9 December 2023 03:34 am Views - 868
However, the court decision has smashed all efforts by some of the members of the Rajapaksa family to convince the country that it was the public uprising or the Aragalaya which shook the country for months last year that resulted in the economic crisis, and not the other way around. In fact it is hilarious to tell those who took to the streets that their agitations created weeks-long and miles-long queues for fuel and cooking gas and a thirteen-hour long power cut last year.
The court ruling which was delivered after considering a Fundamental Rights petition filed by university academics Athulasiri Samarakoon, Dr. Mahim Mendis and several others stated that former Presidents Gotabhaya Rajapaksa and Mahinda Rajapaksa, former Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa, former President’s Secretary Dr. P.B. Jayasundara, former Central Bank Governors Ajith Nivard Cabraal and Dr. W.D. Laxman, and former Treasury Secretary S.R. Attigalle were guilty of triggering the island’s worst economic crisis by mishandling the economy and thereby had failed to uphold public trust.
Soon after the judgment was delivered, the former President who was also the Prime Minister under President Gotabaya Rajapaksa during the period under scrutiny by the court stated that he respected the ruling. However, apparently with the gravity of the judgment being neither felt by the country nor the media which did not highlight it since the respondents were not handed any punishment, Rajapaksa changed the tune and told Parliament on November 21 that he did not accept the verdict. Yet, had the court imposed any sentence on him and others, they wouldn’t be able to reject it as it was the highest court in the country that had delivered it.
In the same breath, the former President in his speech to the Parliament passed the responsibility for the crisis on to the Parliament arguing that every decision by the government affecting the economy was taken with the approval of the Parliament. However, we in an article earlier pointed out that none of the decisions which the Supreme Court pronounced as being resultant in the crisis were presented in Parliament before they were implemented. On the other hand, the ruling party under any government in Sri Lanka is prepared to endorse anything - even a destructive decision like an untimely ban on fertilizer imports - that is presented by their leaders. Law interprets it as party discipline, the breach of which would lead to the concerned member being deprived of party membership and thereby the Parliamentary seat.
Now, Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksa has shifted his allegation from the Parliament to the so-called Yahapalana Government. In a lengthy statement with statistical details, he, on November 29, argued that under his Presidency between 2005 and 2014 the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), economic growth and foreign reserves had improved despite the country having faced with a protracted separatist war. And he then argued with statistics that all those achievements were reversed by the Yahapalana Government between 2015 and 2019, while the economic growth of other countries in the region saw a steady rise. However, he refrained from replying to the reasons for the current economic downturn cited in the Supreme Court verdict such as huge tax cuts and the delay in approaching the International Monetary Fund (IMF) when the country had begun to see a foreign exchange crisis.
It would have been more realistic if Mr. Rajapaksa – instead of totally denying responsibility – had argued that despite the crisis that broke out during the tenure of his brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the overall crisis had been in the making for the past several decades. In fact, he had admitted the culpability to the economic disaster in an interview with the Daily Mirror last year. He stated that all past governments and leaders including him have to take the responsibility for the situation.
Sri Lanka had a strong foreign reserve which enabled it to even give a loan to the British government, during the first government after Independence. Nevertheless that government and all successive governments have failed to expand the economy and diversify it to build an economy of production to thereby strengthen the country’s foreign reserves, and transform the education system in a manner that it would be able to develop a skilled workforce that would adapt to the ever changing technological demands. Instead, leaders of all past governments did everything, keeping the next election rather than the next generation in mind, ultimately ruining the economy.
For the past several decades, Finance Ministers have been presenting deficit budgets, increasing foreign debt year by year. Projects like the Mattala Airport - which has been running at a loss since it started operations in 2014 - have also aggravated the external debt and foreign exchange situation. It was such a country that was handed over to Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2019. The leaders of that government should have known this serious factor when they promised to build the country like Lee Kuwan Yew of Singapore and Dr. Mahathir Mohamed of Malaysia.
Yet, it was sheer mismanagement that followed. Apparently, keeping the Parliamentary Elections that were to be held within months in mind, Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government announced a huge tax cut that deprived the state coffers of one third of the government’s total revenue. When the four waves of the COVID-19 pandemic drastically affected the dollar earning exports and the remittances by the migrant workers, experts and some of the Opposition members pressed the government to approach the IMF for assistance, but President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and some of his advisors stubbornly declined.
And the Supreme Court accepted the argument by the petitioners that the government wasted dollar reserves dumping them in the market in order to artificially hold back the depreciation of the rupee. And the ill-timed ban on fertilizer imports added to the crisis. The end result was the failure on the part of the government to maintain the socioeconomic status quo, leave alone correcting the past. Mahinda Rajapaksa cannot absolve himself of these absurdities, since during the aforementioned interview with the Daily Mirror he endorsed President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s decisions, saying the latter was performing well and had done a fantastic job! The irony is that the leader of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) is putting the blame for the economic ruination on the Yahapalana Government, even after his party – at the Presidential Vote taken in Parliament last year - elected as the Executive President, one of the two leaders of the former Yahapalana government, who practically ran the show then. Hence, it is appropriate for the leaders not to insult the intelligence of the people, after pushing them to suffer from the effects of the gravest economic crisis in the Sri Lankan history, which they are guilty of.