Mrs. B was meeting Dudley Seers mission when news of 1971 insurrection broke

by Leelananda de Silva
(continued from last week)

The Export Promotion Secretariat was brought under the Ministry as it was argued that being a coordinating board, it should not be under a sectoral ministry like trade. Its chairman was Dr. Seevali Ratwatte, the Prime Minister’s brother. In its early stages, it was managed by Victor Santiapillai, a Sri Lankan released from the UN International Trade Centre in Geneva. I had to prepare the cabinet paper for the establishment of the Secretariat. There was some tension with the Ministry of Trade on this subject as they wanted the Board to be located within that ministry. Seevali was adamant that it should be under the Ministry of Planning, as its tasks would range beyond trade and would have to address many issues on the supply side. I had a close working relationship with Seevali and Victor.

One of the things I was involved with was in negotiating a line of technical assistance from the Japanese International Cooperation Agency to consolidate and expand the work of the Secretariat.A delicate administrative task which fell to me in early 1971 was to handle the visit of the ILO- sponsored mission headed by Dudley Seers. The Seers mission was to report on the prospects of economic and social development, specially with a view to creating greater employment opportunities.

It was a large mission consisting of about 20 experts. It was located in the Planning Ministry. One of the first tasks was to select a secretary to the mission, and Devanesan Nesiah, from the administrative service was appointed. He handled the substantive and managerial tasks relating to the mission with great competence. It was a pleasure to have worked with him. I had the task of managing relations between the mission and the Planning Ministry, which did not always go according to plan. The Seers mission had been requested by Gamani Corea, and H.A.de.S was not too happy with it. His view was that local economists and other social scientists knew what should be done and there was no necessity for foreign experts who knew very little of the country to come and advice us.

I clearly remember the evening of April 5, 1971, Dudley Seers and his mission met the Prime Minister and others including planning ministry officials at “Temple Trees”. While the meeting was on, the news of the insurgency came through, and that police stations in the deep South had been attacked. The Prime Minister had to abandon the meeting, and later on that night an emergency and curfew were declared. The Seers mission remained locked up in their hotel rooms for much of their time in Ceylon.

When the Seers mission had completed their report, there was a meeting in Geneva in March 1972 to discuss the report along with reports of other similar ILO sponsored missions to Kenya and Colombia. I attended that meeting in Geneva as the government representative, along with Godfrey Gunatilake, who by that time had left the Planning Ministry. Gamani Corea who was in Brussels as Sri Lankan Ambassador chaired the meeting, at the invitation of ILO. This was the first time that I worked with Gamani Corea, although I had met him before. This was the start of a long friendship.

As for the Seers mission, this was not the end. The Central Bank followed up with a request to the ILO World Employment Programme research group in Geneva, to send a team to develop a new statistical framework which includes employment aspects of development, and Graham Pyatt, Professor of Economics at Warwick led a team which included Professor Alan Brown and Alan Roe, a young lecturer from Warwick, to undertake this task. I had a marginal connection with this mission and this was the first time I met Alan Roe and his wife Susan. Alan went on to achieve higher things including the Professorship of Economics at Warwick and Director of the Warwick Research Institute, and he is now a Fellow of the UN University. Alan and Susan have remained our friends and we saw them regularly when we were in the UK.

Once the decision was made to host the non aligned summit in Colombo in 1973, there were new demands on my time. The diplomatic missions in Colombo, specially the Western ones, constantly called for meetings to brief them on non aligned affairs. When it was economic issues they were interested in, the foreign office passed them on to me. Most of the time, it was routine briefings of what happened on the non aligned circuit.

