Editorial
Basil’s Budget
Monday 15th November, 2021
Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa has spoken, and the people are trying to figure out what he has said, one may say with apologies to Bill Clinton. Ordinary Sri Lankans, at whose expense governments raise revenue by way of indirect taxes, expect various benefits such as salary increases, tax cuts, subsidies, etc., when budgets are presented. So, Budget 2022 may have gladdened the hearts of only government teachers and principals. Rs. 30 bn has been allocated for the revision of their salaries. One can only hope that there will not be a spate of copycat strikes, as it were, by other state workers, demanding better salaries. The Sri Lanka Government Officers’ Trade Union Association has already threatened to launch a strike unless public workers are given a pay hike immediately.
What matters more than anything else at this juncture is how the government proposes to straighten up the battered economy, shore up dwindling foreign reserves, stabilise the rupee, service debt, improve the country’s creditworthiness, and overcome the balance of payment woes while raising funds to bridge the budget deficit.
Debt servicing is one of the biggest problems the country is beset with. Finance Minister Rajapaksa, presenting the Budget, on Friday, did not forget to take a swipe at the yahapalana government, which, he said, had raised debt to the tune of USD 6.9 billion during a 15-month period between April 2018 and July 2019 alone, and the debt the present government had to repay included that amount. Governments borrow heavily, leaving repayment to their successors. The Finance Minister, did not say that the yahapalana government had repaid the loans the previous Rajapaksa government had drawn, and the country’s debt burden could have been lessened significantly if borrowed dollars had not been spent on projects such as the Lotus Tower, the Mattala Airport, the Suriyawewa cricket stadium, the Hambantota port, etc.
Minister Rajapaksa said something sensible about debt repayment. “We cannot solve this problem only by obtaining international loans. Therefore, we must adopt a special programme to encourage exports to earn foreign exchange.” This, no doubt, is the way out. But will the government care to do so? Another way of overcoming the country’s forex woes is to attract foreign direct investment. But foreign investors are wary of parking their money here owing to corruption. Who wants to invest in a country where many palms have to be greased to get anything done? How does the government propose to eliminate corruption and improve the country’s ease-of-doing-business ranking to attract foreign investment?
The need for tax increases and surcharges would not have arisen if the government had not opted for tax cuts to win the last general election. That politically-motivated measure the SLPP adopted after winning the 2019 presidential election was one of the main reasons for the widening of the budget deficit, the other factors being lockdowns, pandemic relief and the cost of vaccination drive. Tax cuts caused a drastic drop in the state tax revenue from 12.6% in 2019 to 9.2% in 2020, according to analysts.
The government decision to curtail expenditure related to the state service and carry out public sector recruitment only to fill vacancies is welcome. Curiously, it was only last month that Leader of the House, Education Minister Dinesh Gunawardena said the government had decided to recruit more graduates to strengthen the public sector by increasing its workforce!
The budget proposal for reviewing the eligibility of Samurdhi beneficiaries is also welcome. Relief programmes in this country are characterised by poor targeting, which has benefited various racketeers, and led to an increase in the economic burden on the ordinary public, who pays indirect taxes. The Finance Minister ought to ensure that his directive is carried out.
Minister Rajapaksa said there were about 300 state-owned enterprises, and the government had invested over Rs. 670 billion therein and spent as much as Rs. 75 billion to maintain them, but most of them did not yield returns. What does the government propose to do with the loss-incurring ones? Is it planning to divest them or run them as Public Private Partnerships? Most of these state institutions in debt could be turned around if properly managed without political interference.
The Finance Minister has proposed that Rs. 8.5 billion, which Perpetual Treasuries Ltd., has earned through the bond scams, be transferred to the state coffers. Similarly, will probes be conducted into the sugar tax racket and other such frauds which have benefited the SLPP financiers, and action taken to confiscate the illegally raised funds?
Meanwhile, the Budget 2022 will not yield the intended results unless the government gets its act together on the health front. It may be recalled that the economy began to recover and the country recorded an economic growth of 8% during the first half of 2021 owing to the successful vaccine rollout. But thanks to the government’s refusal to impose travel restrictions in April to prevent an explosive spread of Covid-19, and resultant lockdowns, the economic growth rate is expected to drop to 5% or even 4% for the current year. The pandemic is spreading fast, and if the country happens to be locked down again, as feared by health experts, the economy will be in a far worse situation.
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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