Features
New Peradeniya pays tribute to old Peradeniya
by Liyanage Amarakeerthi
Text of Speech made at at a function held on August 9, 2023 to celebrate the handing over to Professor Gananath Obyesekere’s personal library, the Obeyesekere Collection, to the library of University of Peradeniya.
When I was invited to speak on Professor Gananath Obeyesekere’s work, I said, ‘even though I am more than happy to speak and I am quite familiar with his work,’ I asked, ‘wouldn’t it be better if someone younger, such as Dhammika Herath speaks representing the department of Sociology.’ Here we are, representing the New Peradeniya in appreciating, paying tribute to the old Peradeniya.
My background is literature, and my training is in comparative literature, literary theory, postcolonial studies, Cultural Studies, and so on being the components of that training. In my speech, I will highlight what Professor Gananath Obeyesekere’s work has been to me as a scholar in above subjects teaching in Sri Lanka.
Prof. Gananath Obeyesekere
Let me begin with a short anecdote. In 1993, I was a third-year student at the university of Colombo. On one July day, the inter faculty drama competition was taking place. For the competition, I had written and directed a play. When my play was about to be staged, I peeked through the curtains to take a last look at the panel of judges to make sure they were ready to see the greatest short play in the world. The chairperson of the panel was an elegantly dressed lady, a beautiful madam, who spoke mostly in English.
After many hours, the competition was over but not the intense discussion of the panel. After a while, however, it also ended; my play won all major awards the best play, best script, best actor and so on. Soon after the awards were given away, professor Sarath Wijesooriya, then a lecturer, came to me and said, ‘Anna Ranjini Madam enna kiwwa.’ I went into that special room hoping very much that she would not speak to me in English. Ranjini Madam was that elegant lady, the chairperson of the panel of judges. She talked to me in Sinhala and appreciated the play, and asked me to meet her at Lauries Rd, Bambalapitya.
Gananath and Ranjini Obeyesekere at the book gifting event at Peradeniya
There we met not only in that summer, but nearly every summer after that, when Obeyesekeres were on vacation. In one of those conversations, I heard ‘Fulbright fellowship’ for the first time. In 1997 I won it; after winning the scholarship, I had to send out applications to universities. In that summer too, Obeyesekeres were in Sri Lanka. Professor Gananath Obeyesekere mentioned ‘the University of Wisconsin.’ In those were pre-internet days, and such little pieces of information mattered a lot. Now, it is 2023, and during the last 30 years, Professor Ranjini Obeyesekere has been my mentor, friend, and an inspiration for working tirelessly in my field. Though history is not always the best judge, let’s hope madam, that your mentee will be judged fairly.
Professor Obeyesekere’s work has been inspirational for me in many ways. Primarily, he has been one of the role models for me and some others in Sri Lankan academia, especially in the faculties of arts, where such role models are extremely rare. He has been an inspiration in speaking truth to power, in keeping a critical distance from all centers of power, and in feeling at home in the loneliness that often comes to you when you keep that distance.
Let me explain briefly, how I have worked some Obeyesekere thoughts into the curricular that I teach at the department of Sinhala here at Peradeniya. Last semester I taught a part of a course, recently introduced to our curriculum, and it deals with the European/colonial representations of Sri Lanka. Edward Said is, of course, an essential thinker there. Our own Obeyesekere is equally important, if not even more relevant. None of my students read scholarly books in English, but when I used Professor Obeyesekere’s Cannibal Talk, and The Apotheosis of Captain Cook translating some sections and explaining some more, my students could see a great thinker at work.
They are intelligent enough to see the main point. Cannibalism has been a conceptual tool of colonialism, the European colonizers representing certain groups of human beings as cannibals. Even more than Sati in India, cannibalistic practices, which were extremely rare, were over emphasized by the colonizers when representing certain groups of people. We have learned from Said’s Orientalism that representation of other people, Asian, African, American, and so on, in colonial discourses is mediated by power, and that power to represent overlaps with power to govern, power to punish, and power to murder.
In there, ‘knowledge’, the knowledge of ‘other’ constructed with the aim of subjugating the other, is a form of power. Foucault may have shown that knowledge is power. Obeyesekere’s work, especially the works mentioned above, shows a much more complex picture of that ‘knowledge/power’ axis. Once a discourse is constructed around a subject and a knowledge is produced within that discourse, many people contribute to sustaining it and giving it a life of its own, as ‘The Doomed King’ amply demonstrates.
