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‘Draft Constitution will be ready early next year’
Chief Government Whip and Highways Minister Johnston Fernando has said that as pledged by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in his presidential election manifesto in 2019, a committee of experts had been tasked with formulating a new draft Constitution and the draft Constitution would be presented to Parliament early next year.
“The making of the Constitution is a complicated process with the change of times and people’s needs. People voted for us to introduce new Constitution among many other things we had promised in our manifesto. During the past one and half years, our topmost priority was saving the lives of the people. Now the constitution making process is back on track,” Minister Fernando told journalists after a progress review meeting held at the Ministry auditorium to appraise the ongoing road development projects in Kandy and its suburbs on 18-10-2021.
Asked to explain the government’s position on holding provincial council elections the minister said: “Elections should be held on time. Elections are a democratic right of people. We are ready to hold elections and we saw recently the opposition leader too is suggesting that the government should be dissolved and an election should be held. We are ready and we are never afraid of elections.
Asked to comment on the ongoing forex crisis, the minister said that it was only a temporary situation which would change in the coming few weeks. “We cannot solve this problem by printing dollars, we either have to earn them or save them. That was why we had to impose limits that caused shortages and price increases. Now the problem is being solved and its subsequent problems too would be solved in time to come. The opposition is all out to make slogans out of this and win political advantage but they would not succeed. For example, the opposition made predictions of deaths and their estimates ranged from 20,000 to 200,000. They said that we would not be able to bring in vaccines. After we brought in vaccines they tried to sabotage it, but now the national vaccination drive is almost completed and we are among the top countries in the world in success charts. Similarly, the rice, sugar, gas and other problems too would last only a couple more days.”
Asked to comment on former minister Patali Champika Ranawaka’s statement that the government had placed the burden on people’s shoulders while it could have given fuel at Rs 121 a litre, the minister said: “Patali could speak of figures but people do not take his maths seriously. That is why he is in the opposition. They try to create a crisis and ride on that for survival. They got trade unionists to speak of a fuel shortage and create panic buying but people did not fall for that. People have trust in the president and our government because they know we have not cheated or robbed banks the way the Yahapalana government did.”