwar and postwar Marxists and progressive intellectuals like Antonio Gramsci, Gyorgy Lukacs, Karl and Hedda Korsch, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, EP Thompson, Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, and Charles Taylor.
The 1970s NLR group included, besides Tom Nairn, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Anthony Barnett, Fred Halliday, Nicolas Krasso, and Tariq Ali among others. Sri Lanka’s Upali Cooray, Marxist and Labour Lawyer, was active in the NLR circle. By the 1970s, NLR began taking positions in British politics and Anderson and Nairn formulated the famous Anderson-Nairn thesis on the decline and fall of Britain. The NLR supported Britain joining the European Community, setting itself apart from many in the Labour Party and much of the British Left at that time. Tom Nairn wrote and published a special issue of the journal in 1972, titled, “The Left against Europe?”
The Break-up of Britain, Nairn’s magnum opus, is a collection of articles that he wrote to the New Left Review (NLR) between 1970 and 1977. The articles were written at different times – 1970, 1974, 1975 and 1976, during a decade of alternating governments and severe political and economic crises. The book was published two years before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. A postscript was added to the 1981 edition by which time Margaret Thatcher was into her third year as Prime Minister.
The book’s chapter headings are indicative of Nairn’s diagnoses of the crisis of Britain’s multi-national state. The first chapter, perhaps written last in 1976, was aptly titled “The Twilight of the British State.” There were two chapters on Scotland (Scotland and Europe, and Old and New Scottish Nationalism); two on England (English Nationalism: the case of Enoch Powell, and the English Enigma); one each on Wales (Culture and Politics in Wales) and Northern Ireland (Relic or Portent?); a penultimate chapter titled, Supra-Nationalism and Europe; and the final chapter: The Modern Janus, a powerful reflection on Marxism and nationalism that begins challengingly, “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.”
For students of nationalism, the Break-up’s publication presaged a surge of writings in English on the theory and manifestations of nationalism. Two pathbreaking books appeared in 1983. Benedict Anderson’s (older brother of Perry Anderson) Imagined Communities, brought into relief two principal processes of nation making. ‘Print capitalism’ that led to mass production of newspapers and languages in the hitherto vernaculars of the world, and ‘pilgrimage’ that made modern nomads out of state functionaries, and the two together enabled and facilitated the contemporaneous collective imagination of hitherto disparate groups of people. Anderson’s “preciously written” book somewhat overshadowed Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism that was also published in 1983.
Gellner’s assertive thesis is that the emergence of nations and nationalisms became feasible only because of industrialization and modernization. Gellner’s student, Anthony Smith, countered Gellner and asserted the ethnic-primordiality of nations in his book, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, published in 1986. Tom Nairn’s writings could be seen as synthesizing the two, modernity and pre-modernity, privileging the former without dismissing the latter. Esoterically speaking, modernity and post-modernity have made possible the national survival of many cultural groups which in Engels’s dismissive description should have been reduced to becoming “ethnographic monuments.”
Tom Nairn is considered to be among the four most cited writers on nationalism along with Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Anthony Smith. Many others have since enriched the universe of writings on nationalism. Two outstanding books on nationalism in the industrial cradle of Western Europe are, Patrick Geary’s (2002) The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe; and Joep Leerssen’s (2006, first published in the Dutch-language) National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Books on nationalism in postcolonial societies outside South Asia, include, Robert J. Foster’s (1995) edited symposium, Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia; Neil Lazarus’s (1999) Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World; and Anthony Reid’s (2010) Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia.
