The carnival will continue

Nobody would be surprised that both India and Japan are most unhappy about the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) allowing itself to be stampeded by port and other unions, together with a section of the Buddhist clergy, to abandon its commitment to develop and run the East Container Terminal (ECT) of the Colombo Port as a 51-49 percent joint venture (JV). The Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) was to retain its controlling interest and would thereby have collected over half the profits earned by the JV. Moreover, the minority shareholder would have funded the completion of the phase two of the project involving the building a second 600 m berth to supplement the 450 m berth already commissioned. This involves a massive investment of billions of rupees that an already debt-strapped economy cannot afford. Foreign investment and assistance for this purpose in the context of the first fiasco is most unlikely. All the wrong signals have been given.

A lot of false propaganda that the country’s national assets are being sold, with ECT being touted as the latest such instance, was allowed to gather steam during the controversy that has now reached its unhappy conclusion. Eventually the unions railroaded the government into giving in and announcing that the project will be totally handled by the SLPA which will manage and develop the terminal at its own expense. This has been hailed as a great victory. Sowing the wind by caving into union and other pressure will result in having to reap the whirlwind resulting in many dangerous implications for future governance. The unions having already had the first taste of blood, can surely be expected to look for more. They, together with others who helped scuttle the ECT deal, have already indicated that they would do as much over the development of the West Container Terminal (WCT). Having withdrawn from its original commitment, the government has indicated that 85% of WCT would be granted to Indian and other investors in an attempt to win them over. But this obviously placatory measure, which some of the unions and their backers are saying they would resist, does not seem to have any buyers. Sri Lanka’s former High Commissioner to Delhi is on record saying that India rejected WCT in 2018.

The agreed ECT arrangement covered a 35-year period during which the SLPA would have received handsome royalties and dividends from the yet incomplete deep water terminal. Management, technical and marketing expertise that the country woefully lacks would have flowed in. On top of that, the foreign partners would have completed the second phase of the project with no investment from the government. Both Japan and India are friends we cannot afford to lose. For many years Japan has been one of our biggest aid donors, if not the biggest, with grant and concessional loans running into billions extended. Good relations with India must necessarily be a cornerstone of our foreign policy, a reality that government’s of different political complexions have long acknowledged. Give the looming crisis in Geneva in March, this is hardly the time to antagonize Big Brother. While Japan has restricted itself to diplomatically expressing “regret” for what has happened, India has been less restrained with its High Commission in Colombo, obviously with the nod from New Delhi, issuing a strong statement in this regard.

A lot of geopolitics is involved in the ECT matter. China’s presence with an 85 percent interest in the Colombo International Container Terminal (CICT), with SLPA holding the balance, obviously influenced India’s interest in a countervailing presence here. Over and above that, the lion’s share of the Colombo Port’s activity involves transshipment to India. This would logically favour an Indian role in the business. The unions did not resist the arrangements at CICT, or even the 99-year lease of the Hambantota Port to China. But their approach to ECT was totally different. Undoubtedly India’s intervention in Sri Lanka’s ethnic crisis and the civil war which followed fueled nationalist sentiments, including from the Buddhist clergy, that strongly supported opposition to the Indian entry into the Colombo port. Japanese participation, as agreed, would have helped dilute such concerns. But in the event, the unions threatening strike action pushed the government to the wall. The result was the scuttling of the 2019 trilateral agreement between the governments of Sri Lanka, India and Japan.

As much as eight billion rupees of SLPA’s revenue, according to its 2018 annual report (the latest available), comes from the privately managed South Asia Gateway Terminal (SAGT) and CICT that are privately run. The Jaya Container Terminal (JCT) SLPA manages is inefficient and its profitability is not commensurate with revenue. As is the case with most state-run enterprises in this country, JCT has over 10,000 employees when the actual requirement is 3,000 by the admission of the SLPA chairman at a recent television talk show. This is the result of politically motivated ‘jobs for the boys’ philosophy that has bedeviled state enterprise in our country. An article we run today arguing that the government should have honoured its agreement on ECT with India and Japan, points out that the two privately owned terminals in the Colombo port handles more than twice the volume of containers handled handled at the SLPA-managed JCT. It says that according to SLPA figures, around Rs. 20 billion is paid annually to less than 9,000 employees averaging Rs. 2.2 million per employee. No wonder then that port employees want the carnival to continue.