Professor Obeyesekere has taught us, how to challenge the received knowledge in a field of study. In Medusa’s Hair, he challenges Edmand Leach, an intellectual giant of the field of anthropology, and one of his teachers. Such debates are now almost nonexistent in our faculty. Some of the debates created by Obeyesekere are of a global scale. His famous book, Apotheosis of Captain Cook, generated a lasting debate with the famous anthropologist Martin Sahlins. Two great anthropologists of our times responded to each other by writing book-length responses.
That debate generated some other debates; other famous anthropologists such as Clifford Geerts, Stanley Thambiah, and so on dedicating special conference panels to the Obeyesekere-Sahlins debate. As I understood it, the thrust of Obeyesekere’s argument was that Hawaiian natives were not epistemologically naïve to accept colonizing Captain Cook as a powerful deity of a new order which was too powerful to resist. Sahlins did have extremely interesting points about what happened when the Old-world colonizers met the New World, the American continent. But my postcolonial Sri Lankan mind tend to agree with Obeyesekere.
Professor Obeyesekere is the most important theoretically oriented scholar in recent times. His psychoanalytic approaches and extremely agile and fluid readings of classical historical narratives and historical characters have rendered them much richer than they had been represented in some colonial, nationalist, or postcolonial readings.
His book, The Work of Culture, one of my favorite Obeyesekere masterpieces, is an extraordinary work beautifully demonstrating a great mind of our times at work. One of the greatest prose writers to be produced by Peradeniya and its department of English, Obeyesekere uses the paradigm of Oedipus to reexamine historical Buddhist characters such as Asoka, Dutugemunu, Kashyapa, and so on.
Given as a series of lectures in 1982, under the general title of “Psychoanalytic Anthropology and some problems of Interpretation,” the book, The Work of Culture, is a rich summary of the author’s previous work, and a demonstration of how a great thinker can work with already familiar materials and yet come up with new insights with surprise, delight, and wisdom. The book, as the case with Obeyesekere scholarship, is an exhibition of putting English language at work to make rich scholarly arguments in beautifully crafted prose, that is not threateningly difficult but yet deep and complex in thought.
In this book, Obeyesekere revisits his famous argument on the Dutugamunu’s conscience, and shows us once more that Gamani was a complex character with a complex personal history. Estranged from his father, under the shadow of a strong mother, married to a woman of whom the dominant historical narratives prefer to be silent, having a brother with whom his relationship is a ‘typical case of sibling rivalry,’ and then, and finally as a king who is forced by contemporary politics to kill a virtuous king. For Obeyesekere, the troubled conscience of Gamini as a son, brother, husband, father, and a ruler, can be used as a metaphor of reminding us of the need for a society conducive to have much more peaceful conscience not only for rulers for all of us.
Not surprisingly, this rich reading of historical events and characters was misunderstood, Obeyesekere was turned into a national villain in extremely one-dimensional nationalist/racist by the Sinhala press. Peradeniya university that produced Obeyesekere was to produce scholars who argue that Dutugemunu, by extension Sinhala people, has no sense of guilt in their conscience! No wonder that Sri Lanka has descended into the political, ethical, cultural abyss that it is in right now.
Obeyesekere has been a leading critic of European enlightenment rationalism. In ‘Medusa’s Hair’ he uses the theories of personal symbols and psychoanalysis to understand mythic-religious experience at the level of religious magic. His critique of Western rationalism finds its best expression in the ‘Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience,’ a stunning book close to my heart since I have been a writer and scholar looking for all possible alternatives to naturalist realism.
The critique of Western rationalism has been something fashionable in our country, with extreme cultural relativists getting themselves lost in the domain of Natha deviyo. Obeyesekere’s critique of rationalism is the kind that would not end up producing or promoting the racists such as Channa Jayasumana.
Professor Obeyesekere critically defends the enlightenment tradition, supplementing Cartesian rational cogito with all kinds of other forms of insight, intuition, or vision articulated within the European enlightenment tradition itself and beyond. Descartes famously said, ‘I think therefore I am.’ There, ‘to think’ means rational thought.
But meditative insight, vision, the sudden vision or the epiphany of poets, or what Freud calls, ‘lucid dreaming’ have been ‘forms of knowledge’ in nearly all traditions. Obeyesekere’s study is the only book-length treatment of these phenomena in recent years.
