75th Independence Anniversary: What the president cannot say

by Rohan Pethiyagoda

Like you, I’ve been watching the elaborate preparations that the government’ has been making for the Independence Day celebrations, spending hundreds of millions of rupees on an extravagant display of power, apparently without a care in the world that poverty has reduced many children in this country to just a single meal a day. I’ve been thinking, if I were the president, how would I address the nation on this occasion. Well, here goes:

My fellow citizens: Today we celebrate 75 years of Independence. For 350 years, from the death of the last King of Kotte, Dom João Dharmapala in 1597 and until 4 February 1948, we were colonized by foreign powers. Nationalists often say that colonialism is the reason for our country’s predicament. I remain to be convinced of that. There is no doubt that Sri Lanka was once a great nation, a great civilization. Until the end of the Polonnaruwa period 800 years ago, Sri Lanka was a small but prosperous country, a powerhouse of agriculture, architecture, art, engineering and innovation, additionally blessed with a culture that was deeply rooted in the Buddhist tradition. We were the Singapore of South Asia back then.

But then, our civilization collapsed. This is no great shame. After all, all great civilizations must one day decline. Just look at the Greek, the Roman, the Islamic civilizations, for example. By the time the Portuguese took over, our island was fragmented into four warring kingdoms. It was a right royal mess. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Palk Strait, India had reached the apex of its flourishing. By 1600, India was producing 22.5 percent of global GDP, compared with just 9% today, despite its massive population. There is almost no evidence of similar flourishing in Sri Lanka at that time. When the colonials got here, we were at our weakest, most vulnerable; we were ripe for the picking. So, it’s about time we stopped harping on about what a great and noble past we used to have. It doesn’t matter anymore. We need to live in the present.

There are some people who argue that colonialism was a good thing. I disagree. Like slavery, colonialism is always bad. But we have to face the fact that by the end of the colonial period, by 1948, Ceylon was the most prosperous country in Asia. We had a thriving, export-orientated economy. We had a manageable population of just seven million people. We had a superb infrastructure of roads, railways, ports and airports. We had a 16-year history of universal franchise, of democracy, an independent judiciary, an excellent civil service, a secular constitution, free education, and even a positive balance of payments. Britain actually owed us money, back then.

But we had our weaknesses too: an unsustainable rate of population growth (population has tripled in these past 75 years) and there was also a lack of industrialization. Our political leaders, our early prime ministers, were drawn from the highest echelons of society. They came from affluent families and had excellent educational backgrounds. After all, four of the first five attended St Thomas’s College, which was my old school as well. All of them had since 1931 been groomed for leadership by the British through the mechanism of the State Council. And then, in 1948, they finally got their hands on power, the absolute power that comes with sovereignty. And all of them, in my opinion at least, were abject failures.

And it took them just 10 years, a single decade, in which to reduce it all to rubble. From the very outset, political parties had to outbid each other to get votes. If you didn’t offer a generous welfare package, free education, free health, free rice, free electricity, free stuff, all of it spiced with a pinch of anti-Tamil bigotry and class warfare, you simply couldn’t get elected. People also demanded 21 days of paid leave, 84 days of paid maternity leave, and more than 25 paid public holidays every year. In short, lots of free stuff and as little actual work as possible.

And once you got that free education, the government had to even create a free job for you in the state sector, and pay you a pensionable salary, to retain your political loyalty. Every election was reduced to an auction, an auction of votes, and the votes went to whichever party made the highest bid. And to give you more stuff— දියව්! දියව්!—us poor politicians had no alternative but to borrow more and more money. Where else was the money to come from? As a result, there has been no year in the past 40 years in which government debt has been less than 70 percent of GDP. It is now well over 110 percent. We borrow more than we produce. In fact, I think the last time in our history that we had a primary fiscal surplus was in 1955, the year I was born, 67 years ago. Few indicators say it better than the exchange rate. In 1948, the cost of a US dollar was just Rs 3.32. Today it is, as you know, more than Rs 370, a devaluation of 11,000 percent.

