Connect with us

Editorial

The carnival will continue

Published

on

Nobody would be surprised that both India and Japan are most unhappy about the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) allowing itself to be stampeded by port and other unions, together with a section of the Buddhist clergy, to abandon its commitment to develop and run the East Container Terminal (ECT) of the Colombo Port as a 51-49 percent joint venture (JV). The Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) was to retain its controlling interest and would thereby have collected over half the profits earned by the JV. Moreover, the minority shareholder would have funded the completion of the phase two of the project involving the building a second 600 m berth to supplement the 450 m berth already commissioned. This involves a massive investment of billions of rupees that an already debt-strapped economy cannot afford. Foreign investment and assistance for this purpose in the context of the first fiasco is most unlikely. All the wrong signals have been given.

A lot of false propaganda that the country’s national assets are being sold, with ECT being touted as the latest such instance, was allowed to gather steam during the controversy that has now reached its unhappy conclusion. Eventually the unions railroaded the government into giving in and announcing that the project will be totally handled by the SLPA which will manage and develop the terminal at its own expense. This has been hailed as a great victory. Sowing the wind by caving into union and other pressure will result in having to reap the whirlwind resulting in many dangerous implications for future governance. The unions having already had the first taste of blood, can surely be expected to look for more. They, together with others who helped scuttle the ECT deal, have already indicated that they would do as much over the development of the West Container Terminal (WCT). Having withdrawn from its original commitment, the government has indicated that 85% of WCT would be granted to Indian and other investors in an attempt to win them over. But this obviously placatory measure, which some of the unions and their backers are saying they would resist, does not seem to have any buyers. Sri Lanka’s former High Commissioner to Delhi is on record saying that India rejected WCT in 2018.

The agreed ECT arrangement covered a 35-year period during which the SLPA would have received handsome royalties and dividends from the yet incomplete deep water terminal. Management, technical and marketing expertise that the country woefully lacks would have flowed in. On top of that, the foreign partners would have completed the second phase of the project with no investment from the government. Both Japan and India are friends we cannot afford to lose. For many years Japan has been one of our biggest aid donors, if not the biggest, with grant and concessional loans running into billions extended. Good relations with India must necessarily be a cornerstone of our foreign policy, a reality that government’s of different political complexions have long acknowledged. Give the looming crisis in Geneva in March, this is hardly the time to antagonize Big Brother. While Japan has restricted itself to diplomatically expressing “regret” for what has happened, India has been less restrained with its High Commission in Colombo, obviously with the nod from New Delhi, issuing a strong statement in this regard.

A lot of geopolitics is involved in the ECT matter. China’s presence with an 85 percent interest in the Colombo International Container Terminal (CICT), with SLPA holding the balance, obviously influenced India’s interest in a countervailing presence here. Over and above that, the lion’s share of the Colombo Port’s activity involves transshipment to India. This would logically favour an Indian role in the business. The unions did not resist the arrangements at CICT, or even the 99-year lease of the Hambantota Port to China. But their approach to ECT was totally different. Undoubtedly India’s intervention in Sri Lanka’s ethnic crisis and the civil war which followed fueled nationalist sentiments, including from the Buddhist clergy, that strongly supported opposition to the Indian entry into the Colombo port. Japanese participation, as agreed, would have helped dilute such concerns. But in the event, the unions threatening strike action pushed the government to the wall. The result was the scuttling of the 2019 trilateral agreement between the governments of Sri Lanka, India and Japan.

As much as eight billion rupees of SLPA’s revenue, according to its 2018 annual report (the latest available), comes from the privately managed South Asia Gateway Terminal (SAGT) and CICT that are privately run. The Jaya Container Terminal (JCT) SLPA manages is inefficient and its profitability is not commensurate with revenue. As is the case with most state-run enterprises in this country, JCT has over 10,000 employees when the actual requirement is 3,000 by the admission of the SLPA chairman at a recent television talk show. This is the result of politically motivated ‘jobs for the boys’ philosophy that has bedeviled state enterprise in our country. An article we run today arguing that the government should have honoured its agreement on ECT with India and Japan, points out that the two privately owned terminals in the Colombo port handles more than twice the volume of containers handled handled at the SLPA-managed JCT. It says that according to SLPA figures, around Rs. 20 billion is paid annually to less than 9,000 employees averaging Rs. 2.2 million per employee. No wonder then that port employees want the carnival to continue.



Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Editorial

Ensure safety of COPF Chairman

Published

on

Saturday 8th June, 2024

It was with shock and dismay that we received the news about death threats to COPF (Committee on Public Finance) Chairman Dr. Harsha de Silva over the ongoing parliamentary probe into the on-arrival visa scam. Dr. de Silva yesterday told Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena, in Parliament, that he was facing death threats and intimidation, and it was incumbent upon Parliament to ensure his safety. He stopped short of naming names, but revealed that some ruling party MPs were among those who had ganged up against him. The Speaker only said there had been no complaint, and he would look into the matter.

The SLPP-UNP government has been doing everything in its power to have all parliamentary committees under its thumb. The COPE (Committee on Public Enterprises), which once helped restore public faith in the legislature by exposing state sector corruption, has now become a mere appendage of the incumbent regime, thanks to the appointment of SLPP MP Rohitha Abeygunawardena as its Chairman. The SLPP-UNP combine also tried to oust COPF Chairman Dr. de Silva, but in vain. However, it knows more than one way to shoe a horse.

The COPF, under Dr. de Silva’s chairmanship, has been a thorn in the side of the government, which is struggling to cover up numerous corrupt deals. Dr. de Silva yesterday told Parliament that he found it extremely difficult to function as the COPF head due to severe resource constraints his committee was facing; he himself had to pay the salaries of some of his staff members besides burning the midnight oil.

The sheer workload he had to cope with as the COPF chief had taken its toll on his health, he said, informing the Speaker that he was at the end of his tether, and at times thought of resigning from the COPF. This is exactly what the government wants him to do; resource squeezes and threats are aimed at making him quit.

On 26 May, Dr. de Silva revealed, in an ‘X’ post, that the COPF had uncovered some vital information about the visa scam and it would reveal everything after its final meeting on the issue; the COPF was committed to exposing the truth behind the controversial tender, he added. In an editorial comment on 27 May, we warned him.

While thanking him for his bold stand, we pointed out that by making such a statement, he had thrown caution to the wind, and become a marked target, with the government making an all-out effort to delay the COPF investigation lest the truth should come out much to the detriment of its interests in this election year. Unfortunately, what was feared has come about; Dr. de Silva is complaining of death threats and government moves to strangulate the COPF financially to derail its investigations.

Dr. de Silva’s predicament exemplifies the fate that befalls the few good men and women in Parliament. It is hoped that all those who seek an end to the state sector corruption will rally behind Dr. de Silva, and bring pressure to bear on the government to ensure his safety. Let Dr. de Silva be urged to reveal the names of those who have issued threats, veiled or otherwise, to him and are trying to scuttle the COPF probes.

Continue Reading

Editorial

Dead man walking!

Published

on

Friday 7th June, 2024

The SLPP-UNP government is going hell for leather to make bad laws as if there were no tomorrow. It is abusing its parliamentary majority, which has been retained with the help of some crossovers, for that purpose. The Opposition, the media and trade unions are up in arms, and understandably so. The incumbent regime is a dead man walking; it is so desperate that it is capable of anything. Hence the need for it to be restrained.

The Electricity (Amendment) Bill (EAB) plunged Parliament into turmoil yesterday, but the government secured its passage. The Supreme Court (SC) determined the entire EAB inconsistent with the Constitution and recommended changes thereto. After unveiling the Bill, sometime ago, Minister of Power and Energy Kanchana Wijesekera hailed it as an excellent piece of legislation aimed at straightening up the power sector to serve the public interest better.

The SC determination left him with egg on his face. He reminded us of the proverbial curate who, while eating a stale egg, assured his host, a Bishop, that parts of it were excellent. Wijesekera’s egg, as it were, made Parliament stink yesterday, but he sought to please his masters by praising it as a silver bullet.

EAB should have been discarded and a new one drafted in consultation with all stakeholders. But the government is apparently driven by an ulterior motive; its aim is not to serve Sri Lanka’s interests but to look after those of some moneybags.

It is not uncommon for Bills to contain some flaws, which are rectified either before or during the committee stage. But there is something terribly wrong with draft Bills that are full of sections inconsistent with the Constitution. The drafters of EAB have demonstrated their sheer ignorance of the supreme law, and that they are not equal to the task of drafting Bills. If they had read the Constitution at least perfunctorily, they would not have drafted such a bad law.