That brings me to another point I want to make: ‘comparative nature of Obeyesekere scholarship.’ Some of his books are large, intimidatingly so. But written in elegant and unpretentious prose, they are invitingly readable, and once you get in, you would not come out of them without a feeling of remarkable expansion in your consciousness and awareness. Take for example, ‘Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth.’ Before I encountered this book, I did not know that the idea of Karma as a form of ethical rationality and as a form of causality explaining human life beyond our mundane world or this life, can be used as a theoretical category for intercultural understanding.
Karma, not necessarily in the Buddhist sense of the word, has existed in many other cultures. Deep, reflective thinking, and philosophical formations on life after death have not been unique to a single culture. This book, as several other Obeyesekere books and essays, demonstrates that serious big questions about life such as the meaning of life have been raised everywhere.
Sometimes, human beings have learned from each other the art of asking those questions. Sometimes, similar questions have been asked independent of each other. In many ways and on many times, Obeyesekere scholarship has shown us our shared humanity. I have tried to pass on that message to my students hoping to get them out of parochial nationalisms they have been brought up in for decades in our country.
Speaking of parochialism, let me touch on Professor Obeyesekere’s recent book, a lovely little book, ‘The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom’, that invites us to reconsider the cosmopolitan nature of Kandyan kingdom through the 16th and 18th centuries. Several Kandyan kings such as Rajasingha II, enjoyed having foreigners in Kandy. While those foreigners were useful as servants, interpreters, craftsmen, soldiers, mechanics, gunners and so on, it was not for instrumental reasons, the king liked having international visitors around.
The king enjoyed seeing the many faces of humanity in his domain. With such cosmopolitan outlooks, the king and the elites were not threatened by the presence of cultural difference. There is no wonder that the subtitle of the book is ‘lessons for our time.’ In ‘our time, even when we beg for more tourism dollars and foreign support, those very nationalist forces that brought the country down, can be seen promoting extreme chauvinism and xenophobia.
Social theory has been something fashionable in Sri Lanka for decades. But many theory persons are insanely pretentious and esoteric. Some theoreticians are just name-droppers whose pretensions do no more than dulling the epistemological cutting edges of those theories. Obeyesekere, in contrast, demonstrates how theories can be applied in analyzing texts and rituals in a way the theories themselves are better honed. ‘Medusa’s Hair’ is a beautiful example of that fact. Even when one does not agree with Obeyesekere’s theories, one can still admire the way theories are used.
In Medusa’s Hair, the main theoretical approach was Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis. The book deals with folk priests and priestess who perform magical religious acts. Abdin is one of them. He uses religious trance to bury himself in a grave for hours and come back unharmed. Obeyesekere spends years observing him. At one point, he asks Abdin if he ever had ejaculation while in the coffin, and Abdin answers, ‘Yes. Every time.’ Perhaps Freud is right in arguing that many of such religious-mythical heroics can be sublimations of unfulfilled sexual desires. We really do not know if Abdin lied. Obeyesekere was able to ask that question because he had a good grounding in psychoanalytic theory. All Obeyesekere books are full of such examples.
As a scholar in literature, let me wind up highlighting another hallmark of Obeyesekere scholarship, which is dear to my heart. Professor Obeyesekere has a rich literary mind. In fact, it runs in the family, Obeyesekere family. Gananath and Ranjini are the most celebrated literary couple in the country. In addition to Ranjini translating Sinhala literature into English, Gananath constantly uses literary works in his research. In using literature, especially narratives, for research Obeyesekere does not reduce them to mere facts but attends to the richness of narrative literature by paying attention to layered-meanings, connotations, sub-texts, the meanings of narrative structures and so on.
That requires a deeper understanding of how literature works. The younger generation of sociologists of this country must pay attention to the way Obeyesekere reads, interprets, and engages with literary works. It was clear from the early work of Obeyesekere that the taste for good literature was a hallmark of his work, and his early essays in Sinhala and English attest to the fact that he could have become the literary giant of this country in the generation after Sarachchandra and Ludowyke, had he stayed in the field of English or Sinhala. Nearly all his work contains constant reference to literature both European and South Asian, especially Sinhala.
