Editorial
Cost-cutting and hypocrisy

Wednesday 22nd January, 2025
Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa (MR) is willing to vacate his official residence if the government makes a written request to that effect, his eldest son, Namal, has said. This has been MR’s response to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s recent statement that the former Presidents would be asked to pay monthly rentals determined by the Government Valuation Department for their official residences or vacate them immediately. He said MR would have to pay about Rs. 4.6 million a month as rent! Cabinet Spokesman Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa has said the government will make no such request, but MR should leave that house.
President Dissanayake is of the view that the official residences of all ex-Presidents and their imputed rents will be assessed so that the public will know how much they spend to maintain the former leaders. Similarly, the people have a right to know the total value of the vehicle fleets at the disposal of the President, the Prime Minister and the Ministers, and the imputed rentals for the President’s House, Temple Trees, the parliamentary complex, etc. Why can’t parliament be moved back to its original location by the sea? Most of all, the MPs’ housing scheme at Madiwela must be turned into a university hostel complex, as the NPP promised before last year’s elections.
Meanwhile, all losses politicians and their parties have caused to the state must also be estimated and recovered. Maithripala Sirisena, whom the JVP backed to the hilt, during his successful presidential election campaign in 2015, has said the JVP burnt down about 240 Agrarian Service Centres together with paddy storage facilities in the late 1980s. Besides, the JVP destroyed hundreds of buses, over a dozen trains and countless transformers and other such assets of the Ceylon Electricity Board.
President Dissanayake has made an issue of public funds spent on providing security to the former Presidents. No one in his or her proper senses will demand that the VIP security divisions be downsized; the President and the Prime Minister must be given maximum possible protection, but the public should be informed of how much it costs the state coffers to protect the incumbent government leaders.
The JVP-led NPP government has also pledged to recover Sri Lanka’s stolen assets. That will be a great service to this country, which is desperate for funds. The ill-gotten wealth of former government leaders and their kith and kin may not be in Uganda; it must be in some other countries. The government must redouble its effort to fulfil its promise to trace those illegal assets stashed away overseas and bring them back. A probe must also be launched to trace and recover vast amounts of gold and cash robbed by the JVP from banks, pawning centres, and members of the public during its second uprising.
How much does it cost the public to provide subsidised food and beverages to the MPs? We suggest that the parliament restaurants be privatised. The MPs must not be given official vehicles. If the lawmakers in affluent countries such as Sweden travel in buses and trains to attend the parliament, why can’t their counterparts in a bankrupt country like Sri Lanka do so? In Sweden, only the Prime Minister is given an official car and all others including the Speaker get only bus and train passes from the state. Now that the government has reportedly decided to use the official residences of ministers for tourism-related purposes to boost the economy, the Speaker’s House near the Parliamentary complex should be turned into a boutique hotel.
Most of all, since the government is in a cost-cutting mode, will it reveal whether it will scrap the Provincial Councils (PCs), which are a drain on the state coffers? The JVP went on a killing spree in the late 1980s to torpedo the PC system, albeit in vain. The PCs, which the JVP has publicly condemned as a white elephant, obviously cost the country much more than the former President’s official residences and security contingents, don’t they?
We are also burdened with a bloated public service with a state employee for every 14 citizens. There are about 1.5 million public workers whereas the actual need is for only about half of them. Will the government reduce the burgeoning public service to save state funds?
Editorial
Groping in the dark

Thursday 13th February, 2025
Sri Lanka continues to be in the throes of multiple crises because their root causes usually go unaddressed. If the past governments, especially the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration, had cared to tackle the issue of the country’s national debt becoming unmanageable by taking steps to shore up foreign currency reserves and increasing state revenue substantially, the current economic crisis could have been averted.
A mega crisis has been developing in the power sector for decades, but nobody seems to care. Successive governments have only paid lip service to the pressing need to address it. Sunday’s countrywide power outage has left the government, the Opposition, the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and other stakeholders behaving like the proverbial visually-impaired men who tried to figure out the shape of an elephant by touching different parts of the animal’s anatomy, and came to absurd conclusions. No sooner had the power failure occurred than Minister in charge of the power sector, Kumara Jayakody, declared that a monkey had done it! His claim had the whole world in stitches, with international media giving it much prominence owing to its high entertainment value. It also made one wonder whether Sri Lanka’s national grid was so primitive that it lacked resilience to withstand the shock from a monkey coming into contact with a transformer in a grid substation. Even ferocious Tigers could not shut down the national grid despite all their terror attacks on the country’s power infrastructure.
