JVP comes out strongly against hasty selling of what’s left of family silver by incumbent govt

By Saman Indrajith

Sri Lanka polity is set to face a ‘do or die’ struggle in the coming months, says JVP-led NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake.

Addressing a seminar at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute in Colombo on Tuesday (2) under the theme of ‘Untold truth of selling off national assets’ Dissanayake said this is going to be a very decisive year for Lankan people as the government has fast-tracked its moves to sell off national assets in an unprecedented manner.

“The CEB is to be divided into parcels which could be sold off and the amendments to the laws for this purpose are to be passed within this month in Parliament. They have likewise fast tracked the processes of selling off the Insurance Corporation and Telecom. For suppressing upcoming public outcry against privatizing these national assets, new draconian provisions are to be in place with the passing of the Anti-Terrorism Bill and Online safety Bill.

JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake addressing the seminar

Both the processes of selling off national assets and implementing new laws to suppress people’s voices against it have been fast-tracked and the government is in a mighty hurry to get these done in the shortest possible time. As such we as a nation are being pushed towards a very decisive time. The seven to eight months to come will witness the most decisive struggle and it is going to be a do or die type struggle,” Dissanayake said.

Dissanayake said that people would have to fight against privatization and make it count because that struggle would decide the future of the nation. “The government has no excuse for selling these national enterprises but the very same old pretext that they are loss making and a burden to the national economy and the treasury.

This brings to our mind how these very same people had been harping on the same tune before the end of the war, that the country could not be developed because of the expenses for the war effort. Maithripala Sirisena as the minister of health went on saying that two new hospitals could be built if we had saved money spent for firing rockets from multi-barrel rocket launchers for 24 days. People now know how money was used for development in the post-war period.

“They now say the same about public enterprises ear-marked for selling off. They tell people that if we sell them off, the money saved could be channeled into health, education, and other welfare programmes. Experience shows that this is a lie. Twenty-one plantation companies were sold to private companies, and 18 of them have been reported to make losses and cannot even increase the daily wage of a worker to Rs 1,000. Almost all those companies have not settled their loans to banks.

The end result is now the tea industry is in the hands of low-country tea-small holders. How could this happen if privatizing was good. As of now seven financial companies, 41 industries and 21 plantations have been sold off. Among them were the Ceylon Oxygen Company, Ceylon Leather Products, Lakspray Company, the Nylon Company under Ceylon Petroleum, Mattegoda Textiles Company, Ceylon Oils and Fats Corporation, Hingurana Sugar Factory, Mahaweli Marine Corporation, and Eastern Paper Mills Corporation. None of them are in existence today. If privatizing is good, they would have thrived after selling off,” Dissanayake said.NPP National Executive Committee member Prof Anil Jayantha also addressed the seminar.