Wimps, heroes and litmus test

Tuesday 23rd August, 2022

President Ranil Wickremesinghe has read public workers the riot act. People are happy when government servants get an earful from someone. Addressing a district development review meeting in Anuradhapura, during the weekend, the President asked the state workers to earn their keep or go home. He also told some home truths; Sri Lanka had been left fending for itself, and other countries had already done what was possible to help it; the economy was contracting; the biggest challenge before the country was to straighten up the economy, and national production had to be increased for that purpose. These are hard facts that cannot be glossed over.

Surprisingly, President Wickremesinghe has transmogrified into a swashbuckling hero of sorts, and his transition is similar, in some respects, to that of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who took to politics as a comedian but has proved to be a tough nut to crack. Wickremesinghe is doing what the people expected of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a former military officer. He does not hesitate to put his foot down unlike in the past, when he was seen to be fainthearted owing to his government’s submissiveness vis-à-vis the LTTE in the early noughties.

People voted for Gotabaya overwhelmingly at the last presidential election because they were fed up with wimps as leaders and needed a really tough guy to bring order out of chaos and deal with those who stood in the way of national progress. They had a long wish list; they wanted the officialdom tamed, bribery and corruption eliminated and discipline enforced. Ironically, Gotabaya, despite his military background and rhetoric, turned out to be a lily-livered President who made very bad decisions which were legion, and showed a clean pair of heels when push came to shove. Whoever would have thought that a former battle-hardened, frontline combat officer, known for his iron-fist policy and propensity for railroading others into doing his bidding, while he was the Defence Secretary, would buckle under pressure and run away like a frightened meerkat?

Nobody would have in his or her wildest dreams imagined that Wickremesinghe would ever be a tougher leader than Gotabaya. The SLPP politicians and their cronies depended on President Rajapaksa to protect them against the anti-government protesters on the rampage, but he let them down very badly, and help for them came from an unexpected quarter. They are now kowtowing to President Wickremesinghe, who neutralised protests, and the ruling party grandees’ subservience to him is unforgivingly cringeworthy.

The moment of truth, however, has not yet come for President Wickremesinghe and the Rajapaksa family, which has the incumbent government on a string. They have become cocky since the retreat of the Aragalaya activists, and undertaken to bite off more than they can chew, where the proposed divestiture programme is concerned.

Never will the government be able to justify its plan to divest the profitable state ventures such as Sri Lanka Telecom and Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation. Such institutions help augment the state revenue, and their divestiture will compel governments to increase taxes. The power and energy sectors are rotten to the core. The Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) have become a huge drain on state coffers. They must be given a radical shake-up; it is not fair to allow them to pass their losses on to the public, but this task requires patience and caution; it cannot be accomplished in a hurry. Their restructuring is one of the conditions for the IMF bailout package being negotiated, but it is doubtful whether the government will be able to overcome resistance from the powerful trade unions that oppose its divestiture programme, on whose implementation hinges the success of the ongoing negotiations with the IMF. Strikes in the power and energy sectors will put paid to the ongoing efforts to stabilise the economy. Disruptions to power and fuel supplies are fraught with the danger of crippling the country. The government is bound to find itself in a catch-22 situation.

The litmus test for the President’s mental toughness and the government’s strength lies in their ability to overcome resistance from the powerful trade unions on the warpath and carry out their divestiture programme.