I said earlier that Professor Gananath Obeyesekere has been one of my role models. Let me now qualify that statement a bit. We have a group of younger academics here at the faculty of Arts, who constantly speak of the ways of waking up from the nightmare of mediocrity we are trapped in. When mediocrity is the majority, the nightmare is, for them, their sweetest dream ever. A group of us regularly meet, informally, to discuss this issue.
The name Obeyesekere, both Gananath and Ranjini, constantly appear in those discussions. Both of them are role models for all of us. But here comes the qualification: I wish Professor Gananth wrote more in Sinhala. If he did so through 1980s through 1990s, the parochialisms that led to the nightmare mentioned above would not have engulfed all of us. I also wish that the group of excellent scholars made of Ganananth, Michael Roberts, Stanley Thambiah, Siri Gunasinghe, Sugathapala de Silva, Kithsiri Malalgoda, C.R. de Silva, H. L. Seneviratne, and so on did not leave the country. For example, the vacuum created by Siri Gunasinghe by leaving the country and not writing enough in Sinhala, was filled by extremely one-dimensionally nationalist ideologues.
Yet again, if professor Obeyesekere did not leave country, when he did, and if he did not write in English until he became a leading anthropologist in the world, he would not have been able to build up the rich personal library donated to us today, and, perhaps, he would not have been able to write the great books, I mentioned above. I invite younger scholars in our faculty, and the brightest of our students, to learn your English well and come of your parochial worlds, here we have now the biography of Obeyesekere and, his library, a road map of his intellectual journey, and make them your own.
I own twelve of his books, I can be the only one to own a copy of the Pattini book in my generation, because it is so rare now. But I don’t have time to touch on all of them here. Let’s organize ourselves into a group, and collectively read Obeyesekere books, and the Obeyesekere collection.
by Dr Gotabhya Ranasinghe
Senior Consultant Cardiologist
National Hospital Sri Lanka
When we sought a meeting with Hon Dr. Ramesh Pathirana, Minister of Health, he graciously cleared his busy schedule to accommodate us. Renowned for his attentive listening and deep understanding, Minister Pathirana is dedicated to advancing the health sector. His openness and transparency exemplify the qualities of an exemplary politician and minister.
Dr. Palitha Mahipala, the current Health Secretary, demonstrates both commendable enthusiasm and unwavering support. This combination of attributes makes him a highly compatible colleague for the esteemed Minister of Health.
Our discussion centered on a project that has been in the works for the past 30 years, one that no other minister had managed to advance.
Minister Pathirana, however, recognized the project’s significance and its potential to revolutionize care for heart patients.
The project involves the construction of a state-of-the-art facility at the premises of the National Hospital Colombo. The project’s location within the premises of the National Hospital underscores its importance and relevance to the healthcare infrastructure of the nation.
This facility will include a cardiology building and a tertiary care center, equipped with the latest technology to handle and treat all types of heart-related conditions and surgeries.
Securing funding was a major milestone for this initiative. Minister Pathirana successfully obtained approval for a $40 billion loan from the Asian Development Bank. With the funding in place, the foundation stone is scheduled to be laid in September this year, and construction will begin in January 2025.
This project guarantees a consistent and uninterrupted supply of stents and related medications for heart patients. As a result, patients will have timely access to essential medical supplies during their treatment and recovery. By securing these critical resources, the project aims to enhance patient outcomes, minimize treatment delays, and maintain the highest standards of cardiac care.
Upon its fruition, this monumental building will serve as a beacon of hope and healing, symbolizing the unwavering dedication to improving patient outcomes and fostering a healthier society.We anticipate a future marked by significant progress and positive outcomes in Sri Lanka’s cardiovascular treatment landscape within the foreseeable timeframe.
by Fr. Emmanuel Fernando, OMI
Jesuit Fr. Aloysius Pieris (affectionately called Fr. Aloy) celebrated his 90th birthday on April 9, 2024 and I, as the editor of our Oblate Journal, THE MISSIONARY OBLATE had gone to press by that time. Immediately I decided to publish an article, appreciating the untiring selfless services he continues to offer for inter-Faith dialogue, the renewal of the Catholic Church, his concern for the poor and the suffering Sri Lankan masses and to me, the present writer.
