By

C.A.Chandraprema

The government that came into power promising good governance or yahapalanaya is already showing signs of coming apart at the seams. Even the unexpected demise of Ven. Sobitha was being blamed indirectly on the yahapalana government with the late monk’s closest political associate, Dr Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri of FUTA fame telling The Island that people began questioning Ven Sobitha about the doings of the yahapalana government and were expecting the senior monk to do something to correct the course of the government and that the Ven. monk’s health deteriorated because he just couldn’t take the pressure. It also so transpires that President Maithripala Sirisena had not gone to see Ven. Sobitha during his final illness not necessarily out of callous indifference but possibly out of fear of what the ailing monk may say to him the president’s detractors say.

We understand that even prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe had not gone to see Ven Sobitha during his final illness but that obviously could not be due to any fear of what the monk may say to him because Wickremesinghe himself is the principle victim of yahapalanaya. He got his party supporters to vote for Maithripala Sirisena on the pledge that the executive presidency would be abolished and executive power entrusted to the prime minister and the cabinet. Yet this did not happen and the UNP which won the August 2015 election just as well as Chandrika Kumaratunga won the 1994 parliamentary election has been unable to form a government and are relegated to holding less than half the cabinet portfolios with the best subjects allocated to the president’s cronies. Naturally dissension is spreading within the UNP at grassroots level.

It will take a while for this resentment to boil to the surface as the marginalization of the UNP has come about only after August this year. Until the parliamentary election, the UNP was generally OK, and were controlling the best portfolios in what was essentially a UNP led government even though there were a considerable number of UPFA ministers who held portfolios of secondary importance. The UNP rank and file are now waiting for the budget and the allocation of money to the ministries in the hope that may alleviate some of their woes. The real fireworks in the UNP will begin only early next year if the rank and file find that their hopes do not materialize even after money is allocated to the ministries.

President Maithripala Sirisena’s renewed pledge to abolish the executive presidency at the funeral of Ven. Sobitha was met with much scepticism especially from UNP types. The pro-UNP Lanka e News website cynically said that Maithripala Sirisena had not abolished the executive presidency through the 19th Amendment when Sobitha Thera was alive and that the people will no longer take his pledges seriously. The article further said that that Sirisena should match his words with deeds by initiating a constitutional amendment to this effect. It however seems unlikely that President Sirisena will do anything to abolish the executive presidency because if he does so, he will be reduced to a cipher overnight and will most probably lose control of the SLFP itself. This will no doubt happen at some point, but he can postpone the day by holding onto the executive presidency for as long as he can.

Fighting over nothing

If anything the infighting within the government over the Avant Garde affair which came to a head early last week with the resignation of Minister Tilak Marapana highlighted above all else how dysfunctional the government is. It is not unusual at all for there to be clashes between the ministers of the same government, which sometimes have ended up in physical violence and the occurrence of such incidents do not necessarily mean that the government is about to fall. But the clash within the present government over the Avant Garde affair is in a class of its own. This is a government that never called a special cabinet meeting to discuss any of the disasters that have befallen the country since it assumed office in January. The tea and rubber markets have collapsed, the rupee is in freefall, Sri Lanka was on the cusp of a balance of payments crisis, foreign money was being withdrawn from the bond market, foreign reserves were in sharp decline, money was being printed at a rate and meeting the inflated state wage bill was becoming a daily struggle; yet none of these multiple crises inspired the government to hold an emergency cabinet meeting.

But a special cabinet meeting was held to discuss Avant Garde! Ordinary folk cannot make head or tail of what is happening. It may be as is now being said by many that this is due to some ministers trying to get the lucrative maritime security business handled by Avant Garde given to their own cronies. Even if this clash in the cabinet is due to all important financial considerations, it still has gone much further than any similar clash in the past. Though such clashes over business and money matters may occur within governments, most often, the public never heard of them, as the common interest of holding onto power ensured that nobody made the clashes public. Lanka e News pointedly said that this whole Avant Garde affair was due to three ministers wanting the lucrative maritime security business given to their cronies.

The entire government is split down the middle over this affair which is hardly an important matter of state. If such ballistic differences can emerge over a relatively unimportant matter like a security business, the government will not survive a real divergence of interests which affects the rank and file of the partner parties in the government. In fact such an issue already exists in the form of the marginalization of the UNP with the best portfolios given to president Sirisena’s cronies. If the UNP rank and file finds out after the budget that things have not improved after money is allocated to the ministries their party has got, then we will see a confrontation that will make the clash over Avant Garde look like a picnic.

