Tall towers, empty stomachs

Friday 16th September, 2022

The Lotus Tower, one of the Ozymandian projects that the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration launched, plunging the country deeper into debt, has been opened again! It was first opened by the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government in September 2019. This time around, the public will be able to visit it, provided of course they buy tickets. Why the tower remained closed for three long years after its grand opening is anyone’s guess.

In September 2019, whoever would have thought that the Lotus Tower would be opened again under a Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe government? After the 2015 regime change, Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickremesinghe vowed to bring the Rajapaksas to justice for the theft of public funds, corruption and other such serious offences, and their Yahapalana government condemned the Lotus Tower as an utter waste of public funds. Today, both of them are in the Rajapaksa camp!

Sri Lankans are reeling from the impact of the fifth highest food inflation rate in the world; as many as 6.3 million of them are facing food insecurity, according to the UN, and malnutrition is rampant among children. Hospitals are experiencing drug shortages, and many surgical operations have been postponed indefinitely. There are no funds for printing school textbooks. The prices of all essentials have gone into the stratosphere, but the government is asking the people who are struggling to dull the pangs of hunger to pay for taking a bird’s eye view of Colombo from the top of the Lotus Tower!

If the Rajapaksa administration had cared to rationalise state expenditure without obtaining foreign loans for projects such as the Lotus Tower, the Mattala Airport and the Hambantota Port, the country would not have gone bankrupt, and people would not have had to starve.

In ancient Rome, the patricians used ‘bread and circus’, or cheap food and entertainment, to divert the plebeians’ attention away from their problems and thereby prevent popular uprisings. The commoners in Rome at least had bread or panem, but here in this thrice-blessed land, bread has become a luxury for the hoi polloi, most of whom hit the sack on empty stomachs. The Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe government will be able to pull the wool over the eyes of the public further, and even impose tariff and tax increases while all eyes are on the Lotus tower!

There is a very serious issue concerning the Lotus Tower. It was built primarily to provide broadcasting facilities to radio and television stations. The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka, issuing a media statement, indicated that the tower would be able to accommodate 50 television and 35 FM radio services, as pointed out by a Sri Lankan telecommunication expert, Shanthilal Nanayakkara, who is retired Principal Engineer, Digital Transition Division, Australian Communications and Media Authority, Canberra. He highlighted some design faults of the tower in an article, ‘Deficiencies in the broadcast technologies of Lotus Tower’, published by The Island of 15 August 2016. In another article, ‘Lotus Tower: A way forward for Broadcasting’, published by this newspaper on 12 Sept., he has said the tower has other attractions but the broadcasting and communication facilities are absent! If the Lotus Tower is to fulfil its primary purpose of providing a consolidated multi-user broadcast and communication facility, a considerable effort and capital will be required, he has said. This means more money will have to be spent thanks to the aforesaid design faults.

Following the publication of the first article about the tower, in 2016, the then government ordered an inquiry, which only proved its veracity. Curiously, no attempt was made to ascertain who was responsible for the design faults. Here is a very serious accountability issue, we reckon. A probe is called for. It may be too embarrassing for the Rajapaksas, the Wickremeisnghes, the Sirisenas and other strange bedfellows in the current regime to order an investigation because they do not want to open a can of worms, but pressure must be brought to bear on the government to do so. The people who paid for the construction of the tower have a right to know the truth. Will the Opposition and others flog this issue hard enough, and see to it that an investigation is launched?