If the historic AKD win does not become yet another regret…

25 September 2024 12:09 am Views - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}} 28 Bookmark

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During the last couple of days, Sri Lanka elected a left-leaning outsider as its 9th Executive President and then went on to win a test match in Galle.

No one challenged the election results; Protesters did not storm Parliament, arsonists did not torch the houses and shops, and the army did not try to usurp power.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake assumes duties

Whether you voted for him or not, this is a victory for democracy. This extent of peaceful power transfer from the traditional establishment to its polar opposite would not have been possible in more than half of the countries in the world. One can safely bet on Polymarket that the upcoming presidential election in America would be much less peaceful than ours.

President Dissanayake took a swipe at the salary hike in the public sector just before the postal voting, which is a fair criticism of the political culture. But, these concerns pale in comparison to the resistance his election would have faced in most places. Leave aside leftist autocracies in Latin America and the Middle Eastern authoritarian states. Even the progressive Thailand - which is way ahead of Sri Lanka in progressive legislation and became the second Asian country to legalise gay marriage- annulled an overwhelming election victory of an anti-establishment party and then proceeded to ban it.

Funny enough, there is a vocal minority of self-proclaimed activists often associated with the left and N.G.O. captains who make a living trash-talking Sri Lanka and the perceived dearth of democracy.

A good starting point would probably be to agree that there is a lot of good in this country, including its democracy.
I hold strong reservations about President Dissanayake’s economic policies and the JVP’s political culture, which I have aired in these columns.

However, differences should not lead to a desire for collective nihilism, a very common ailment in South Asian politics, which has thrived in undermining each other.

I extend all my best wishes to the new president and his party in their endeavour to uplift the living standard of the people of this country. After all, as China’s grand reformer, Deng Xiaoping, famously said, it does not matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.

As long as President Dissanayake and his party deliver economic growth on par with high-growth emerging market economies, the rest of the differences are immaterial.

A free and fair general election- first test in democracy

The starting point for the new president would probably be to defend the democratic culture he was bestowed with. If the monopolistic and violent subculture in the Sri Lankan universities comes to replace the country at large, we will be back to the dreaded days of the 80s in no time. President Dissanayake has said all the right things and promised to govern to build trust with the people, those who voted and those who did not and eschewed usual antics such as traffic-inducing sycophantic celebrations. However, he will have to rein in the potential excesses of his party cadres, which should not be difficult, given the top-down party structure.

His first test in democracy would be how free the upcoming general election would be. One would expect it would be as free and democratic as the one he got elected to the office of presidency.

The second major concern would be the economy. He faces both immediate and medium-term economic challenges.

The immediate concerns are associated with the IMF programme, which he said he would not scrap but would renegotiate.

Any decision to walk back on the IMF commitments unilaterally will unleash a chain of events that would lead to the repetition of the hapless days of Gotabaya’s last throes. It is known that some of the economic advisors of the new president think they could reinvent the wheel without the IMF. He should not give in to that temptation. Gotabaya did, and the result was a complete economic collapse. It would always help to listen to people with real experience at the competitive level in international financial institutions rather than vernacularly educated pedagogic pundits at home.

Here again, the starting point would be to agree with the obvious—that the IMF-mandated measures have greatly stabilised the economy, curbed inflation from 70% to lower single digits, and the economy has grown at 5 per cent during the first half of this year.

Mr. Dissanayake should build on these gains. He should not let ideology or sound bites of economic populism to blind himself.

The medium-term economic challenges are wide-ranging, but one stands out of all. That is Sri Lanka’s continuous failure to provide quality jobs and a matching professional education for its dwindling workforce. Every year, 300,000 students sit for the G.C.E. Advanced Level examination, and nearly two-thirds qualify for university. However, only 40,000 students get admitted to public universities, another 20-25,000 economically better off students go to private universities, and equal numbers go to various forms of vocational training institutes. What about two-thirds of students left ashtrays by the system? Sri Lanka’s sub-par economic performance broadly correlates with the missed opportunities of its youth. Sri Lanka should build a network of universities and vocational training institutions that could provide all its children with a tertiary, university and professional education and retrain a vast majority of its unskilled workforce, which we now send overseas as migrant workers.

Even with the best intentions, that cannot be achieved with the government alone. Nor can it be done through a purely market forces-dominated initiative.

Private-public partnership

Any future government should allocate a substantial portion of its funds to a private-public partnership to create a skilled workforce. The outgoing Ranil Wickremesinghe administration introduced a pilot programme to provide funding for vocational training opportunities for 50,000 youths a year, which should be the starting point for a future initiative with a greater scale.

Aspiring states emulate and improvise from the successful strategies of the lead states. Taiwan, which largely relied on low-end manufacturing until the 1980s, set up industrial parks and technical colleges to feed them. These institutions may not rank high in international tables today, but they are a far more important pillar in global supply chains than probably better-positioned Singaporean universities. Sri Lanka does not need to reinvent the wheel; it should improvise and emulate the already established successful practices of the other states.

A new political culture

President Dissanayake promises to usher in a new political culture. Probably, that is what he and NPP could do, considering that they are much less rent-seeking than the traditional political establishment. However, what is termed a political culture is a civilisational process which is often tied firmly to prosperity. Richer liberal democracies are also more peaceful, tolerant, less corrupt and law-abiding. Therefore, no social engineering process should be undertaken in isolation from economic progress. Emphasis on good governance without clear economic policies of Yahapalanya ended in a colossal failure, leading to the election of an alleged war criminal as the president in the following election.

One would hope the new president would prevail in his challenges and usher in an era of prosperity and freedom -because his failure would inevitably translate into the failure of the country and its people.

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