Features
Sri Lanka struck hard as COVID-19 starts global second wave
by Rajan Philips
After months of Covid-quiet, the coronavirus has hit the country hard. Sri Lanka’s 33rd Covid-cluster could not have erupted in Minuwangoda any more suddenly and in larger numbers. It caught the government literally holding its constitutional pants to the neglect of everything else. After stagnating for months at 3,200+ cases, the Sri Lankan Covid-19 total rose by more than a third in a matter of three days. Since its discovery last Sunday, the 33rd cluster accounted for 1,053 cases by Wednesday. 729 cases were reported on a single day, a record. The total number of infections in the country has since passed 4,500.
The case count is still miniscule compared to the large South Asian countries, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The recovery rate is exceptionally high, and the death rate is exceptionally low. What should be concerning, however, is whether Sri Lanka has strengthened its infrastructure and capacity to anticipate and handle future cluster eruptions. Or, has the government been resting on its old Covid laurels and wasting time and effort on an unnecessary constitutional makeover?
Worldwide, all the highly infected countries are bracing for the so called second wave, with new daily infections higher than what they were in March-April triggering the first spate of lockdowns. People are more aware of the virus now than they were during the first wave, but they are not behaving as responsibly, especially in social situations in the West. Irresponsibly infected by the virus, the American President Donald Trump, who soaks on the slogan “Make America Great Again,” has turned the White House into a “Blight House”, as the New York Daily News called it. No one wants to go there even if they cannot avoid it.
Governments are reluctant to enforce another lockdown for fear of driving businesses out of business and their employees out of livelihood. On Wednesday, the World Bank predicted that the Covid-19 pandemic will force 150 million people into extreme poverty globally, and South Asia will bear the biggest share between 49 and 57 million of them. Proportionately, based on these projections, Sri Lanka would likely have about 500,000 people driven to extreme poverty by the pandemic. The Bank makes it clear that the new poor will be in the urban, and not rural, sector, mostly comprised of people “engaged in informal services, construction, and manufacturing.” Globally, the public health crisis is expected to last at least two more years, even after a vaccine; and economic recovery could take a decade. The picture cannot be grimmer.
The public health picture in Sri Lanka has not been so grim, and the general feeling has been that the island country has somehow dodged the Covid-bullet. The worry, at least among the more informed citizens and commentators, is about the economy. For the majority of the people, however, the economic hardships are not something abstract, but have become their living misery. The government lost its head after the initial Covid containment success, and became bullish about a quick (V-shaped, no less) economic recovery despite all the evidence that a rapid and substantial economic recovery is virtually impossible in the middle of a global slowdown. After the August election and two-thirds majority, the government has needlessly got itself embroiled in a constitutional makeover, exposing in the process both political naivete and technical incompetence. It is now banking on a favourable outcome from the Supreme Court, and later even a referendum. The outbreak in Minuawngoda changes the whole picture and all the preceding calculations. Will the government change appropriately, as well? That is the question.
Covid response and hot spots
Whether or not the government will change course, it has already changed the response structure to Covid-19 that it created during the early months of the outbreak. The response structure that was in place earlier is no longer there. There were two faces to the original structure: its health face was Dr. Anil Jasinghe; and its logistics face was Lt. Gen. Shavendra Silva. Dr. Jasinghe is no longer in the Health Ministry. He was administratively shuffled up as Secretary to the Ministry of the Environment soon after the election. The shuffling was apparently a part of what President Rajapaksa hailed as the new “methodical procedure to appoint Heads of Government Institutions.” After Dr. Jasinghe was dispatched, the expectation in professional circles was that Dr. Amal Harsha De Silva, would be promoted to succeed Dr. Jasinghe. There were skeptics, however, who seemed to know the games that are played in these matters despite presidential assertions to the contrary.
The skeptics were correct, it turns out. Dr. Amal Harsha de Silva did not get the promotion. In fact, no one seems to have been promoted. Dr. S. Sridharan would appear to be functioning as Acting Director General of Health Services. One of the Deputy Directors, Dr. Sudath Samaraweera, who is also the Chief Epidemiologist, has been assigned to fill the other role of Dr. Jasinghe in the National Operation Centre for Prevention of COVID-19 Outbreak (NOCPCO). It is Dr. Sudath Samaraweera who is the new Health counterpart to Lt. Gen. Shavendra Silva’s military arm. There is no questioning the competence of Dr. Samaraweera, but there is a question to the government – why move medical professionals in and out of a pandemic task force while keeping the military men as immovable fixtures? Are such moves well advised, for professional morale and dedication, in the middle of a very serious public health crisis? Should Doctors be fighting the coronavirus while looking over their shoulders for political strikes?
