Editorial
Thus spake Prez
Thursday 9th February, 2023
President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who presented his government’s policy statement in Parliament, yesterday, sounded like a seasoned insurance sales agent with glib phrases rolling off his experienced tongue; he sought to scare the public and infuse them with hope, at the same time, to sell his policies. The knee-jerk reaction of the Opposition was to denounce the President’s address as snake oil, but it, in our book, is not devoid of substance and deserves critical appraisal and not cynical dismissal.
The President’s speech touched on many things. It contained a promise to build a secure future for the youth, and a boastful claim that when Wickremesinghe took over as the President there had been queues for essential commodities but now there was economic stability and the people were comfortable. This ‘improvement’ is not due to the government’s competent handling of the economy. Thanks to the country’s shameful debt default, some forex is now available for essential imports, and fuel rationing has helped contain the petroleum crisis to some extent. This cannot be considered an achievement by any stretch of the imagination.
President Wickremesinghe also preened himself on the fact that the government had been able ‘to increase the foreign reserves which had fallen to zero up to USD 500 million’. This certainly is no mean achievement, but the blame for the present forex crisis should be apportioned to the President and his party. The Exchange Control Act of 1953 helped prevent questionable forex outflows; it made violations thereof non-bailable criminal offences. Exporters were required to bring back an equivalent of foreign exchange of the worth of their exports, or more, via the banking system, and the properties of the offenders were confiscated. In 2017, the UNP-led Yahapalana government replaced that law with the Foreign Exchange Act much to the detriment of the country’s interests, and the new law has stood foreign exchange racketeers in good stead and contributed to the current forex crisis. If the country’s foreign reserves are to be built significantly, the Exchange Control Act will have to be restored. It is hoped that the IMF will pay attention to this pressing need.
President Wickremesinghe, yesterday, tried to justify the controversial tax increases that have driven workers to protest. He would have the public believe that the measures his government had adopted to increase its tax revenue were in keeping with some recommendations made by the Sri Lanka Administrative Service Association—reintroduction of PAYE, making all officers of state enterprises pay taxes from their salaries and not through their institutions and employers, reintroduction of withholding tax, suspension of all tax exemptions and revision of the income slabs for taxation and the level of turnover subject to VAT.
Those who are protesting against tax increases are not refusing to pay taxes. Given high inflation, after tax deductions and the payment of loan installments, they are left without any money to feed and clothe their family members. They are demanding that taxes be brought down to affordable levels. Another reason for their protests is rampant corruption as well as the culture of impunity, which enables politicians and their kith and kin to help themselves to public money. Members of the political families are living the high life without any legitimate sources of income while the people are paying taxes and struggling to dull the pangs of hunger.
The President, yesterday, dangled a carrot while claiming that he did not engage in populist politics. He said the government would be able to ‘give an additional allowance to public servants in the third and fourth quarters of the year, and grant concessions to the private sector’. The public sector has about 1.7 million workers although the country can manage with half that number. The President is offering to grant them an allowance despite the economic crisis!
It is widely believed that the present economic crisis could have been averted if IMF assistance had been sought in time. President Wickremesinghe’s policy statement endorses this view. The President said: “We left the IMF in 2020. That short-sighted decision has also affected the current situation. Bangladesh was able to obtain IMF assistance early, as they had continued to be in that process. We had to initiate the process from the beginning. However, amidst all the difficulties, we started this journey.” Interestingly, the President has contradicted former Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa albeit unwittingly. Rajapaksa said in a recent television interview that the SLPP government had been in touch with the IMF throughout, and there had been no delay in seeking the latter’s assistance.
President Wickremesinghe also promised less government. He said the strategy of the government should be to guide the private sector in business activities while being in the background. He will not find it difficult to sell this idea, given people’s resentment at the ever-burgeoning public sector, and the sheer number of loss-incurring state-owned ventures.
One wonders whether President Wickremesinghe, who should remain maniacally focused on reviving the economy, has sought to bite off more than he can chew. He has undertaken to implement the 13th Amendment fully, introduce a host of other laws and set up countless institutions. Yesterday, he promised maximum devolution within a unitary state. This can be taken as a pledge to implement the 13th Amendment fully, and the government is bound to have more problems to contend with on the political front.
The President called for unity and a concerted effort to expedite economic recovery. It behoves everyone to heed this call. But the government, for its part, ought to abandon its confrontational approach, learn to tolerate dissent and, above all, extend the hand of friendship to its political opponents, warring trade unions, etc.
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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