It was in 1988, when I was appointed Director of the Oblate Scholastics at Ampitiya by the then Oblate Provincial Fr. Anselm Silva, that I came to know Fr. Aloy more closely. Knowing well his expertise in matters spiritual, theological, Indological and pastoral, and with the collaborative spirit of my companion-formators, our Oblate Scholastics were sent to Tulana, the Research and Encounter Centre, Kelaniya, of which he is the Founder-Director, for ‘exposure-programmes’ on matters spiritual, biblical, theological and pastoral. Some of these dimensions according to my view and that of my companion-formators, were not available at the National Seminary, Ampitiya.
Ever since that time, our Oblate formators/ accompaniers at the Oblate Scholasticate, Ampitiya , have continued to send our Oblate Scholastics to Tulana Centre for deepening their insights and convictions regarding matters needed to serve the people in today’s context. Fr. Aloy also had tried very enthusiastically with the Oblate team headed by Frs. Oswald Firth and Clement Waidyasekara to begin a Theologate, directed by the Religious Congregations in Sri Lanka, for the contextual formation/ accompaniment of their members. It should very well be a desired goal of the Leaders / Provincials of the Religious Congregations.
Besides being a formator/accompanier at the Oblate Scholasticate, I was entrusted also with the task of editing and publishing our Oblate journal, ‘The Missionary Oblate’. To maintain the quality of the journal I continue to depend on Fr. Aloy for his thought-provoking and stimulating articles on Biblical Spirituality, Biblical Theology and Ecclesiology. I am very grateful to him for his generous assistance. Of late, his writings on renewal of the Church, initiated by Pope St. John XX111 and continued by Pope Francis through the Synodal path, published in our Oblate journal, enable our readers to focus their attention also on the needed renewal in the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka. Fr. Aloy appreciated very much the Synodal path adopted by the Jesuit Pope Francis for the renewal of the Church, rooted very much on prayerful discernment. In my Religious and presbyteral life, Fr.Aloy continues to be my spiritual animator / guide and ongoing formator / acccompanier.
Fr. Aloysius Pieris, BA Hons (Lond), LPh (SHC, India), STL (PFT, Naples), PhD (SLU/VC), ThD (Tilburg), D.Ltt (KU), has been one of the eminent Asian theologians well recognized internationally and one who has lectured and held visiting chairs in many universities both in the West and in the East. Many members of Religious Congregations from Asian countries have benefited from his lectures and guidance in the East Asian Pastoral Institute (EAPI) in Manila, Philippines. He had been a Theologian consulted by the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences for many years. During his professorship at the Gregorian University in Rome, he was called to be a member of a special group of advisers on other religions consulted by Pope Paul VI.
Fr. Aloy is the author of more than 30 books and well over 500 Research Papers. Some of his books and articles have been translated and published in several countries. Among those books, one can find the following: 1) The Genesis of an Asian Theology of Liberation (An Autobiographical Excursus on the Art of Theologising in Asia, 2) An Asian Theology of Liberation, 3) Providential Timeliness of Vatican 11 (a long-overdue halt to a scandalous millennium, 4) Give Vatican 11 a chance, 5) Leadership in the Church, 6) Relishing our faith in working for justice (Themes for study and discussion), 7) A Message meant mainly, not exclusively for Jesuits (Background information necessary for helping Francis renew the Church), 8) Lent in Lanka (Reflections and Resolutions, 9) Love meets wisdom (A Christian Experience of Buddhism, 10) Fire and Water 11) God’s Reign for God’s poor, 12) Our Unhiddden Agenda (How we Jesuits work, pray and form our men). He is also the Editor of two journals, Vagdevi, Journal of Religious Reflection and Dialogue, New Series.
Fr. Aloy has a BA in Pali and Sanskrit from the University of London and a Ph.D in Buddhist Philosophy from the University of Sri Lankan, Vidyodaya Campus. On Nov. 23, 2019, he was awarded the prestigious honorary Doctorate of Literature (D.Litt) by the Chancellor of the University of Kelaniya, the Most Venerable Welamitiyawe Dharmakirthi Sri Kusala Dhamma Thera.
Fr. Aloy continues to be a promoter of Gospel values and virtues. Justice as a constitutive dimension of love and social concern for the downtrodden masses are very much noted in his life and work. He had very much appreciated the commitment of the late Fr. Joseph (Joe) Fernando, the National Director of the Social and Economic Centre (SEDEC) for the poor.