Medical professionals are also speaking out in the wake of the 33rd cluster eruption. Opinions differ on the extent of ‘community spread’ and the exclusion of primary care physicians from the Covid-19 response system. The risks involved in speaking out have been illustrated by the removal of Dr Jayaruwan Bandara, as Director of the Medical Research Institute. His replacement Dr. Prabhath Amarasinghe, was Dr. Bandara’s Deputy Director, according to reports. Government Ministers have muddied the matter by stating in parliament that Dr. Amerasinghe is merely returning to his accredited position as Director after being out of the country for research studies. So, has Dr. Bandara been only an Acting Director all along? It is not my purpose to labour on staffing minutiae, but only to look at how President Rajapaksa’s new “methodical” appointment approach is being applied to senior medical professionals in the middle of a global pandemic.
The bigger problem after the 33rd cluster is the potential for rampant spread of the virus among the 50,000 garment factory workers employed by nearly 85 companies in the Gampaha District. From what is being reported, garment factory owners and the army and public health officials are co-ordinating the response efforts for contact tracing and quarantining quite responsibly. It turns out that in addition to the direct factory workers, there others providing ancillary services in factories through separate contractors. The problem of tracing the ancillary contract workers would seem to be more difficult than dealing with direct factory workers. The key question to the government and the Covid-response Operation Centre, is why no attention was given to potential hot spots during all the months when the virus was keeping things quiet.
Garment factory workers are an internal migrant population. Perhaps characteristic of the inelastic village and kinship ties and obligations in South Asian societies including Sri Lanka, factory workers are not atomized to permanently relocate from their natal villages to the places of factory work. The upshot is crowded living around the factories in permanently temporary arrangements. Village housing schemes undertaken by governments may not have spotted this contradiction, let alone address it. There are other social issues involving uprooted personal relationships, alcoholism, gambling, and indebtedness. Nonetheless, people would have muddled through lives, as they have been, but for the unexpected arrival of a new virus. Overnight, sources of livelihood are turned into hot spots of infection. This is not anybody’s fault, and there are no readymade solutions. Only thing that can reasonably be said to the government is that Covid-19 has made the government’s work cut out. There is no room for playing constitutional games in this situation.
Infections involving garment factory workers drive home the two prongs of the Covid assault and the responses to it, involving public health and the economy. Not only healthy working conditions, but also living conditions must be provided for garment workers to remain healthy and to continue working. The government cannot sustain the economy and the society if the garment factory workers are not working. The same premise can be extended to other sectors with due adjustments. The point is that the economic approach that is needed is to ensure basic survival through this crisis. And not the approach that is hitched to any vistas of prosperity or splendour. The only vistas staring Sri Lanka in the face now are vistas of debts, with massive repayments. The 33rd Covid cluster is a wake up call to the government. How will it respond?
The perceptive commentator seeking to make some sense of social and economic developments within most Southern countries today has no choice but to revisit, as it were, that classic on post-colonial societies, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ by Frantz Fanon. Decades after the South’s initial decolonization experience this work by the Algerian political scientist of repute remains profoundly relevant.
The fact that the Algeria of today is seeking accountability from its former colonizer, France, for the injustices visited on it during the decades of colonial rule enhances the value and continuing topicality of Frantz’s thinking and findings. The fact that the majority of the people of most decolonized states are continuing to be disempowered and deprived of development should doubly underline the significance of ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ as a landmark in the discourse on Southern questions. The world would be erring badly if it dismisses this evergreen on decolonization and its pains as in any way outdated.
Developments in contemporary China help to throw into relief some of the internal ‘structural deficiencies’ that have come to characterize most Southern societies in current times. However, these and many more ‘structural faults’ came to the attention of the likes of Fanon decades back.
It is with considerable reservations on their truthfulness that a commentator would need to read reports from the US’ Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on developments in China, but one cannot approach with the same skepticism revelations on China by well-known media institutions such as Bloomberg News.
While an ODNI report quoted in this newspaper on March 25th, 2025, elaborated on the vast wealth believed to have been amassed by China’s contemporary rulers and their families over the years, Bloomberg News in a more studied manner said in 2012, among other things, on the same subject that, ‘Xi’s extended family had amassed assets totaling approximately $376 million, encompassing investments in sectors like rare earth minerals and real estate. However, no direct links were established between these assets and Xi or his immediate family.’
