The present government’s three legs and its predecessor’s $30,000 champagne taste
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by Rajan Philips-October 8, 2016, 7:15 pm
In any creature or contraption, three legs will pose a balancing problem while moving. Two legged ones move lifting one leg at a time, the four legged ones lift two of theirs diagonally,and we tie one leg each of pairs of children to run three-legged races. In a sense, the Maithripala-Wickremasinghe government is a three-legged government, with the President and the Prime Minister tied at their ankles on some issues while trying to walk separately with their free legs on other issues. You can see why the government moves awkwardly and even tumbles embarrassingly so many times. My use of the leggy metaphor today is to say something different, i.e. to speak to three matters on which the government is trying to find its footing(s) and make progress at the same time. They are reconciliation, the economy and trade, with three corresponding files on the constitution, the 2017 budget and free trade. Free trade has several files in search of a million jobs, the most contentious being the file on India and the ECTA.
Besides two, three and four, there were three other numbers that were in the news last week that have some relevance to the state of our politics and its morals, not to mention the march "towards a civilization state". There was Usvatte Aratchi’s number – Rs. 53,226.68, the totalexpenditure of the Gal Oya Project Evaluation Committee in 1969. Then there was the report on sandwiches at Rs. 1,250 apiece to be served at a recent Police party in Colombo. The third number reported on the front page in last week’s Sunday Island is the whopping US$ 30,000.00 to uncork a bottle of champagne in New York for the Rajapaksa entourage to celebrate their imagined conquest of the UN in 2014, the last year of their prodigality. "What a rise, my countrymen", you might say, from Rs. 53,000.00 to US$ 30,000.00 in 45 years.
Last Monday, The Island carried an article by GL Peiris where he tried to make self-serving political mileage out of the launching of Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekara’s new book, "Towards a Civilization State." All Sri Lankans respect Dr. Amarasekara’s unique contributions to the celebration of Sinhalese national culture and ethos, but few will countenance GL Peiris taking mileage out of Dr. Amarasekara’s latest addition. It will not be out of place to ask Peiris how he would square the great traditions of Emperor Asoka and ancient Sinhalese kings with the upstart tastes of a government of modern pretenders that he served so compliantly as Foreign Minister.
From champagne to challenges
The $30,000 champagne indulgence of the Rajapaksas has been contrasted with the apparent frugality of President Sirisena’s UN visits as well as his other foreign travels. There should be no surprise in this as this is how it should be. In the past, Sri Lankan political leaders regardless of their political affiliations, and even failings, were generally known for their austere ways both in personal and public lives. They did not indulge in extravaganzas at public expense. It could be said that President Sirisena, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, and Leader of the Opposition Sampanthan, all belong to that austere tradition, but the same cannot be said of most of the other members of the government and of parliament. Their indulgences may not carry a single price tag of 30,000 dollars, but that alone is not enough for good governance. There are other challenges to overcome than the mere temptation to drink champagne in New York.
The economy and the budget are recurrent challenges that torment all governments. As I noted at the outset, the present government has two other priority challenges: reconciliation/constitution, and free trade with India and others. The budget is due, as it must be, in November. The government has set tight deadlines for the other two as well. A few days ago, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe announced in New Delhi that he and Prime Minister Modi have decided that the proposed Economic and Technical Co-operation Agreement (ETCA) must be concluded by the end of the year. The report of the Steering Committee on constitution is expected any time and that will open another Pandora’s Box to keep everyone busy.
The Prime Minister made another announcement a week ago, this time from Auckland, New Zealand, that the government is "working on scrapping the Executive Presidency", and that there is ongoing discussion as to whether the powers of the executive presidency "would be fully transferred to parliament, or a combination of National Legislature, Senate and Provincial Councils." It is useful to know the PM’s thinking on important national issues even if he reveals it from outside the country. Interestingly, the PM’s statement came as a response to a question by a Sri Lankan New Zealander if Mr. Wickremesinghe would contest the next presidential election. For the UNP, the creator of the executive presidency nearly 40 years ago, scrapping it seems easier than winning it.
The PM has a surprising new ally in JHU’s Champika Ranawaka who is also the Minister of Megapolis and Western Development. The JHU has been strongly opposed to abolishing the executive presidency in the recent past, and prevented a unanimous agreement on this matter for Maithripala Sirisena’s common candidacy platform at the presidential election in January 2015. On the occasion of the JHU’s 13th annual convention, Mr. Ranawake has conceded that "we (JHU) are not against abolishing the Executive Presidency." But if it is one step forward with the JHU, it could be two or more steps backward with others in the south and in the north. For every action in the north there will be more than two reactions in the south, and the recent protests in the north are being seen by observers as attempts to scupper the government’s constitutional agenda.
