Loss of trust

This is being written before the budget was presented on Friday due to technical demands of printing the Sunday Island on Friday night. Hence our commentary on a subject not focusing on the latest breaking news, but yet on a no less important subject. That is on the very-much-in-the-offing New Fortress Energy (NFE) deal with a US company where it is planned to sell-off a 40 per cent slice of state-owned West Coast Power Ltd., the owners of the 310 MW Yugadanavi Power Plant at Kerawalapitiya. Much has been said and written on the matter strongly opposed by a battery of experts and a formidable group of minority constituents of the ruling Sri Lanka Podu Jana Peramuna (SLPP)-led government. The CEB trade unions and other important state sector unions too have expressed their displeasure and a national blackout threatened. Nevertheless, the government seems intent on going ahead with the transaction now under challenge in the Supreme Court with the case due to be taken up within the next few days.

What is particularly unhappy about the whole business is that there is a great deal of suspicion that the deal is being pursued not in the national interest but for reasons that can only be called venal. The enthusiasm to finalize it is widely believed to be less than altruistic, with fat kickbacks that have sadly become a fact of life in our country today, being a strong driving force. The mere fact that such deals have been widely alleged, though not definitively proved, to have been corrupt is a sad commentary on the country’s political and bureaucratic establishments that have lost the people’s trust for good reasons. Succeeding governments have set bloodhounds against their predecessors and we have all been treated not to promised criminal convictions – only a dismal four to six percent of cases in our courts lead to such conviction – but to the sight of the supposedly independent Attorney General withdrawing indictments filed by his own department against VIPs following changes of government. Far too many crooks have got off the hook under the guise of political victimization.

We now have a promise that all documents and agreements on the NFE deal, allegedly signed in the dead of night behind the backs of the cabinet and parliament, will be presented to the legislature. The CEB chairman is on record saying that there are non-disclosure clauses in the agreement, a business practice that is not unknown. Whether these too will be made public remains to be seen. Most of us, with good reason, are highly suspicious of such arrangements. Non-disclosure obviously means that somebody wants some details of an agreement kept under wraps for reasons of their own. This is totally unacceptable in arrangements between a sovereign and a commercial entity as commitments between the state and any other party must necessarily be in the public domain. Transparency requires that and total transparency is essential in deals such as this. Let us hope that we will have that.

The debate on the budget for 2022 that Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa, presented to parliament on Friday, will necessarily bring matters of governance and the activities of all ministries, departments and agencies of the government under the national spotlight. Given its importance, the NFE deal will (or should) be thoroughly dissected. It is accepted fact that contemporary budget debates are nowhere near the caliber of those of the past where the ability of lawmakers sitting in the legislature was vastly different from what we have today. However that be, there is a great deal of published material for MPs to use in pending discussions and this, hopefully, will happen. They say, not without justification, that under democratic parliamentary rule the opposition can have its say but governments will have their way. Rightly or wrongly this has often happened in our country and the NFE transaction will be no different unless the Supreme Court holds otherwise.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa went on record a few days ago asking the very pertinent question that if the people kicked out a government, as happened in 2015, why did they re-elect the same bunch as in 2019/2020? Regular columnist Rajan Philips has in this page trenchantly analyzed this conundrum, reaching conclusions that will not be palatable to the ruling cabal and certainly not to the political class in general, elected, defeated and re-elected in the course of our contemporary political history. Although the voter has regularly said “a plague on both your houses,” he/she has as regularly re-elected their occupants to the great cost of the nation. Why was that? Because there was no credible alternative. Originally it was the UNP versus the rest. If the rest were able to subordinate their ideological differences, the first post-Independence government might not have been UNP. But that is now all water under the bridge.

Thereafter, following the defeat of what some thought was an invincible UNP by an SLFP-led Mahajana Eksath Peramuna in 1956, we have had various permutations and combinations of political parties, many of them communal rather than national, contending under the green and blue umbrellas. The reds, unthinkably, were wiped out in 1977. Unfortunately, the people did not get what was good for them. Maybe that’s what they deserved. The cynical viewpoint at this moment of time is that is all they are going to get in the foreseeable future.