Such processes that are said to have taken hold in China in post- Mao times in particular are more or less true of most former colonies of the South. A clear case in point is Sri Lanka. More than 75 years into ‘independence’ the latter is yet to bring to book those sections of its ruling class that have grown enormously rich on ill-gotten gains. It seems that, as matters stand, these sections would never be held accountable for their unbounded financial avarice.
The mentioned processes of exploitation of a country’s wealth, explain in considerable measure, the continuing underdevelopment of the South. However, Fanon foresaw all these ills and more about the South long ago. In ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ he speaks insightfully about the ruling classes of the decolonized world, who, having got into the boots of the departing colonizers, left no stone unturned to appropriate the wealth of their countries by devious means and thereby grow into the stratum described as ‘the stinking rich.’
This is another dimension to the process referred to as ‘the development of underdevelopment.’ The process could also be described as ‘How the Other Half Dies’. The latter is the title of another evergreen piece of research of the seventies on the South’s development debacles by reputed researcher Susan George.
Now that the Non-aligned Movement is receiving some attention locally it would be apt to revisit as it were these development debacles that are continuing to bedevil the South. Among other things, NAM emerged as a voice of the world’s poor. In fact in the seventies it was referred to as ‘The trade union of the poor.’ Accordingly, it had a strong developmental focus.
Besides the traditional aims of NAM, such as the need for the South to keep an ‘equidistance’ between the superpowers in the conduct of its affairs, the ruling strata of developing countries were also expected to deliver to their peoples equitable development. This was a foremost dimension in the liberation of the South. That is, economic growth needed to be accompanied by re-distributive justice. In the absence of these key conditions no development could be said to have occurred.
Basing ourselves on these yardsticks of development, it could be said that Southern rulers have failed their peoples right through these decades of decolonization. Those countries which have claimed to be socialistic or centrally planned should come in for the harshest criticism. Accordingly, a central aim of NAM has gone largely unachieved.
It does not follow from the foregoing that NAM has failed completely. It is just that those who have been charged with achieving NAM’s central aims have allowed the Movement to go into decline. All evidence points to the fact that they have allowed themselves to be carried away by the elusive charms of the market economy, which three decades ago, came to be favoured over central planning as an essential of development by the South’s ruling strata.
However, now with the returning to power in the US of Donald Trump and the political Right, the affairs of the South could, in a sense, be described as having come full circle. The downgrading of USAID, for instance, and the consequent scaling down of numerous forms of assistance to the South could be expected to aggravate the development ills of the hemisphere. For instance, the latter would need to brace for stepped-up unemployment, poverty and social discontent.
The South could be said to have arrived at a juncture where it would need to seek ways of collectively advancing its best interests once again with little or no dependence on external assistance. Now is the time for Southern organizations such as NAM to come to the forefront of the affairs of the South. Sheer necessity should compel the hemisphere to think and act collectively.
Accordingly, the possibility of South-South cooperation should be explored anew and the relevant institutional and policy framework needs to be created to take on the relevant challenges.
It is not the case that these challenges ceased to exist over the past few decades. Rather it is a case of these obligations being ignored by the South’s ruling strata in the belief that externally imposed solutions to the South’s development questions would prove successful. Besides, these classes were governed by self- interest.
It is pressure by the people that would enable their rulers to see the error of their ways. An obligation is cast on social democratic forces or the Centre-Left to come to center stage and take on this challenge of raising the political awareness of the people.
On the morning of 21 March, 2025, a Chinese-built K-8 jet trainer aircraft of the Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) crashed at Wariyapola. Fortunately, the two pilots ejected from the aircraft and parachuted down to safety.
A team of seven has been appointed to investigate the accident. Their task is to find the ‘cause behind the cause’, or the root cause. Ejecting from an aircraft usually has physical and psychological repercussions. The crew involved in the crash are the best witnesses, and they must be well rested and ready for the accident inquiry. It is vital that a non-punitive atmosphere must prevail. If the pilots believe that they are under threat of punishment, they will try to withhold vital information and not reveal the truth behind what happened, prompting their decision to abandon the stricken aircraft. In the interest of fairness, the crew must have a professional colleague to represent them at the Inquiry.
2000 years ago, the Roman philosopher Cicero said that “To err is human.” Alexander Pope said, “To err is human. To forgive, divine.” Yet in a Royal Air Force (RAF) hangar in the UK Force (RAF) hangs a sign declaring: “To err is human. To forgive is not RAF policy” These are the two extremes.
Over the years, behavioural scientists have observed that errors and intelligence are two sides of the same coin. In other words, an intelligent human being is liable to make errors. They went on to label these acts of omission and commission as ‘Slips, Lapses, Mistakes and Violations’.
