Features
Trust begets trust
by Usvatte-aratchi
The president’s rhetorical claims on Galle Face Green on February 4, 2023, amplified in Parliament on February 8 that there have been no dehydrating long queues at petrol stations and no protests by peasants demanding fertilizer because of good economic management since he assumed office hid from the public many facets of the slide down to that ‘stability’ at a low level. The economy is in some temporary and unstable hysteresis. The policy changes that brought it about were implemented well before the present president’s accession to office.
Let us look closer at what happened. The country went into default on its foreign debt in April 2022, four months before the new president took office. That action saved for other uses the foreign exchange that we would have paid in interest and capital to foreigners up to that point. That relieved pressure on the balance of payments. By implication, it also saved the value in rupees that would have been necessary to buy the foreign exchange to pay the debt owed to foreigners. That helped to relieve the pressure on the domestic budget. Those resources were released for other uses, contributing to that temporary relief.
What we can expect for the next two years and more is about the same level of resources augmented with the first tranche of the Extended Funds Facility, after the Fund and our government agree on terms. The president’s promise of higher pay for public servants later in the year is pie in the sky. Consequent upon the default on foreign debt payments and the perceived higher risks of lending to Sri Lanka, interest rates on borrowing from banks rose beyond 35 percent per annum. Few enterprises could function with funds borrowed at those rates of interest.
Banks loans, renewed year after year, are a common source of capital for enterprises in this country, in the absence of developed capital markets. The economy shrank in response to higher interest rates as the monetary multiplier became effective in its own time. Bad loan books in banks bloomed. Business activity slowed down and will shrink further. The policy decisions that brought about these changes were made before the present president took office. The recent fluctuation in the value of the rupee is a minor play in speculation. Like all bubbles of this sort in markets, it will break in its short time. Ignore the share market. It does not matter to the economy.
The ratio of imports to GDP, about 40 percent, is a fairly constant number in this economy. Selected imports were banned and the economy necessarily shrank, again. Crop failures called forth mainly out of ignorance and prejudice (with viyath maga [Wise Guys] as partners of government!), severely cut down the income of farmers and peasants and the results of that fall in income worked themselves throughout the economy Major policies and programmes that depressed total income and total demand that brought about the so-called stability antedated the advent of the new president. The central bank cannot raise the supply response as that response is governed by other stimuli: high risks of lending to a bankrupt nation.
In 2022, remittances from workers overseas rose in some degree, with the rise in the rupee value of the dollar. (Elementary, Dr. Watson.) There was some increase in tourism but far too small to compensate for losses in the economy elsewhere. Tourists came partly because foreign currency could buy a lot more after the May 2022 devaluation than before it. A room priced at $100 in 2021 (Rs 20,000) is now available for $ 75, (Rs26,3750), a lower price to the tourist and a higher price to the hotelier. Along with the shrinkage in the economy, the demand for energy fell. The ratio of energy use to GDP is (again) fairly constant. (The former Prime Minister of China, Li Keqiang, devised his own index number for the growth of GDP in China using the quantity of electricity consumed, freight carried and another as guides.)
The sale of petrol in 2022 fell by about 30 percent of its use in (say) 2018, the last year when the economy worked close to capacity. The demand for energy also fell more steeply consequent upon the sharply higher domestic prices, reflecting the higher prices of petroleum and related materials in international markets. (Both price and income effects were at play.) The fall in the quantity of petrol and other fuel sold in 2022 accounts for the disappearance of dehydrating queues in petrol stations. At my neighbourhood petrol station, I have not seen a line of cars waiting to fill up for many months.
Casual evidence of the fall in demand is the sparse traffic on roads even at times of congestion, evident earlier. There were four three-wheeler drivers who, for many years, operated from the top of our lane and there has been none from about mid-2021. The total effects of all this will be evident in the rate at which the economy shrank in 2022 when the figures will come out later this year. (That funny neologism NEGATIVE GROWTH is a challenge to make nonsense intelligible.) These adverse developments were consequent upon policy decisions made by the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government and inherited by the Wickremesinghe government.