Sunanda Deshapriya had in fact written last week that with the power struggle within the government coming to the fore, it has become necessary for what he calls ‘civil society’ (meaning the foreign funded NGOs) to come to the fore to protect the ‘revolution’ of January 2015. He speaks of the example of Tunisia where the intervention of four organizations, the Tunisian Bar Association, a human rights organization and two trade unions known as the Tunisan quartet, managed to prevent the descent of Tunisia into anarchy like the other ‘Arab spring’ states and he states that a similar intervention is necessary in Sri Lanka to save the January yahapalana revolution. Sunanda states that Maithripala Sirisena or Ranil Wickremesinghe could not have won the January revolution on their own and neither would have succeeded without the help of the Tamil and Muslim political parties.

Furthermore he points out that even though President Sirisena was elected on a majority of UNP votes, if not for Sirisena’s ‘intervention’ the UNP would not have won the August parliamentary election and that therefore all parties to the yahapalana revolution are in a state of interdependence. Yet he laments that each side is now trying to defeat the other. Sunanda states that instead of trying to defeat one another, both parties to the yahapalana revolution should be made to work towards the three main objectives of that revolution – the ushering in of a democratic constitution, the taking of action in regard to the alleged incidents of the last few months of the war and the probing of Rajapaksa corruption. Sunanda had said that he will be continuing this discussion next week. Since he is on the subject, the present writer would like to make the following observations on Sunanda Deshapriya’s views.

By speaking of the interdependence of Srisena upon Ranil and both of them on the minority parties and vice versa, Sunanda is making a typical NGO style flowers and good feelings statement. He is not going to solve anything by making unrealistically lofty statements of this nature. The need of the hour is to recognize the bare facts which are as follows. Until the January change of government, the UNP was the main opposition political party. Many minority parties like the SLMC, and CWC showed a marked preference to be allied with the UNP rather than with the SLFP led coalition and within the past decade, both the SLMC and CWC made repeated attempts to form governments with the UNP after decamping from the PA/UPFA but they had to go on their bended knees back to the UPFA when the UNP failed.

If this writer remembers correctly, the SLMC had to go crawling back to Chandrika once and to Mahinda no less than three times. The CWC had to go back to the PA/UPFA on their bended knees three times. In the case of Mano Ganesan, he has always had a propensity to stick with the UNP and has never been in alliance with the SLFP. Hence the minorities have always preferred to be in alliance with the UNP. Furthermore the UNP has been in opposition for almost twenty years with a 30 month blip in between and even during that short term in government, the UNP rank and file did not have an opportunity to have their grievances addressed. If democratic system is to work there have to be real changes of government from time to time.

In January this year, well over two thirds of the votes that Sirisena got were entirely UNP votes (as distinct from the votes of the UNP’s minority party allies like Mano Ganesan, P.Digambaram and others.) The original idea was that Sirisena would win the presidential election and then abolish the executive presidency and all power would be ceded to the prime minister and the cabinet. If Sirisena had told the UNP voters that he would remain in the post of executive president after the January election, many of them would not have backed him. Had the executive presidency been abolished, the UNP would have been strengthened immeasurably and would not be in need of Sirisena’s help to win the August parliamentary election. In any case if Sirisena gave the UNP any help at the August election, he did that for his own survival and not necessarily for the benefit of the UNP. The latter in fact would have been better off losing the August parliamentary election rather than winning it because what they have got in terms of ministries are just the leftovers.

By giving the best portfolios to non-UNP ministers and ensuring that the majority within the present cabinet is non-UNP, Sirisena has put the UNP under enormous strain as it is they who were out in the cold for nearly two decades. The village level UNP activists and voters have no way of getting their grievances addressed because the best portfolios are in the hands of non-UNP ministers. Maithripala Sirisena and all the non-UNP ministers in the present government have wielded power for nearly a full two decades and want to continue at the expense of the UNP. The people voted for a change, meaning that they wanted a UNP led government not another SLFP-led one. It is obvious that the vast majority of the youth voters voted with the UNP at the August election. But there is no change of government and many of the faces in the government are the same as during the past two decades.