A common feature of late-twentieth century writings on nationalism is the emphasis on culture and the reliance on cultural anthropology. Intervening at the political-intellectual level was Eric Hobsbawm, a contemporary of Ceylon’s Pieter Keuneman and India’s Mohan Kumaramangalam at Cambridge, Marxist and prolific historian, and an intellectual of the British Communist Party who fought Stalinism from within the Party. In his 1991 book, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, and other writings, Hobsbawm countered the statist (and break-up) assertions of nationalism by powerfully pointing out the hopeless stalemates that contending national polities might generate if every national group, including majority groups, were to insist on a state of its own and reject any and all compromising alternatives. Hobsbawm’s warning comes alive in the two break-up narratives of Britain and Sri Lanka. A dubiously redeeming feature in Britain has been what Nain called the ‘English Enigma,’ a peculiar, imperially sustained, and culturally snobbish abstinence from nationalism by the English people. The tragically opposite indulgence in nationalisms has been the story of post-independence Sri Lanka. More on that – Next Week.
by Dr Gotabhya Ranasinghe
Senior Consultant Cardiologist
National Hospital Sri Lanka
When we sought a meeting with Hon Dr. Ramesh Pathirana, Minister of Health, he graciously cleared his busy schedule to accommodate us. Renowned for his attentive listening and deep understanding, Minister Pathirana is dedicated to advancing the health sector. His openness and transparency exemplify the qualities of an exemplary politician and minister.
Dr. Palitha Mahipala, the current Health Secretary, demonstrates both commendable enthusiasm and unwavering support. This combination of attributes makes him a highly compatible colleague for the esteemed Minister of Health.
Our discussion centered on a project that has been in the works for the past 30 years, one that no other minister had managed to advance.
Minister Pathirana, however, recognized the project’s significance and its potential to revolutionize care for heart patients.
The project involves the construction of a state-of-the-art facility at the premises of the National Hospital Colombo. The project’s location within the premises of the National Hospital underscores its importance and relevance to the healthcare infrastructure of the nation.
This facility will include a cardiology building and a tertiary care center, equipped with the latest technology to handle and treat all types of heart-related conditions and surgeries.
Securing funding was a major milestone for this initiative. Minister Pathirana successfully obtained approval for a $40 billion loan from the Asian Development Bank. With the funding in place, the foundation stone is scheduled to be laid in September this year, and construction will begin in January 2025.
This project guarantees a consistent and uninterrupted supply of stents and related medications for heart patients. As a result, patients will have timely access to essential medical supplies during their treatment and recovery. By securing these critical resources, the project aims to enhance patient outcomes, minimize treatment delays, and maintain the highest standards of cardiac care.
Upon its fruition, this monumental building will serve as a beacon of hope and healing, symbolizing the unwavering dedication to improving patient outcomes and fostering a healthier society.We anticipate a future marked by significant progress and positive outcomes in Sri Lanka’s cardiovascular treatment landscape within the foreseeable timeframe.
by Fr. Emmanuel Fernando, OMI
Jesuit Fr. Aloysius Pieris (affectionately called Fr. Aloy) celebrated his 90th birthday on April 9, 2024 and I, as the editor of our Oblate Journal, THE MISSIONARY OBLATE had gone to press by that time. Immediately I decided to publish an article, appreciating the untiring selfless services he continues to offer for inter-Faith dialogue, the renewal of the Catholic Church, his concern for the poor and the suffering Sri Lankan masses and to me, the present writer.
It was in 1988, when I was appointed Director of the Oblate Scholastics at Ampitiya by the then Oblate Provincial Fr. Anselm Silva, that I came to know Fr. Aloy more closely. Knowing well his expertise in matters spiritual, theological, Indological and pastoral, and with the collaborative spirit of my companion-formators, our Oblate Scholastics were sent to Tulana, the Research and Encounter Centre, Kelaniya, of which he is the Founder-Director, for ‘exposure-programmes’ on matters spiritual, biblical, theological and pastoral. Some of these dimensions according to my view and that of my companion-formators, were not available at the National Seminary, Ampitiya.
Ever since that time, our Oblate formators/ accompaniers at the Oblate Scholasticate, Ampitiya , have continued to send our Oblate Scholastics to Tulana Centre for deepening their insights and convictions regarding matters needed to serve the people in today’s context. Fr. Aloy also had tried very enthusiastically with the Oblate team headed by Frs. Oswald Firth and Clement Waidyasekara to begin a Theologate, directed by the Religious Congregations in Sri Lanka, for the contextual formation/ accompaniment of their members. It should very well be a desired goal of the Leaders / Provincials of the Religious Congregations.
