His Master’s Voice

We run a front page report today quoting Mr. Wajira Abeywardene, the UNP Chairman who succeeded President Ranil Wickremesinghe to the party’s solitary National List seat in Parliament, making some interesting assertions at a Siri Kotha press briefing last Thursday. The MP, observers believe, will soon be made a cabinet minister when the president finishes the yet unfinished business of adding to the present 20 cabinet ministers now in office. We commented in this space as recently as a week ago that the president would not have relished the appointment in September of as many as 38 state ministers. Nor will he look forward to adding to the cabinet caving in to the demands of his SLPP electors who won him the presidency. Many of them are already knocking at his door for ministerial appointments. Puppeteer Basil Rajapaksa is hard at work pulling the strings from faraway USA.

Abeywardene’s frequent press conferences, and what the spouts on that platform, no doubt reflects His Master’s Voice. Citing several constitutional provisions, he rightly or wrongly declared the recent declaration of Sri Lanka’s bankruptcy by what he called the “previous government” as “unconstitutional.” This, though there’s little difference between the previous government and this one. A cursory look at the provisions cited indicate that they are in the section of the constitution dealing with parliamentary control of public finance and there does not appear to be any overt prohibition there on declaring the country bankrupt. If the country is bankrupt, as is freely admitted all round, and has repudiated its international sovereign debt, what does one do? Nobody will dispute that it was the Rajapaksa regime that bankrupted the country as Abeywardene implies. But as everybody knows, Ranil Wickremesinghe embraced the Rajapaksas in a project he has now labeled risky, and at least till next February when he can dissolve the legislature, he’s a virtual prisoner of the SLPP.

When the whole country wants an election, although no reasonable person will deny that the time is not right for that at present, the president recently went on record talking about referendums. Obviously, if the time is not opportune for an election, the same would apply to a referendum. RW says that if there is no consensus about new electoral laws, a referendum would be necessary. The next scheduled elections are the local government polls due in March. The president said a few days ago that he wants to downsize the local bodies to half their present size – from 8,000 member to 4,000. He was, of course, eloquently silent on who was responsible for bloating them to their present numbers.

Nevertheless, the proposal will be widely acclaimed countrywide with no opposition to a reduction at all levels of the leeches fattening themselves off the blood of the tax exchequer. Beginning with parliament and going down the provincial councils and the different local authorities to the humblest pradeshiya sabhas, there is no debate that the country does not receive a return from them of a fraction of the value of the funds expended on them. But there is a rub, and no small one at that. Downsizing the local bodies will mean a long drawn process that will cost a great deal of time so there isn’t even a remote possibility of an election in March along with downsizing.

There is no necessity labouring the fact that neither President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP nor the Rajapaksas’ SLPP pohottuwa need an election right now like it needs a hole in the head. That is why the whole opposition, who well know the government and its president are dead ducks, is pushing so hard for a poll regardless of dismal country conditions. It will be clear to the meanest intellect that all this talk of downsizing local bodies is no more than a strategy not to hold local elections in March. The pohottuwa has not only lost its mandate, having plunged the country to its worst ever economic predicament in contemporary history, it has also repudiated it by President GR’s and PM MR’s resignations. The enthronement of Ranil Wickremesinghe, who MR called “our man” at Kalutara a few days ago, elected to the presidency by the pohottuwa’s parliamentary majority followed. Its MPs want the incumbent parliament to run its full term although that’s not what the country wishes. Various political and other forces are now building steam for a new round of agitation and the president has accused an unnamed party of attempting to grab power on the back of dead bodies.

Wajira Abeywardene would have us believe that everything is Tickety Boo as in Danny Kaye’s famous song because there are no longer shortages of milk powder, fuel and gas and things have turned for the better. The reality is far from that. He has closed his eyes to the fact that right now there’s a crude oil shipment outside port, incurring huge demurrage, remaining unloaded for want of dollars to pay for it. The dollar crunch is nowhere near gone and whether the hoped for foreign assistance is coming at the desired level at the right time is far from assured. Rajan Philips has in this page made a trenchant and incisive analysis of the present state of play particularly on the economic front. The UNP chairman may think that the president knows what to do and will do it at a time the Rajapaksas are crawling out of the woodwork. He is welcome to his own beliefs but few will buy it.