So instead of making dishonest and unproductive statements about the ‘interdependence’ of the yahapalana partners, people like Sunanda Deshapriya should be honest enough to call a spade a spade and admit that the UNP voter has been seriously short changed in this whole game. Deshapriya and his NGO colleagues should make an announcement that they will be backing the UNP fully at the forthcoming local government election so as to bring pressure on Sirisena to be fair by the party that contributed most to bringing him into power. Sirisena for his part should do justice by the UNP by giving them proper portfolios. If people like Sunanda Deshapriya beat around the bush trying to save the yahapalanaya outfit that will only result in both the Sirisena faction and the UNP going down the drainpipe together. The better course of action would be to salvage the UNP and sacrifice the rest. If the change of government that people voted for is not given full reign at least for a few years, that will result in a skewing of the democratic system from which this country may never recover.

The budget blues

The next week will be one of wondering how the government handles the looming budget deficit. Everybody knows that you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs and now the guessing game is on as to whose eggs will be broken in the process. Back in September, an IMF team that visited Sri Lanka stressed among other things the need to rein imports for consumption, the need to maintain foreign exchange reserves, to keep an eye on core inflation, to allow the rupee to depreciate to a realistic level, the need to reduce public debt and to keep the budget deficit at a manageable level, to improve tax revenue, introduce market based pricing for fuel and electricity and to restructure and put public enterprises on a commercial footing among other things. Looking at the IMF statement of 18 September and the Prime Minister’s statement on economic policy of 5 November, one gets the impression that the PM was actually talking to the IMF rather than the Sri Lankan public.

The prime minister in making his special statement to parliament made all the right noises – the noises that we should hear from a UNP prime minister. He stated that since Sri Lanka was now a lower middle-income country and that we have lost ‘the right to claim financial aid and benefits’, we cannot spend more than we earn, anymore. This was obviously a realization that had eluded the new government when the mini-budget was passed earlier this year! Be that as it may, the PM spoke of a competitive exchange rate policy, the need to reduce public debt, the need to reduce tax concessions and to eliminate ‘one off taxes’ (like the super gains tax). He also pledged to restructure the state owned enterprises and to bring them all under one holding company and to sell these shares to the public so as to produce a ‘business owning citizenry’.

A particular stroke of genius was the use of the Constitutional Council to make the message of privatization more palatable to the public. When the public enterprises are brought under one umbrella and shares of these are to be vested in a Trust with the Treasury and the Central Bank being the custodians of this trust. The Constitutional Council would name the members of the board that would run this outfit. This Council was seen as a panacea for all our ills and this is an ingenious way of making use of this body to make the public accept what has hitherto been unacceptable. Whether the trade unions will be lulled by the mention of the Constitutional Council is yet to be seen. Another purpose for which the name of the Constitutional Council was used by the prime minister was in the conversion of the EPF and ETF into a pension fund so that it pays out a pension instead of handing out a lump sum payment to private sector employees when they retire.

In the case of the EPF and ETF as well, the constitutional council would make appointments to the body that would control it once it is converted into a pension fund. Once again it is yet to be seen whether the mention of the constitutional council will make the conversion of these bodies into a pension fund more palatable to the people. This has the potential to blow up in the face of the government if not handled properly – and there is hardly anything that the government has handled properly since they came into power. Furthermore, if the immediate need is to convince the IMF to bail the government out, then there is no need to touch the EPF and ETF because the IMF has not said anything about those organizations. The IMF however will be pleased with the plans to privatize state owned enterprises like hotels and Lanka Hospitals. All in all, it is clear that the prime minister’s statement on economic policy on 5 November was meant to reassure the multilateral lending agencies as to the intentions of the government ahead of the budget. It certainly acted as an incentive for the private sector as well, because the stock market picked up slightly after the PM’s speech.

But two or three days after the PM’s speech, the mood turned cautious again because the PM’s words are just those. Nobody knows how the budget will turn out in the end given the hard realities confronting the government. The stock market is now down again. We seem to be confronted once again with the situation that prevailed after December 2001 when the stock market remained in a slump even after the UNP assumed office and continued in that state until the last few months of that short-lived government. Even though the stock market should pick up after a pro-business UNP government assumes power, what happened this time was that there was a sharp drop and then it hit plateau and remains stagnant. Nothing seems to inspire confidence. This is due to the uncertainty surrounding how the budget will finally turn out.

Courtesy:Sunday Island