To illustrate the point in a motoring context, if one was restricted to driving at a speed limit of 100 kph along an expressway and the speed crept up to 120 kph, then it is a ‘Slip’ on one’s part. If you forgot to fasten the seatbelt, it is a ‘Lapse’. While driving along a two-lane road, if a driver thinks in his/her judgement that the way is clear and tries to overtake slower traffic on the road, using the opposite lane, then encounters unanticipated opposite traffic and is forced to get back to the correct lane, that is a ‘Mistake’. Finally, if a double line is crossed while overtaking, while aware that the law is being broken, that is labelled as a ‘Violation’. In theory, all of the above could be applied to flying as well.
In the mid-Seventies, Elwyn Edwards and Frank Hawkins proposed that good interaction between Software (paperwork), Hardware (the aircraft and other machines), Liveware (human element) and the (working) environment are the essentials in safe flight operations. Labelled the ‘SHELL’ concept, it was adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organisation. (ICAO). (See Diagram 01)
In diagram 01, two ‘L’s depict the ‘Liveware’, inside and outside an aircraft flightdeck. The ‘L’ at the centre is the pilot in command (PIC), who should know his/her strengths and weaknesses, know the same of his/her crew, aircraft, and their mission, and, above all, be continuously evaluating the risks.
Finally, Prof. James Reason proposed the Swiss Cheese Theory of Accident Causation. (See Diagram 02)
From this diagram we see that built in defences in a system are like slices of Swiss cheese. There are pre-existing holes at random which, unfortunately, may align and allow the crew at the ‘sharp end’ to carry out a procedure unchecked.
Although it is easy and self-satisfying to blame a crew, or an individual, at an official accident investigation, what should be asked, instead, is why or how the system failed them? Furthermore, a ‘just culture’ must prevail.
The PIC and crew are the last line of defence in air safety and accident prevention. (See Diagram 3)
A daily newspaper reported that it is now left to be seen whether the crash on 21 March was due to mechanical failure or pilot error. Why is it that when a judge makes a wrong judgement it is termed ‘Miscarriage of Justice’ or when a Surgeon loses a patient on the operating table it is ‘Surgical Misadventure’, but when a pilot makes an honest error, it is called ‘Pilot Error’? I believe it should be termed ‘Human Condition’.
Even before the accident investigation had started, on 23 March, 2025, Minister of Civil Aviation, Bimal Ratnayake, went on record saying that the Ministry of Defence had told him the accident was due to an ‘athweradda’ (error). This kind of premature declaration is a definite ‘no-no’ and breach of protocol. The Minister should not be pre-empting the accident enquiry’s findings and commenting on a subject not under his purview. Everyone concerned should wait for the accident report from the SLAF expert panel before commenting.
God bless the PIC and crew!
– Ad Astrian
Yes, it’s happening tomorrow, Friday (28th), and Saturday (29th,) and what makes this scene extra special is that you don’t need to rush and pack your travelling bags and fork out a tidy sum for your airfare to Thailand.
The Thai Street Food Festival, taking place at Siam Nivasa, 43, Dr. CWW Kannangara Mawatha, Colombo 7, will not only give you a taste of Thai delicacies but also Thai culture, Thai music, and Thai dancing.
This event is being organised by the Thai Community, in Sri Lanka, in collaboration with the Royal Thai Embassy in Colombo.
The Thai Community has been very active and they make every effort to promote Amazing Thailand, to Sri Lankans, in every possible way they can.
Regarding the happening, taking place tomorrow, and on Saturday, they say they are thrilled to give Sri Lankans the vibrant Thai Street Food Festival.
Explaining how Thai souvenirs are turned out
I’m told that his event is part of a series of activities, put together by the Royal Thai Embassy, to commemorate 70 years of diplomatic relations between Thailand and Sri Lanka.
At the Thai Street Food Festival, starting at 5.00 pm., you could immerse yourself in lively Thai culture, savour delicious Thai dishes, prepared by Colombo’s top-notch restaurants, enjoy live music, captivate dance performances, and explore Thai Community members offering a feast of food and beverages … all connected with Amazing Thailand.
Some of the EXCO members of the Thai Community, in Sri Lanka,
with the Ambassador for Thailand
I’m sure most of my readers would have been to Thailand (I’ve been there 24 times) and experienced what Amazing Thailand has to offer visitors … cultural richness, culinary delights and unique experiences.
Well, if you haven’t been to Thailand, as yet, this is the opportunity for you to experience a little bit of Thailand … right here in Colombo; and for those who have experienced the real Thailand, the Thai Street Food Festival will bring back those happy times … all over again!
Remember, ENTRANCE IS FREE.
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