We politicians learned very early on that when it comes to subsidies, you simply can’t mess with the electorate. We learned that even though we are stupid and ignorant, you are even more stupid and ignorant. The inability of the UNP government to continue the wartime rice subsidy in 1952, for example, precipitated the great ‘hartal’, a general strike, bringing the UNP government to its knees and causing Dudley Senanayake to resign. Anxious to get back in favour with the electorate, in February 1956, Sir John Kotelawela promised to make Sinhala the sole official language. SWRD Bandaranaike followed suit, and for his bad luck, the poor chap won the general election that year. The Official Language Act was signed into law just three months later. It was very simple: “The Sinhala language shall be the one official language of Ceylon.”

This effectively disenfranchised both the Tamils and the Burghers, and by 1958, just ten years after Independence, race riots reduced the country to ashes. The Burghers were quick to pack their bags and emigrate to Australia. Even John Kotelawala, the father of the UNP’s Sinhala Only policy, got on a plane and took up residence in England.

The man simply had no shame. And now you’ve gone and named a university in his honour. What were you thinking? The Tamils struggled on for another quarter century, and then, they too ran away, to just about any country that would have them: Canada, Switzerland, Australia, England, the United States. Now, finally, even the Sinhalese are running away to join their Tamil brethren, by the planeload.

Meanwhile, from the 1950s onwards, we nationalized everything: transport, schools, hospitals, newspapers, banks, hotels, plantations, petroleum, shipping, insurance, the lot. And when there was nothing left to nationalize, we created new monopolies, state corporations, to compete with the private sector and, in effect, to destroy it. We did these things because it was the only way we politicians could give you those jobs that you wanted, that you felt entitled to, in the state sector. Through nationalization, we confiscated jobs from the private sector and gave them to you. And as chairmen and directors of these so-called state-owned enterprises, we appointed our unemployable relatives and our political cronies. And now you blame us because these so-called enterprises are unprofitable and inefficient. Can you really blame us? It is, after all, what you wanted. How else could we give you those jobs? And now, if we try to privatize any of these once more, you get all hot and bothered and you start protesting. You cut off our legs at the knees and then you ask us to run a marathon and become Singapore.

But of course, it hasn’t been all bad. Your life expectancy, for example, has increased by 30 years since Independence. Just about every household in Sri Lanka is now connected to the national electricity grid. We’ve got rid of most of the diseases that made our grandparents’ lives a misery. Our rice production increased from just 1.8 tons per hectare at Independence to 4.5 tons per hectare by 2015, making us a net exporter of rice for the first time in 500 years. And then of course, Gotabaya Rajapaksa came along and destroyed it all. Perhaps most importantly, despite all our troubles we managed to retain a semblance of democracy, the ability to change governments peacefully.

But what is the value of free health when almost half our children our undernourished? Of what value is free education when a quarter of all students fail their O levels and more than a third fail their A levels? And when almost no one can pass without expensive private tuition, anyway? And that’s just the ones who stay on in school. According to UNICEF, almost 60% of our children drop out of school by age 17, before their A levels. And what is the value of democracy when the vast majority of those you elect to office are thugs, crooks, and morons?

Now, 75 years after Independence, all you can do is to patriotically sing the praises of Mother Lanka for her rolling landscapes, her lofty hills, and her misty valleys. That’s all we have left to crow about. Having started near the top of the Asian rankings in 1948, we’ve been overtaken by one country after another. Of course, you can curse us politicians for the mess in which the country finds itself. But when it comes to looking for whom to blame, isn’t it time that you too, looked in the mirror? Maybe you need to point the finger at yourself as well.

Sri Lanka’s predicament is not the just fault of its politicians. It is also your fault. For once in your life, learn to take some damned responsibility. Ayubowan.