In Sri Lanka, a few religious Congregations – the Good Shepherd Sisters, the Christian Brothers, the Marist Brothers and the Oblates – have invited him to animate their members especially during their Provincial Congresses, Chapters and International Conferences. The mainline Christian Churches also have sought his advice and followed his seminars. I, for one, regret very much, that the Sri Lankan authorities of the Catholic Church –today’s Hierarchy—- have not sought Fr.
Aloy’s expertise for the renewal of the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka and thus have not benefited from the immense store of wisdom and insight that he can offer to our local Church while the Sri Lankan bishops who governed the Catholic church in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (Edmund Fernando OMI, Anthony de Saram, Leo Nanayakkara OSB, Frank Marcus Fernando, Paul Perera,) visited him and consulted him on many matters. Among the Tamil Bishops, Bishop Rayappu Joseph was keeping close contact with him and Bishop J. Deogupillai hosted him and his team visiting him after the horrible Black July massacre of Tamils.
Sri Lanka-Singapore Free Trade Agreement
By Gomi Senadhira
senadhiragomi@gmail.com
“You might tell fairy tales, but the progress of a country cannot be achieved through such narratives. A country cannot be developed by making false promises. The country moved backward because of the electoral promises made by political parties throughout time. We have witnessed that the ultimate result of this is the country becoming bankrupt. Unfortunately, many segments of the population have not come to realize this yet.” – President Ranil Wickremesinghe, 2024 Budget speech
Any Sri Lankan would agree with the above words of President Wickremesinghe on the false promises our politicians and officials make and the fairy tales they narrate which bankrupted this country. So, to understand this, let’s look at one such fairy tale with lots of false promises; Ranil Wickremesinghe’s greatest achievement in the area of international trade and investment promotion during the Yahapalana period, Sri Lanka-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (SLSFTA).
It is appropriate and timely to do it now as Finance Minister Wickremesinghe has just presented to parliament a bill on the National Policy on Economic Transformation which includes the establishment of an Office for International Trade and the Sri Lanka Institute of Economics and International Trade.
Was SLSFTA a “Cleverly negotiated Free Trade Agreement” as stated by the (former) Minister of Development Strategies and International Trade Malik Samarawickrama during the Parliamentary Debate on the SLSFTA in July 2018, or a colossal blunder covered up with lies, false promises, and fairy tales? After SLSFTA was signed there were a number of fairy tales published on this agreement by the Ministry of Development Strategies and International, Institute of Policy Studies, and others.
However, for this article, I would like to limit my comments to the speech by Minister Samarawickrama during the Parliamentary Debate, and the two most important areas in the agreement which were covered up with lies, fairy tales, and false promises, namely: revenue loss for Sri Lanka and Investment from Singapore. On the other important area, “Waste products dumping” I do not want to comment here as I have written extensively on the issue.
1. The revenue loss
During the Parliamentary Debate in July 2018, Minister Samarawickrama stated “…. let me reiterate that this FTA with Singapore has been very cleverly negotiated by us…. The liberalisation programme under this FTA has been carefully designed to have the least impact on domestic industry and revenue collection. We have included all revenue sensitive items in the negative list of items which will not be subject to removal of tariff. Therefore, 97.8% revenue from Customs duty is protected. Our tariff liberalisation will take place over a period of 12-15 years! In fact, the revenue earned through tariffs on goods imported from Singapore last year was Rs. 35 billion.
The revenue loss for over the next 15 years due to the FTA is only Rs. 733 million– which when annualised, on average, is just Rs. 51 million. That is just 0.14% per year! So anyone who claims the Singapore FTA causes revenue loss to the Government cannot do basic arithmetic! Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, I call on my fellow members of this House – don’t mislead the public with baseless criticism that is not grounded in facts. Don’t look at petty politics and use these issues for your own political survival.”
I was surprised to read the minister’s speech because an article published in January 2018 in “The Straits Times“, based on information released by the Singaporean Negotiators stated, “…. With the FTA, tariff savings for Singapore exports are estimated to hit $10 million annually“.
As the annual tariff savings (that is the revenue loss for Sri Lanka) calculated by the Singaporean Negotiators, Singaporean $ 10 million (Sri Lankan rupees 1,200 million in 2018) was way above the rupees’ 733 million revenue loss for 15 years estimated by the Sri Lankan negotiators, it was clear to any observer that one of the parties to the agreement had not done the basic arithmetic!
