Editorial
Import restrictions, wedgie and reality
Monday 13th September, 2021
Nobody has taken kindly to the stringent import restrictions the Central Bank (CB) has imposed, however necessary they may be to shore up the country’s depleting foreign exchange reserves. From the reactions of various people to the government move to restrict imports, one can guess how they prioritise their needs and wants. Most of them are worried about possible shortages of domestic appliances, food items, beverages, skincare products and the like. Their concerns and consternation are understandable. But, curiously, what worries the Opposition is the restriction on underwear imports, of all things!
It is said that the ordinary Sri Lankans think with their stomachs, especially when they vote. In commenting on the 100% cash margin deposit slapped by the CB, the focus of many Opposition worthies has been on a possible shortage of imported underwear; this kind of reaction shows the Opposition MPs’ preoccupation with their nether regions more than anything else—a fact that has become evident from their lewd utterances in Parliament. They have been flogging the underwear issue to the point of queasiness during the past couple of days. The Opposition is bent on getting its back on the government politically, and this may be the reason why it has sought to give the latter a wedgie, but in so doing it has unfortunately reduced an otherwise very serious economic issue to a mere political joke.
Garments, imported or otherwise, are the least of Sri Lankans’ problems, at present, for two reasons. In April, they bought all the clothes in the world as if they had never seen them before, and they have loads and loads of them in their wardrobes; their irresponsible shopping sprees caused an explosive spread of Covid-19, which has led to a situation where they are confined to their homes and cannot wear what they have bought. On the other hand, enough garments are produced locally, and export quality clothes also enter the local market. So, the Opposition politicians’ worry about a possible shortage of underwear is baseless.
Ironically, the present-day political leaders looked down upon garment factories during their Opposition days about three decades ago. When the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa set up garment factories throughout the country to develop the rural economy and provide employment to the poor, the then SLFP-led Opposition ridiculed his project, claiming that he was having Sri Lankan girls stitch jangis for suddhis (underwear for the white women). The JVP, too, looked down upon the garment factory programme and coined a catchy slogan to denigrate it—kellanta gament, kollanta pament (garment factories for girls and pavement hawking for boys). Today, the Opposition led by the late President Premadasa’s son, Sajith, would have the public believe that Sri Lankans will have to do without underwear due to import restrictions! The worst critics of his father’s project at issue have become dependent on garment factories to earn foreign exchange.
It is expected that the 100% cash margin deposit requirement will help maintain the stability of exchange rates and foreign currency market liquidity as it discourages excessive imports of speculative nature. Most of the commodities on the CB list are non-essentials, and the public can do without some of them, or locally produced alternatives thereto are available. But how can tyres be considered non-essentials; are locally manufactured tyres available to prevent shortages due to import restrictions?
True, the blame for the country’s forex woes should be apportioned to successive governments which borrowed heavily from external sources for projects that have become white elephants. A sizeable chunk of the borrowed funds also ended up in the off-shore accounts of the politicians who have been in power during the past several decades. The former Rajapaksa administration was mainly responsible for borrowing excessively and embarking on useless ventures in the name of development. But there is no gainsaying that the country has to adopt drastic measures to hoist itself from the present economic mire. Import restrictions alone will not do. While importers are discouraged from bringing in non-essential goods, action must be taken to ensure that the country benefits from Sri Lankan exporters’ dollars, and exporters do not misprice their goods to park their dollars overseas to make the most of the rupee depreciation. The practice of stashing away dollars overseas and mispricing have aggravated the country’s current account deficit by depressing the dollar inflows. It is doubtful whether any effective measures have been adopted to prevent exporters from under-invoicing goods to keep their dollars abroad and importers from over-invoicing goods to send their dollars out.
Meanwhile, not all mobile phones can be considered non-essential goods. Most Sri Lankans are dependent on mobile phones to carry out their day-to-day functions. The pandemic has made the mobile phone essential for even children following online lessons. There are also others who purchase the latest editions of mobile phones unnecessarily. Import restrictions, therefore, could have been imposed on mobile phones, if at all, above a certain factory price. The same holds true for domestic appliances such as refrigerators which people cannot do without.
The 100% cash margin deposit requirement will enable big-time businessmen with enough dollars to monopolise the import market by elbowing out others, and fleece consumers. Such a situation has to be averted. Most of all, the need for revising the list of imports affected by the extreme cash margin deposit measure cannot be overemphasised to prevent it from dealing a crippling punch to the average consumer.
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.
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.
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.
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