Trial balloon?

Nobody can be faulted for being deeply suspicious of the various ongoing moves of the government to make changes to the country’s electoral laws ahead of upcoming elections due within the next few months. President Ranil Wickremesinghe, as everybody knows, is serving out the former president’s term of office which ends in November next year when a successor must take office.

Thus the presidential election process must kick off some weeks earlier by August/September – that is less that one year down the road. The local government elections scheduled for last year, for which nominations were called for and received earlier this year, were not held on the grounds that there was no money to conduct an election. In this context it is obvious to one and all that the government funks elections, be they provincial, local or national, and will try every trick in the book to delay them for as long as possible. Hence the trial balloons.

Although some kind of normalcy has been achieved since the shambles of 2022 when Gotabaya Rajapaksa was ejected from the presidency and his brother, Mahinda, from the prime ministry, both the president and his government, despite many brave words, are very well aware that they are not top of the pops as far as the electorate is concerned.

This is also true of the president’s UNP and the Rajapaksa SLPP which elected and keeps him in office. It is not necessary to labour the fact that life is extremely difficult for ordinary people although the affluent continue to wine and dine at five star hotels and restaurants at prices that defy the imagination. Certainly, last week’s staff level agreement with the IMF and the current expectation that the delayed second tranche of the previously negotiated Extended Fund Facility will be available in the short term, together with the news that some debt sustainability arrangement with China is in the offing, leaves some room for optimism.

But the country is clearly not over the hill. IMF assistance comes at a price and coming weeks will see new shocks for sure. Electricity charges went up 18% from Friday. Recent rainfall flooding many parts of the country which brought some hydro-electricity generating reservoirs to near spill level should obviously have been taken this to account when deciding on a new tariff. There was no mention in the Public Utilities Commission’s (PUCSL) Friday news release on whether this was the case. The public has a right to this information and ideally the Minister and the CEB will have an early news conference on the subject in the interest of transparency.

The electricity price will obviously have a wide ranging knock-on effect. Apart from ordinary households, manufacturing industries will be confronted with higher production costs that will have to be passed down to consumers. Export industries like garments are already feeling the pinch of shrinking order books. There has to be an effect on most essential sectors. Fuel prices were raised recently but judging by Colombo traffic there does not appear to be a price-induced reduction of consumption. We are truly a ‘clean suit empty pocket’ race as the saying goes.

In this space last week we discussed possible candidates for the presidency and also made the point that more important than who will run is whether elections will be held on schedule. In any society undergoing the economic shock therapy that is our lot at present, it is vital that safety valves are opened on schedule so that public hope of a chance for change is not frustrated. The presidential election next year is the first scheduled election and it is in this context that the appointment of a nine-member commission headed by a former Chief Justice Priyasath Dep has created a degree of suspicion in the public mind that a process of not holding elections until its work is done has begun. The commission has been mandated to propose changes to the voting system and address many other election related matters. While many of these have been crying for attention for a long time, neither the president nor his government enjoy the public trust that they will not attempt to delay elections if that is to their advantage.

No time frame for the completion of the work of the commission has been set. Among the matters within the commission’s terms of reference is whether an individual be permitted to contest in both parliamentary and provincial council election. There has been no demand anywhere for such a provision as far as we know, and what the president’s reasons for examining such a possibility is not yet in the public domain. Last Sunday we ran a feature in this paper of Mr. RG Senanayake contesting both the Kelaniya and Dambadeniya seats at the 1956 general election and winning both seats. Senanayake was reputed to have raised both hands when a vote by a show of hands vote was called!

Whether anything is cooking following the Supreme Court determination that a minister who defected from the party from which he was elected had lost his seat. There are many defectors sitting in the incumbent parliament and reports suggest that some of them are getting jittery. But law professor GL Peiris, responding to a question at a press conference of the Dullas Alahapperuma faction of the SLPP, said that they had voted for the SLPP candidate against the UNP candidate Ranil Wickremesinghe. There has yet been no attempt by the SLPP to expel them from the party endangering their seats, he said, but if there was, they would strongly resist it.