Tough challenge for CB Chief

Thursday 25th August 2022

Central Bank (CB) Governor Dr. Nandalal Weerasinghe is facing a tough challenge. It is not the current round of negotiations he and his team are having with the IMF to secure a bailout package, or pinching and scraping to make sure there is enough forex for essential imports, or halting the tumble of the rupee. He is expected to deliver a lecture to the members of Parliament on the interim budget and the current economic situation, on 30 August, according to media reports. Making most MPs understand what he has got to say about the economy and the budget will be the toughest challenge for Dr. Weerasinghe.

Most MPs are not au fait with economic affairs, as is public knowledge, and they need to be educated thereon, and therefore they should be given an opportunity to listen to experts. The organisers of the aforesaid lecture deserve thanks. The question however is whether most MPs will be able to grasp what the CB chief is going to tell them, if their sickening tripe we hear during budget debates is anything to go by. We are not looking down upon anyone whose education level is relatively low, much less arguing that people’s representatives should be all mavens, but they should be educated and intelligent enough to function as legislators. The MPs’ blather replete with risqué and even raw filth during serious discussions in the current Parliament is really annoying and makes one wonder whether a country burdened with such representatives will ever be able to achieve any progress.

One may recall that Ranil Wickremesinghe, when he was the Prime Minister in the Yahapalana government, told Parliament, in response to a question from the Opposition on the bond scams, that the MPs did not know Treasury bonds from James Bond. There is also an apocryphal yet interesting story about Dr. N. M. Perera, who did not waste his time. When he was the Finance Minister, he once refused to speak to a reporter who accosted him because the latter failed to answer some basic questions the former asked anent the GDP. It is said that Dr. Perera walked away, saying that he had no time to waste.

Former MP Ranjan Ramanayake has set an example to all politicians, as we have said in a previous editorial comment. He was 56 years old, when he sat the GCE O/L examination, in 2019, because he wanted to obtain a credit pass for English; he succeeded in his endeavour. He was a deputy minister at the time. Thereafter, he sat the GCE A/L examination, and is currently reading for his degree in social science while serving a prison term for contempt of court. Education has helped him serve time fruitfully, free from prison blues, as it were. Why can’t other politicians emulate him instead of making a public display of their ignorance?

A news item in this newspaper today quotes a state official as having said there are as many as 68 graduates working as labourers in government schools in the Southern Province. Sri Lankans should be ashamed of themselves! Some of those who are not even qualified to be sanitary workers in the state sector become ministers and tell the educated what to do.

Among the members of the current Parliament is a school dropout who made a female principal kneel before him for refusing to carry out an illegal order he issued when he was a chief minister! Another ruling party worthy had the audacity to ask, at a public meeting, whether oxygen could be ‘eaten’, when an intrepid female forest officer opposed a move to clear a mangrove forest, pointing out that the destruction of vital ecosystems would cause a drop in the oxygen level in the area. No wonder the country finds itself in the current predicament; progress continues to elude it, and the intelligent youth take to the streets, demanding a ‘system change’. Let the CB Governor be urged to be mindful of the presence of such characters among the MPs he is going to address, and make his lecture as simple as possible lest what he is planning to say should fly over the heads of most members of the audience. He does not have time to waste, does he?