Besides being a formator/accompanier at the Oblate Scholasticate, I was entrusted also with the task of editing and publishing our Oblate journal, ‘The Missionary Oblate’. To maintain the quality of the journal I continue to depend on Fr. Aloy for his thought-provoking and stimulating articles on Biblical Spirituality, Biblical Theology and Ecclesiology. I am very grateful to him for his generous assistance. Of late, his writings on renewal of the Church, initiated by Pope St. John XX111 and continued by Pope Francis through the Synodal path, published in our Oblate journal, enable our readers to focus their attention also on the needed renewal in the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka. Fr. Aloy appreciated very much the Synodal path adopted by the Jesuit Pope Francis for the renewal of the Church, rooted very much on prayerful discernment. In my Religious and presbyteral life, Fr.Aloy continues to be my spiritual animator / guide and ongoing formator / acccompanier.
Fr. Aloysius Pieris, BA Hons (Lond), LPh (SHC, India), STL (PFT, Naples), PhD (SLU/VC), ThD (Tilburg), D.Ltt (KU), has been one of the eminent Asian theologians well recognized internationally and one who has lectured and held visiting chairs in many universities both in the West and in the East. Many members of Religious Congregations from Asian countries have benefited from his lectures and guidance in the East Asian Pastoral Institute (EAPI) in Manila, Philippines. He had been a Theologian consulted by the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences for many years. During his professorship at the Gregorian University in Rome, he was called to be a member of a special group of advisers on other religions consulted by Pope Paul VI.
Fr. Aloy is the author of more than 30 books and well over 500 Research Papers. Some of his books and articles have been translated and published in several countries. Among those books, one can find the following: 1) The Genesis of an Asian Theology of Liberation (An Autobiographical Excursus on the Art of Theologising in Asia, 2) An Asian Theology of Liberation, 3) Providential Timeliness of Vatican 11 (a long-overdue halt to a scandalous millennium, 4) Give Vatican 11 a chance, 5) Leadership in the Church, 6) Relishing our faith in working for justice (Themes for study and discussion), 7) A Message meant mainly, not exclusively for Jesuits (Background information necessary for helping Francis renew the Church), 8) Lent in Lanka (Reflections and Resolutions, 9) Love meets wisdom (A Christian Experience of Buddhism, 10) Fire and Water 11) God’s Reign for God’s poor, 12) Our Unhiddden Agenda (How we Jesuits work, pray and form our men). He is also the Editor of two journals, Vagdevi, Journal of Religious Reflection and Dialogue, New Series.
Fr. Aloy has a BA in Pali and Sanskrit from the University of London and a Ph.D in Buddhist Philosophy from the University of Sri Lankan, Vidyodaya Campus. On Nov. 23, 2019, he was awarded the prestigious honorary Doctorate of Literature (D.Litt) by the Chancellor of the University of Kelaniya, the Most Venerable Welamitiyawe Dharmakirthi Sri Kusala Dhamma Thera.
Fr. Aloy continues to be a promoter of Gospel values and virtues. Justice as a constitutive dimension of love and social concern for the downtrodden masses are very much noted in his life and work. He had very much appreciated the commitment of the late Fr. Joseph (Joe) Fernando, the National Director of the Social and Economic Centre (SEDEC) for the poor.
In Sri Lanka, a few religious Congregations – the Good Shepherd Sisters, the Christian Brothers, the Marist Brothers and the Oblates – have invited him to animate their members especially during their Provincial Congresses, Chapters and International Conferences. The mainline Christian Churches also have sought his advice and followed his seminars. I, for one, regret very much, that the Sri Lankan authorities of the Catholic Church –today’s Hierarchy—- have not sought Fr.