Senior CEB engineers lost no time in attributing Sunday’s power outage to an increase in solar power generation, which, they said, had rendered the national grid unstable on account of a drop in demand. That sounded a tall tale and betrayed the engineers’ prejudice against power generation from renewable sources. The CEB Technological Engineers Union has rubbished the engineers’ claim; it has said that according to a report prepared by a committee consisting of 35 experts including some of the serving CEB high-rankers, the national grid is capable of accommodating 2,600 MW of power from renewable sources, and solar power production amounts to only 1,400 MW at present. The CEB stands accused of short-changing the solar power producers in a bid to perpetuate the country’s overdependence on lucrative thermal power production. It will be interesting to see what the CEB engineers have to say about the aforesaid expert committee report.
There have been several previous instances where we experienced countrywide power outages that lasted for hours. During the past decade or so, every regime change has been followed by a nationwide power failure. The UNP-led UNF formed the Yahapalana government in 2015 after ousting the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration, and a countrywide blackout occurred in 2016. Grid defects were blamed for the eight-hour power outage, but no action was taken to find out what had really caused it.
The SLPP toppled the Yahapalana administration, and formed a government by winning the 2019 presidential election and the 2020 parliamentary polls; the country experienced a nationwide power failure in 2021. The issue was relegated to the limbo of forgotten things after the restoration of power supply and some half-hearted attempts to identify the causes thereof. Prolonged power cuts came thereafter for want of fuel to generate electricity.
Another countrywide power failure was experienced in 2023 about one year after the ouster of President Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe’s fortuitous elevation to the presidency. The latest nationwide power outage has come only a few months after a regime change.
Sunday’s power failure must be thoroughly probed and the causative factors identified as a national priority. It must also be ascertained whether some vested interests deliberately undermined the national grid to advance their own interests. Given the existence of various powerful lobbies, popularly known as Mafias, in Sri Lanka’s power sector, anything is possible.
The government should give serious thought to launching a clean-up of the power sector, which is rotten to the core, under its Clean Sri Lanka initiative.
Editorial
Buses as Chariots of Death

Wednesday 12th February, 2025
The tragic collision between two private buses in Kurunegala on Monday snuffed out four lives and left 25 others injured; five of them are battling death, according to media reports. The police say the bus that caused the mishap was plying at 90 km/h, which is close to the maximum speed limit on local expressways.
Speeding is the order of the day on roads in Sri Lanka, where deaths caused by accidents average seven or eight a day, but nothing much has apparently been done all these years to ensure road safety. It is said that in the days of yore, people would write their last wills before embarking on pilgrimages to faraway places such as Kataragama, given the perils of their arduous journeys. The modern-day Sri Lankans are not entirely free from such trepidation; they cannot so much as cross the road without fear of being run over by speeding vehicles.
It was reported last month that 30 advanced speed guns worth Rs. 91 million had been imported for the traffic police. Didn’t any of the police stations in the areas through which the aforesaid ill-fated buses plied have a speed gun?
Sri Lankan bus drivers are a dangerous lot, as is public knowledge. They are capable of making even atheists pray. Their vehicles are veritable mobile shrines, but the various religious icons displayed therein are redundant, for their spine-tingling driving alone is sufficient to keep their passengers reminded of deities and the Buddha.
Expressways are equipped with speed cameras, which have had a deterrent effect on drivers with lead feet, and help cash-strapped governments rake in a lot of money by way of traffic fines. Given Sri Lankans’ propensity for speeding and committing other traffic offences, installing speed cameras along the roads where accidents frequently occur will not only help save lives but also prove a boon for the incumbent government, which is under pressure to increase its revenue substantially to qualify for the next tranche of the IMF loan.