Ignorant and incompetent, they do not deserve to be paid with public funds and must be sent back to law school. They must be summoned before Parliament and questioned on their serious lapses, which have caused public faith in the national legislature to diminish.

Curiously, the MPs who demand that judges, doctors, Central Bankers, and other public officials be summoned before Parliament have taken badly drafted Bills for granted. The power sector trade unions yesterday alleged that EAB was of Indian origin and geared towards furthering the interests of Adani Group at the expense of Sri Lanka.

Most critics of EAB are agreeable in principle to the need for power sector reforms; the Ceylon Electricity Board should be given a radical shake-up, and transformed into a modern organisation capable of providing a better service at a lower cost. They only asked the government to tread cautiously, consulting all stakeholders and taking action to ensure that the country’s interests prevailed over everything else. But the government was in a mighty hurry to steamroller the Bill through Parliament, making the Opposition ask whether it was doing so at the behest of some external forces involved in controversial power generation deals here.

What is passed by the current Parliament can be either amended or abolished by a future parliament in a constitutionally prescribed manner. But that does not mean that a government is free to pass bad laws, making the country enter into long-term agreements with powerful nations and their investors. It looks as if the SLPP-UNP regime did not care two hoots about the consequences of its actions.

Continue Reading

Editorial

Modi Magic on the wane

Published

on

Thursday 6th June, 2024

The outcome of India’s parliamentary election (2024) has led to a ‘perspective ambiguity’. Prime Minister Narendra Modi lost no time in declaring victory for the BJP-led NDA alliance, which secured 293 seats in the 543-member Parliament, but he must be a worried man. The BJP is short of 32 seats to form a government under its own steam; it has lost 63 seats or about 20% of its parliamentary strength. It had 303 seats in the previous Parliament, and that number has dropped to 240.

Modi has become the second Indian Prime Minister to win a third term. The first PM to do so was Jawaharlal Nehru. But Nehru won an outright majority in Parliament in 1962; Modi has had to depend on smaller parties in his alliance to retain his hold on power. Modi must be reeling from a sharp drop in his victory margin in his own constituency, Varanasi; it has decreased to 152,000 from 480,000 in 2019 whereas Modi’s bete noire, Rahul Gandhi, won Raebareli by a staggering 390,000 votes.

Modi, who reigned supreme with 303 seats in the previous Parliament, is now dependent on parties such as Nitish Kumar’s JD-U and Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP to form a government. He has had to lead an alliance of strange bedfellows. Both Kumar and Naidu were bitter critics of Modi. Kumar helped form the oppositional alliance, the INDIA bloc, before switching his allegiance to PM Modi. Naidu also closed ranks with the BJP in the run-up to the election. These politicians have been described as extremely ambitious and highly unpredictable, and whether Modi will be able to manage them and consolidate his grip on the NDA alliance remains to be seen. They will demand plum ministerial posts in return for their support. The TDP is said to be eyeing Transport and Health portfolios! That is the name of the game in coalition politics, where it is not uncommon for the tail to wag the dog, so to speak. These two political leaders are however not the only problem Modi will have to contend with. The next five years will feel like an eternity for PM Modi.

Nothing would have been more shocking for the BJP than its defeat in Uttar Pradesh’s Faizabad constituency, where the Ram Mandir has been built. Modi may have thought he would be able to win the Lok Sabha election hands down after the consecration of that temple, which became a centrepiece of the BJP’s election campaign. The BJP lost that seat to the Samajwadi Party! Modi must be disappointed that the Ram Mandir hype failed to trigger a massive wave of support for his party. This particular defeat signifies a massive setback for the BJP’s ethno-religious agenda.

Modi’s divisive election campaign failed to yield the desired result. The BJP’s failure to secure an outright majority could be attributed to a host of factors, some of them being the suppression of the Opposition, the arrogance of power, chronic unemployment, and the rising cost of living. The BJP also did not care to reimage itself in a positive light to attract the youth.

Modi will hereafter see the Congress-led INDIA bloc with 223 seats, in his rearview mirror. The Congress (99 seats) and its allies have eaten into the BJP support base considerably, but they have a long way to go before being able to capture power.

The bumpy ride ahead for the BJP-led coalition government to be formed may improve the INDIA bloc’s chances of bettering their electoral performance and turning the tables on the BJP and its allies in time to come. Modi will have a lot to worry about in his third term.

Continue Reading

Trending