In this context, there was one relationship which became more personal than others. I got to know Edward (Ed) P. Brynn, who was a junior diplomat at the US mission. He was an accomplished historian, having obtained a PhD from Trintity College, Dublin and his academic interest had been the British empire. Ed and his wife Jane, who was a lovely person, became close friends of our family and this friendship continued after they left Colombo. Ed was later ambassador to Ghana and deputy assistant secretary at the State Department in Washington. He was appointed chief historian of the project to write the history of the State Department in 35 volumes. Ed and Jane visited us in Switzerland and in England, and we visited them at Jane’s parents’ house in Long Island, New York. It was sad that Jane passed away a few years ago of a virulent form of cancer.

Another enjoyable task which fell to me in 1975 was to assist in the organization of the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the Colombo Plan. This was done in association with the ColomboPlan Secretariat located in Colombo. The anniversary celebrations were in the nature of a large meeting held at the BMICH. I organized a special supplement in the Ceylon Daily News and I contributed an article on technical cooperation for it, which obtained a wide circulation as it was republished in their journal by the Society for International Development in Rome.

What I suggested was adding some new dimensions to the type of technical assistance that the UN and other bilateral donors were delivering at the time. I suggested more flexibility and offering technical assistance on a short term basis at times of critical need for individual countries. In other words what I wanted was the injection of technical assistance into sectors and institutions when there was a real demand for it.

There was a problem in organizing the newspaper supplement. J.R. Jayewardene, the leader of the opposition at the time was one of the founding fathers of the Colombo Plan, when he was Minister of Finance in 1950, along with the then Australian Foreign Minister, Percy Spender. We were getting a message from the Prime Minister Mrs. Bandaranaike. It was only right that we obtain one from JRJ. I got a message from JRJ first and then informed the Prime Minister and she had no objection to it. Mrs. Bandaranaike was always very proper on this type of occasion. I remember meeting JRJ, who was with the British High Commissioner, outside the BMICH waiting for their cars, on the day of the commemorative meeting. JRJ said that he had read my article and liked it very much. I had commended his contribution in creating the Colombo Plan.

At the start of this chapter, I bad mentioned that a rag bag of tasks came to me from the now defunct private sector division and from elsewhere. One of the tasks was to serve as secretary of the India-Sri Lanka economic cooperation standing committee which met from time to time in Colombo and Delhi. It was jointly chaired by H.A.de.S and by the Indian Secretary of Commerce, at that time T.K. Sanyal. These were very cordial occasions.

The work entailed among other things, negotiating credit lines for bilateral trade. With the oil crisis and the urgent need to intensify contacts with the Middle East, the Prime Minister established a cabinet committee on Middle East economic cooperation, which met a few times and I was secretary of this committee. Sri Lanka was a member of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agreement (part of the World Bank) and its administration fell on my division. There was not much work to do here. It was also my responsibility, to manage the overall relations of the Ministry with the private sector. This involved organizing meetings from time to time with private sector bodies like the Chamber of Commerce. Most of the substantive work for these meetings were done by other divisions. Anyway, this responsibility of mine brought me into continuing contacts with Mallory Wijesinghe who was then chairman of the Chamber and other bodies, and N.G.P Panditaratne, of Ford Rhodes.

One interesting task that devolved on me from the former private sector affairs division was to manage the affairs in Sri Lanka relating to the Asian Productivity Organization (APO). The APO is an inter governmental body based in Tokyo and Sri Lanka was a member making an annual contribution to its general fund. The APO was conceived by Japan, and it funded most of the APO technical assistance programmes. The function of the APO was primarily to enable Asian countries to obtain direct knowledge of Japanese techniques in industrial management.

With this aim, the APO offered a number of scholarships to each Asian member country every year for periods lasting a week to three months. In Sri Lanka, these scholarships were reserved for the private sector. It was the task of my division to work with private sector bodies and select eligible persons to be sent on scholarships to Japan. The APO Director for Sri Lanka was Herbert Tennakoon, the Governor of the Central Bank. How this came about was that Mr. Tennakoon had been Sri Lanka’s ambassador in Tokyo and he had been on the governing board of the APO. When he relinquished his job in Tokyo and came to Sri Lanka, he was interested in keeping his APO role and the new ambassador, Arthur Basnayake had no objection.