Police Spokesman, SSP Buddhika Manatunga yesterday urged the public to speak up if the vehicles they travelled in were driven in a reckless manner because it was their precious lives that were in danger. One cannot but agree with him. Passengers usually do not voice their concerns, much less fight for their rights. Curiously, those who ousted an Executive President by taking to the streets suffer in silence in private buses whose drivers ride roughshod over them besides exposing them to danger. Their submissiveness only fosters indiscipline among bus crews. Hence the need for passengers to pluck up the courage to challenge issues such as dangerous driving.
The Police Spokesman also requested the public to inform the police of instances of reckless driving, etc. They should do so for their own sake, but what guarantee is there that the police will respond swiftly to such complaints. Most of all, how can passengers convey such information to the police? Are there special telephone numbers and dedicated personnel to entertain passengers’ complaints?
True, the police alone cannot tackle the menace of reckless driving, and they need public cooperation. But they themselves must take stern action against wild drivers. A few weeks ago, the police used plainclothesmen to travel in private buses and record offenses committed by their drivers, who were made to face legal action subsequently. That method yielded the desired results, but the bus workers and owners started protesting. They have apparently had the last laugh thanks to their political connections. The government stands accused of giving kid-glove treatment to powerful rice millers who exploit the public, and the private bus mudalalis who not only thrive at the expense of commuters but also endanger the latter’s lives with impunity.
Let the government and the police be urged to resume their road discipline campaign.
Editorial
Needed: ‘Ministry of Excuses’

Tuesday 11th February, 2025
Most detractors of the NPP claimed, before last year’s elections, that Sri Lanka would find itself in the same predicament as Oceania in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, if the JVP-led alliance was voted into power, but thankfully their prognostication has not come true although the NPP parliamentary group is said to be under the spell of a kind of Big Brother, as evident from their regimented conduct. However, it looks as if the current dispensation needed a Ministry of Excuses, as it were, a la the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty in Oceania, given the sheer number of excuses the NPP leaders trot out on a daily basis albeit ineffectively.
Sri Lanka has suffered what may be described as the biggest shock at the hands of a monkey since Hanuman’s arson attack mentioned in Ramayana, if a statement made by the Minister in charge of the power sector, Kumara Jayakody, about Sunday’s countrywide power outage is anything to go by.
Power cuts have returned due to the latest breakdown of the Norochcholai coal-fired power plant. Minister Jayakody lost no time in attributing Sunday’s power failure to ‘a monkey coming into contact with a transformer’ at the CEB’s Panadura Grid Substation. Subsequently, he and other government politicians started blaming the previous governments which, they said, had not developed the national grid.
The NPP government considers itself infallible and blames its predecessors and even wild animals whenever something goes wrong. Some of its members have blamed the current coconut shortage on depredation by monkeys, making one wonder whether those animals intensified raids on coconut cultivations after last year’s regime change.
An NPP minister continues to draw heavy flak for having faulted the public for consuming coconut oil and pol sambol excessively thereby worsening the current coconut shortage. The government has also claimed that the rice shortage is attributable, inter alia, to the practice of Sri Lankans feeding their pets with rice! Before last year’s elections, the JVP/NPP accused large-scale millers of hoarding rice, and manipulating the paddy/rice markets to exploit both farmers and consumers alike, and pledged to end millers’ exploitative practices with a single stroke of the presidential pen. But that promise has gone unfulfilled and the millers’ cartel is far from tamed.
Some former military officers who contested the last general election on the NPP ticket thundered from election platforms that they needed only two months to wipe out the underworld. Today, they are in power, but hardly a day passes without underworld killings being reported.
The NPP government should seriously consider setting up the Ministry of Excuses fast so that it will be able to present its excuses, ruses, etc., in an effective manner and prevent its members from making contradictory statements by way of self-exculpation.
Ironically, in the late 1980s the JVP unleashed mindless terror purportedly to save the country from a ‘monkey army’ (derogatory term it used for the Indian Peace Keeping Force). It destroyed countless CEB assets including transformers in a bid to cripple the economy. Fortunately, it failed in its endeavour.
Going by Minister Jayakody’s aforesaid claim, the JVP leaders must be feeling ashamed that in the late 1980s they failed to achieve a task that even a monkey is equal to—causing a countrywide power failure. Today, those who promised to defeat an entire ‘monkey army’ are in power, but they cannot even protect an electricity substation against monkeys!
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