This government reversed some stupid decisions by the former president, who single-handedly and ‘beyond the call of duty’ (as touted to boost his candidacy), destroyed the livelihoods in agriculture including fisheries on a massive scale. Peasants who cannot afford the new high prices for transport with a lower total income are mournfully protesting still, not on the Galle Face Green in Colombo but in rice fields, which ought to be luscious green mid-maha, now sickly brown affected by infection with insects, viruses and bacteria. Infested compost used in rice fields after the ban on the import of chemical fertilizer introduced substituting chemical fertilizer may have introduced pests to fields. The devastation of crops, both rice and corn, is rampant in Ampara, Polonnaruva, Anuradhapura and Kurunegala, all districts that contribute heavily to the marketable surplus of rice and provide feed to poultry farmers.
While the present policy regime is a distinct improvement on the inconsistencies, ignorance and stupidities of the preceding half-military regime, it (the present policy regime) contains standard prescriptions dictated for situations of economic austerity necessary to bring down the level of economic activity to what is affordable; affordable with low import capacity. Following the Hippocrates oath, the government, mercifully, has not harmed the economy in contrast to the earlier regime. The economy cannot work at higher capacity without hitting the ceiling of foreign exchange resources available. Go to Greece a decade back, Thailand 16 years back, and Korea several decades back. (I had written about the impending disasters in this newspaper and spoken about them in other fora for several years. Read a clear warning as early as 2013 in my address to the Annual Sessions of the Sri Lanka Economic Association.)
In no instance, that I cited, was there a surgeon present. But there is work for a team of surgeons and a whole lot of other medics in this instance. WHO will need to send plane loads of surgical supplies. A carbuncle with foul-smelling wounds spread all over this economy and the body politic now presents a serious risk of septicaemia (sepsis). The death rate from sepsis, is 50 percent, more or less, of those affected. Clean up the foul infection of corruption generated and spread by former presidents and their family members, hordes of members of parliament and local government bodies, gangs of government employees and armies of private citizens who helped to spread the bacteria. Some need to be made harmless and others quarantined long-term. The large crowds that throng to hear Anura Kumara Dissanayake, I reckon, are attracted by their persistent, substantiated and convincing promises to eliminate corruption in this society.
Fail in that and the JJB had better find places to hide in. The promises by the president of a bill that will be presented in Parliament to cure these ills in the future is neither here nor there. Every government that came to office after 1994 promised to kill the wild beast of an executive president who still rages savagely, unmolested. The present president who was a powerful figure in the Parliament 2015 -2020 did promise with great solemnity and even more bombastic celebration, that he would revise the constitution to deprive that office of the very powers that he now exploits. So will this bill against corruption be ‘Great Expectations’? To change the entire scene metaphorically, ‘Who is Sinhabahu enough ( ‘kuriru, darunu mee saturaa maranata) to slay this ferocious and woeful foe?’
The time to act is now. The elimination of this gangrene and septicaemia is essential for the revival of the economy. From casual observation, most people will not accept the sincerity of ‘unpopular policies and programmes’ that the president foretold until the general public trusts policymakers’ sincerity. The claims made by politicians of the government and some senior civil servants that there is no money to hold local government elections is another way of saying that among all the payments the government may make in the financial year 2023, holding elections has the lowest priority.
These claims and activities betray a deep-seated distrust of democratic ways of government. All people in democratic societies ought to protest at that ghastly assertion. Most people in our society will be further convinced that this government should not be trusted. Few things will restore trust in government as a frontal attack on corruption in the economy would. Government cannot carry through programmes that hurt the public in the short term without reviving the trust of the people in government which the government had lost much earlier. (I wrote about this in early 2020.) That restoration requires surgery to eliminate the foul and deathly carbuncle. (Recall the ‘restoration’ after (the Short (1640) and Long (1640-1660) Parliaments, the execution of Charles I of England in 1649 and the death of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell in 1659. The English throne, from which Charles III reigns now, has never been vacant ever since.)
by Kaushalya Perera
Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).
How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities
Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).
* Lecturer (Probationary)
– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.
* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.
* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.
State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.
Problem type 1
– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria
Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.
This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!
Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education
A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.
Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.
At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.
Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.
The problem is clear but what about a solution?
Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:
* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.
* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.
* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.
Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.
(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)
This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.
Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.
Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.
The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.
The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication
Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.
Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.
The musicians, who make up Talento, are:
Prabuddha Geetharuchi:
Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist
Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento
(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.
Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):
A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.
Chandana Perera (Drummer):
His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.
Harsha Soysa:
(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band
Udara Jayakody:
(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.
Aruna Madushanka:
(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.
Prashan Pramuditha:
(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..
The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’
In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!
‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.
This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.
It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.
Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.
Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:
Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial
TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic
Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers
YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins
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