So, Herbert Tennakoon continued to be the Director, and I was nominated to be the Alternate Director. I worked with Mr. Tennakoon and saw him once a month or so on APO issues. There was a gentleman by the name of Savudranayagam, a Sri Lankan, who was at the APO, and he was in charge of the Sri Lanka desk. We worked closely together. My experience was that APO was a useful organization.

There was at that time a committee set up by the Central Bank on tea factory modernization. A large loan had been obtained from the Asian Development Bank to modernize tea factories which were in the private sector and the committee, which was chaired by P.V.M. Fernando, deputy governor of the Central Bank, had representatives from several other ministries and departments. I was a member of this committee. The work of the committee was actually done by its secretary, V.K. Wickramasinghe who did a fine job in disbursing the funds on the basis of established priorities.

There were many other occasions where I had to sit on various committees, as H.A.de.S normally avoided them. There was always a demand from other ministries to have a Ministry of Planning representative on their working groups and committees, and these I avoided, delegating such tasks to the other members of my staff. One thing I always avoided were requests to sit on tender boards and interview boards.

Most of the Planning Ministry was physically located on the seventh and eighth floors of the Central Bank building. This was an arrangement which was agreed at the time of Dr. Gamani Corea, a Central Bank official himself. These were very comfortable offices. In the 1970s the Central Bank wanted the space back for its own use. H.A.de.S was not anxious to leave his cosy office.

The Central Bank went to the extent of purchasing from Forbes and Walker, the brokering firm, their building on Prince Street, Fort and offered it to the Planning Ministry. I was involved in the negotiations for the purchase of this building, and its internal restructuring to suit our needs. We took the building and some of us moved there, but not H.A.de.S. We did not give up the seventh and eighth floors of the Central Bank building either. So there was tension on this issue. I had very cordial relations with the Governor of the Central Bank, Herbert Tennekoon, and he used to remind me about this matter from time to time.

There was little that was routine in my day to day work at the Planning Ministry. Tasks cropped up at short notice, depending on the demands made on the Prime Minister or the Permanent Secretary. There could be a meeting with some UN delegation, or the Prime Minister might want some matter attended to urgently. I shall give three or four illustrations out of must be hundreds during these seven years.

Sometime in 1971, the Salaries Commission came to meet the Prime Minister. H.A.de.S. and I had to be there. I remember the Prime Minister telling them, on our advice, that they can make any changes within their terms of reference, but that the total salary bill of the government should not increase. Another occasion was when the British Cabinet Minister, Geoffrey Ripon, came to see the Prime Minister, and this must be about 1972. He was a member of the Heath Cabinet.

He was in Sri Lanka to inform Sri Lanka about the implications of Britain joining the European Union. It was a fascinating meeting. (Now over 40 years later, Britain is leaving the European Union) Once I remember that Prime Minister Bhutto from Pakistan was visiting Sri Lanka and the Prime Minister suggested to him that he addresses a small round table gathering of foreign office officials and wa fe others from outside, on Asian foreign policy issues. I attended this meeting and Bhutto gave a brilliant exposition on international affairs.

On another occasion, at very short notice, Gunnar Myrdal, the Nobel Laureate in Economics, visited the Planing Ministry and met with H.A.de.S and a few officials. He gave us 200 copies of the abridged version of his three volume Asian Drama. These illustrations could offer something of the flavour of a working day in the Ministry. Many times, the Prime Minister used to ring from the cabinet room to be advised on something or the other. Most of the time, I could not plan my day.

(Excerpted from the Long Littleness of Life an autobiography. The writer had an 18-year public service career serving as Senior Assistant Secretary and Director of Economic Affairs of the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affair in the 1970s working closely with Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike. He thereafter had an international career as Resident Representative of the Third World Forum in Geneva from 1980-2013 and thereafter serving as a senior international consultant for many UN and non-UN agencies.)