Six years later, according to a report published by “The Morning” newspaper, speaking at the Committee on Public Finance (COPF) on 7th May 2024, Mr Samarawickrama’s chief trade negotiator K.J. Weerasinghehad had admitted “…. that forecasted revenue loss for the Government of Sri Lanka through the Singapore FTA is Rs. 450 million in 2023 and Rs. 1.3 billion in 2024.”
If these numbers are correct, as tariff liberalisation under the SLSFTA has just started, we will pass Rs 2 billion very soon. Then, the question is how Sri Lanka’s trade negotiators made such a colossal blunder. Didn’t they do their basic arithmetic? If they didn’t know how to do basic arithmetic they should have at least done their basic readings. For example, the headline of the article published in The Straits Times in January 2018 was “Singapore, Sri Lanka sign FTA, annual savings of $10m expected”.
Anyway, as Sri Lanka’s chief negotiator reiterated at the COPF meeting that “…. since 99% of the tariffs in Singapore have zero rates of duty, Sri Lanka has agreed on 80% tariff liberalisation over a period of 15 years while expecting Singapore investments to address the imbalance in trade,” let’s turn towards investment.
Investment from Singapore
In July 2018, speaking during the Parliamentary Debate on the FTA this is what Minister Malik Samarawickrama stated on investment from Singapore, “Already, thanks to this FTA, in just the past two-and-a-half months since the agreement came into effect we have received a proposal from Singapore for investment amounting to $ 14.8 billion in an oil refinery for export of petroleum products. In addition, we have proposals for a steel manufacturing plant for exports ($ 1 billion investment), flour milling plant ($ 50 million), sugar refinery ($ 200 million). This adds up to more than $ 16.05 billion in the pipeline on these projects alone.
And all of these projects will create thousands of more jobs for our people. In principle approval has already been granted by the BOI and the investors are awaiting the release of land the environmental approvals to commence the project.
I request the Opposition and those with vested interests to change their narrow-minded thinking and join us to develop our country. We must always look at what is best for the whole community, not just the few who may oppose. We owe it to our people to courageously take decisions that will change their lives for the better.”
According to the media report I quoted earlier, speaking at the Committee on Public Finance (COPF) Chief Negotiator Weerasinghe has admitted that Sri Lanka was not happy with overall Singapore investments that have come in the past few years in return for the trade liberalisation under the Singapore-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement. He has added that between 2021 and 2023 the total investment from Singapore had been around $162 million!
What happened to those projects worth $16 billion negotiated, thanks to the SLSFTA, in just the two-and-a-half months after the agreement came into effect and approved by the BOI? I do not know about the steel manufacturing plant for exports ($ 1 billion investment), flour milling plant ($ 50 million) and sugar refinery ($ 200 million).
However, story of the multibillion-dollar investment in the Petroleum Refinery unfolded in a manner that would qualify it as the best fairy tale with false promises presented by our politicians and the officials, prior to 2019 elections.
Though many Sri Lankans got to know, through the media which repeatedly highlighted a plethora of issues surrounding the project and the questionable credentials of the Singaporean investor, the construction work on the Mirrijiwela Oil Refinery along with the cement factory began on the24th of March 2019 with a bang and Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and his ministers along with the foreign and local dignitaries laid the foundation stones.
That was few months before the 2019 Presidential elections. Inaugurating the construction work Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said the projects will create thousands of job opportunities in the area and surrounding districts.
The oil refinery, which was to be built over 200 acres of land, with the capacity to refine 200,000 barrels of crude oil per day, was to generate US$7 billion of exports and create 1,500 direct and 3,000 indirect jobs. The construction of the refinery was to be completed in 44 months. Four years later, in August 2023 the Cabinet of Ministers approved the proposal presented by President Ranil Wickremesinghe to cancel the agreement with the investors of the refinery as the project has not been implemented! Can they explain to the country how much money was wasted to produce that fairy tale?
It is obvious that the President, ministers, and officials had made huge blunders and had deliberately misled the public and the parliament on the revenue loss and potential investment from SLSFTA with fairy tales and false promises.
As the president himself said, a country cannot be developed by making false promises or with fairy tales and these false promises and fairy tales had bankrupted the country. “Unfortunately, many segments of the population have not come to realize this yet”.
(The writer, a specialist and an activist on trade and development issues . )
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