Aloy’s expertise for the renewal of the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka and thus have not benefited from the immense store of wisdom and insight that he can offer to our local Church while the Sri Lankan bishops who governed the Catholic church in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (Edmund Fernando OMI, Anthony de Saram, Leo Nanayakkara OSB, Frank Marcus Fernando, Paul Perera,) visited him and consulted him on many matters. Among the Tamil Bishops, Bishop Rayappu Joseph was keeping close contact with him and Bishop J. Deogupillai hosted him and his team visiting him after the horrible Black July massacre of Tamils.
Sri Lanka-Singapore Free Trade Agreement
By Gomi Senadhira
senadhiragomi@gmail.com
“You might tell fairy tales, but the progress of a country cannot be achieved through such narratives. A country cannot be developed by making false promises. The country moved backward because of the electoral promises made by political parties throughout time. We have witnessed that the ultimate result of this is the country becoming bankrupt. Unfortunately, many segments of the population have not come to realize this yet.” – President Ranil Wickremesinghe, 2024 Budget speech
Any Sri Lankan would agree with the above words of President Wickremesinghe on the false promises our politicians and officials make and the fairy tales they narrate which bankrupted this country. So, to understand this, let’s look at one such fairy tale with lots of false promises; Ranil Wickremesinghe’s greatest achievement in the area of international trade and investment promotion during the Yahapalana period, Sri Lanka-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (SLSFTA).
It is appropriate and timely to do it now as Finance Minister Wickremesinghe has just presented to parliament a bill on the National Policy on Economic Transformation which includes the establishment of an Office for International Trade and the Sri Lanka Institute of Economics and International Trade.
Was SLSFTA a “Cleverly negotiated Free Trade Agreement” as stated by the (former) Minister of Development Strategies and International Trade Malik Samarawickrama during the Parliamentary Debate on the SLSFTA in July 2018, or a colossal blunder covered up with lies, false promises, and fairy tales? After SLSFTA was signed there were a number of fairy tales published on this agreement by the Ministry of Development Strategies and International, Institute of Policy Studies, and others.
However, for this article, I would like to limit my comments to the speech by Minister Samarawickrama during the Parliamentary Debate, and the two most important areas in the agreement which were covered up with lies, fairy tales, and false promises, namely: revenue loss for Sri Lanka and Investment from Singapore. On the other important area, “Waste products dumping” I do not want to comment here as I have written extensively on the issue.
1. The revenue loss
During the Parliamentary Debate in July 2018, Minister Samarawickrama stated “…. let me reiterate that this FTA with Singapore has been very cleverly negotiated by us…. The liberalisation programme under this FTA has been carefully designed to have the least impact on domestic industry and revenue collection. We have included all revenue sensitive items in the negative list of items which will not be subject to removal of tariff. Therefore, 97.8% revenue from Customs duty is protected. Our tariff liberalisation will take place over a period of 12-15 years! In fact, the revenue earned through tariffs on goods imported from Singapore last year was Rs. 35 billion.
The revenue loss for over the next 15 years due to the FTA is only Rs. 733 million– which when annualised, on average, is just Rs. 51 million. That is just 0.14% per year! So anyone who claims the Singapore FTA causes revenue loss to the Government cannot do basic arithmetic! Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, I call on my fellow members of this House – don’t mislead the public with baseless criticism that is not grounded in facts. Don’t look at petty politics and use these issues for your own political survival.”
I was surprised to read the minister’s speech because an article published in January 2018 in “The Straits Times“, based on information released by the Singaporean Negotiators stated, “…. With the FTA, tariff savings for Singapore exports are estimated to hit $10 million annually“.
As the annual tariff savings (that is the revenue loss for Sri Lanka) calculated by the Singaporean Negotiators, Singaporean $ 10 million (Sri Lankan rupees 1,200 million in 2018) was way above the rupees’ 733 million revenue loss for 15 years estimated by the Sri Lankan negotiators, it was clear to any observer that one of the parties to the agreement had not done the basic arithmetic!
Six years later, according to a report published by “The Morning” newspaper, speaking at the Committee on Public Finance (COPF) on 7th May 2024, Mr Samarawickrama’s chief trade negotiator K.J. Weerasinghehad had admitted “…. that forecasted revenue loss for the Government of Sri Lanka through the Singapore FTA is Rs. 450 million in 2023 and Rs. 1.3 billion in 2024.”
