Neither whys nor wherefores, let alone solutions, as government lurches from crisis to crisis
by Rajan Philips-March 21, 2016, 12:05 am
To paraphrase the poet (Coleridge), it is crisis, crisis everywhere, but no robust government response anywhere. The economy is in deep trouble and no one is trying to exaggerate the challenges or the consequences of failure. The power system has failed and the consequences have been felt everywhere and more than once or twice. Whether the causes of these crises are current or inherited is immaterial. The people are reasonable enough not to expect instant solutions, but they can see through bluff, bluster and incompetence on the part of any government, old or new, corrupt or conning. The current economic troubles are mostly inherited from the previous government. And the electrical troubles go back even farther. But the political and administrative troubles are mostly manufactured by the present government. The deficit between good governance promises and actual practices is worse than the budget deficit. The confusion in government ranks is confusing everyone else. There is an Executive President and an Executive Prime Minister. Together they made a cabinet that broke the rule for size that they stipulated in the much vaunted 18th Amendment. The size of the cabinet doesn’t matter when all it has are Jokers and no Aces. The Prime Minister has virtually become the Man for all Ministries in the cabinet and the government. Every file goes to him for decision and statement as the government lurches from one crisis file to another.
Sri Lanka joins the blackout club
There have been three island-wide blackouts in six months, each lasting several hours. The restoration of power supply has been intermittent and not uninterrupted. The total collapse has brought industries to a halt and threatened the treatment of drinking water in Colombo. Even the standby generator in the President’s office wouldn’t start and Mr. Sirisena had to leave work early. Apparently, the President was not amused. We do not know what Secretary General U Thant was thinking when he walked down, with a candle in hand, from the top floor of the UN building during the Manhattan power failure in 1971. On the bright side, the urban darkness facilitated a baby boom in a few of New York’s boroughs. Sri Lanka is not the first place to suffer a major blackout, but it is now at the bottom of a list of thirteen significant national or regional power failures in the last fifty years. The twelve failures before Sri Lanka’s, affected larger populations ranging from 30 million (US/Canada Northeast blackout in 1965) to 620 million (in India in 2012). Ten of these blackouts have been in this century, and Sri Lanka is now the fourth South Asian country to suffer a major power failure, joining India (2012 and 2001), Bangladesh (2014) and Pakistan (2015).