It must not be very amusing to the PM to have to answer questions in parliament about the statements of NPC Chief Minister Wigneswaran in Jaffna. But it is equally not amusing to the war-affected people in Jaffna that in spite having all the goodwill in the world and its own promises, the government has not done enough to address their postwar difficulties. Practical steps are needed to return land to the dispossessed; to help them with housing using local effort and resources, not Indo-Belgian steel and contractors; and to restore their livelihoods in farming and fishing. Without these actions and their results, the people will be indifferent to constitutional initiatives, and will be susceptible to provocations by political fortune hunters.
It is no secret that Chief Minister Wigneswaran is being manipulated by individuals whose organizations have not been able to gain an electoral foothold in Jaffna in 50 years. Fifty years is not a figure of speech, like fifty-fifty, but right on the mark because it was in 1965 that a Ponnambalam last won an election in Jaffna. The government being all-constitution in Colombo with no action in Jaffna will just make it possible for hitherto electorally fringe individuals and organizations to become newly elected sources of unnecessary nuisance.
Social Market Economy
The gap between the government’s intentions and the people’s experience is not just in the area of national reconciliation and constitution making, but in other areas as well, especially in economic matters and trade initiatives. The government’s biggest failure is in recognizing this gap and dealing with it strategically. What is needed goes beyond sophistications in the modes of political communication. What is needed is to address the three-legged makeup of the national government. The understood purpose of the national government is to consolidate the UNP and SLFP MPs in parliament while letting the two parties contest the elections separately. That is to say, a convenient arrangement that ties the two parties at the ankles in parliament with free legs to do whatever they can in the electorates.
But what might be safe enough for the Local Government (LG) elections could backfire spectacularly in a national referendum on the constitution. And how can a government that is becoming chronically weary of LG elections, muster courage for a national referendum even if it produces the best-drafted constitution to sell? As well, the rising anti-free trade sentiments can hardly provide a conducive climate for a referendum on any matter.
There is also the matter of ineptitude. The fiasco of the current (2016) budget is a good, or bad, example of the government’s collective ineptitude despite the presence of individual capabilities. A budget that was passed with two-thirds majority in a divided parliament became the most amended and altered budget in history. Hardly a single proposal in the budget could be implemented without second guessing and reconsideration, including the intervention of the Supreme Court. The time for the 2017 budget has arrived and the government can hardly claim that it has implemented any of the policies of the current budget.
Now, even the preparation of the 2017 budget is a matter of concern. Two weeks ago, Nimal Sanderatne in his weekly column on economic matters expressed his concern over too many cooks spoiling the soup. It could be worse if they are also bad cooks. It is already a budget by committee even before it goes before the committee stage in parliament. The Prime Minister and the President have set up two ministerial committees for the preparation of the budget, the latter specifically for the purpose of providing input on SLFP policies. But none of the parliamentarians with background in economics appear to be on either committee. And in the current (2016) budget, the Finance Minister did not quite follow the policy framework, if he followed any framework at all, that was laid out by the Prime Minister in parliament in advance of the budget. So, what is cooking this time?
In addition to the performance gap and the ineptitude, a third area of concern is about the social dimension. Where is the ‘social’ in the "social market economy" that Prime Minister Wickremesinghe is so enamoured with? In New Delhi, the Prime Minister extolled the virtues of removing "tariff and non-tariff barriers that are denying enterprises the opportunity of gaining access to the latest technology and know-how, and depriving our consumers of the best quality of goods and services." The liberalization of trade and the economy over the last four decades has not produced uniform benefits, especially for the people who have to work in the economy to qualify as consumers of "the best quality of goods and service." The concerns of the working people need to be addressed as a condition of any or all new trade initiatives.
More importantly, the working people must be prepared to be worthwhile recipients of "the latest technology and know-how", which requires adequate investment in appropriate education. There is an emerging argument among economists who see the need to prepare for a future of slower economic growth worldwide. The new focus for job creation in the future, it is argued, should be more in the area of education spending than physical infrastructure spending. Sri Lanka needs that more badly than any of its comparator countries in Asia. A new education initiative should be as far reaching as the free education initiative introduced 70 years ago. Making a positive critique of the initiative at that time, Dr NM Perera pointed out the inherent weakness of the free education project insofar as it was not geared to matching the provision of education to employment opportunities and requirements. The mismatch remains even as the proportion of investment in education has been falling well below the requisite levels.