If these numbers are correct, as tariff liberalisation under the SLSFTA has just started, we will pass Rs 2 billion very soon. Then, the question is how Sri Lanka’s trade negotiators made such a colossal blunder. Didn’t they do their basic arithmetic? If they didn’t know how to do basic arithmetic they should have at least done their basic readings. For example, the headline of the article published in The Straits Times in January 2018 was “Singapore, Sri Lanka sign FTA, annual savings of $10m expected”.
Anyway, as Sri Lanka’s chief negotiator reiterated at the COPF meeting that “…. since 99% of the tariffs in Singapore have zero rates of duty, Sri Lanka has agreed on 80% tariff liberalisation over a period of 15 years while expecting Singapore investments to address the imbalance in trade,” let’s turn towards investment.
Investment from Singapore
In July 2018, speaking during the Parliamentary Debate on the FTA this is what Minister Malik Samarawickrama stated on investment from Singapore, “Already, thanks to this FTA, in just the past two-and-a-half months since the agreement came into effect we have received a proposal from Singapore for investment amounting to $ 14.8 billion in an oil refinery for export of petroleum products. In addition, we have proposals for a steel manufacturing plant for exports ($ 1 billion investment), flour milling plant ($ 50 million), sugar refinery ($ 200 million). This adds up to more than $ 16.05 billion in the pipeline on these projects alone.
And all of these projects will create thousands of more jobs for our people. In principle approval has already been granted by the BOI and the investors are awaiting the release of land the environmental approvals to commence the project.
I request the Opposition and those with vested interests to change their narrow-minded thinking and join us to develop our country. We must always look at what is best for the whole community, not just the few who may oppose. We owe it to our people to courageously take decisions that will change their lives for the better.”
According to the media report I quoted earlier, speaking at the Committee on Public Finance (COPF) Chief Negotiator Weerasinghe has admitted that Sri Lanka was not happy with overall Singapore investments that have come in the past few years in return for the trade liberalisation under the Singapore-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement. He has added that between 2021 and 2023 the total investment from Singapore had been around $162 million!
What happened to those projects worth $16 billion negotiated, thanks to the SLSFTA, in just the two-and-a-half months after the agreement came into effect and approved by the BOI? I do not know about the steel manufacturing plant for exports ($ 1 billion investment), flour milling plant ($ 50 million) and sugar refinery ($ 200 million).
However, story of the multibillion-dollar investment in the Petroleum Refinery unfolded in a manner that would qualify it as the best fairy tale with false promises presented by our politicians and the officials, prior to 2019 elections.
Though many Sri Lankans got to know, through the media which repeatedly highlighted a plethora of issues surrounding the project and the questionable credentials of the Singaporean investor, the construction work on the Mirrijiwela Oil Refinery along with the cement factory began on the24th of March 2019 with a bang and Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and his ministers along with the foreign and local dignitaries laid the foundation stones.
That was few months before the 2019 Presidential elections. Inaugurating the construction work Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said the projects will create thousands of job opportunities in the area and surrounding districts.
The oil refinery, which was to be built over 200 acres of land, with the capacity to refine 200,000 barrels of crude oil per day, was to generate US$7 billion of exports and create 1,500 direct and 3,000 indirect jobs. The construction of the refinery was to be completed in 44 months. Four years later, in August 2023 the Cabinet of Ministers approved the proposal presented by President Ranil Wickremesinghe to cancel the agreement with the investors of the refinery as the project has not been implemented! Can they explain to the country how much money was wasted to produce that fairy tale?
It is obvious that the President, ministers, and officials had made huge blunders and had deliberately misled the public and the parliament on the revenue loss and potential investment from SLSFTA with fairy tales and false promises.
As the president himself said, a country cannot be developed by making false promises or with fairy tales and these false promises and fairy tales had bankrupted the country. “Unfortunately, many segments of the population have not come to realize this yet”.
(The writer, a specialist and an activist on trade and development issues . )
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