Monday 4th November, 2024

Many are those who are tut-tutting over the latest fuel price revision, which has not brought any relief to the general public; trishaw drivers, who served as the JVP-led NPP’s grassroots propaganda foot soldiers, as it were, are prominent among them. Quite a few of them are openly critical of the NPP government.

Securing popular mandates in elections is one thing, but delivering what they are obtained for is quite another. Sri Lankan voters are a fastidious lot known for their impatience to have election pledges fulfilled. So, it is only natural that the NPP government has come under fire for its inability to sort out a host of issues such as unconscionably high prices of commodities, especially rice, coconuts, milk food, eggs and fuel.

The NPP leaders, who came to power, promising to break the back of the escalating cost of living immediately, are now expected to make good on their pledge. They also offered to slash petroleum prices by reducing taxes and eliminating corruption, but fuel prices were reduced only marginally last month. The latest fuel price revision has irked the ordinary people using regular petrol and diesel, whose prices have remained unchanged. Only the prices of 95 Octane petrol and Super Diesel have been brought down, and the government stands accused of having sought to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of the poor.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his interim government are caught in a nutcracker, in a manner of speaking. On the one hand, they have to abide by the IMF dictates to keep the bailout programme on track, and on the other, they are under severe pressure from the public as well as the Opposition to grant promised relief forthwith.

The IMF has said in no uncertain terms that general government revenues must be in the region of 15 percent of GDP in 2025. So, it will be well-nigh impossible for the government to reduce taxes to slash fuel prices, and at the same time it cannot convince the public of this economic reality; they are in no mood to reason.

The NPP says it will win the upcoming general election. If it achieves its dream, it is likely to find itself in a more unenviable situation, for it has pledged to grant pay hikes from Budget 2025 and increase welfare expenditure substantially; it has said it needs a parliamentary majority to deliver the promised relief. But whether it will be able to allocate adequate funds for that purpose within the fiscal confines stipulated by the IMF is the question.

The IMF has urged Japan, an economic powerhouse, to fund additional spending plans for relief programmes within its budget without issuing more debt. This has been the IMF’s reaction to the Japanese government’s promise to introduce a sizeable spending package to mitigate the adverse impact of rising costs on the public. “Any kind of support you are providing should be a lot more targeted, and any kind of new initiative should be financed within the budget … You should not be increasing more debt to provide for any new initiative,” Krishna Srinivasan, IMF Director for Asia and Pacific has told Japan, according to Reuters. This shows how difficult it will be for the next government of Sri Lanka, dependent on IMF assistance, to increase welfare expenditure.

Whenever a self-proclaimed messiah elevated to power fail in this country, those who have voted for him or her try to overcome their sense of guilt and vent their frustration by swinging en masse to another political camp, and when they react in this manner waves of popular support form in the polity and crafty politicians ride them. The NPP has benefited from such a wave, and, now, the biggest challenge before it is to prevent its political and electoral gains from being reversed by a counterwave of public anger.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the SLPP also rode a massive wave of popular support to power in 2019, but faced a backlash soon afterwards. Most trishaw operators threw their weight behind Gotabaya in the 2019 presidential race, but when he became a metaphor for failure, after being ensconced in power, they dissociated themselves from him, and some of them went to the extent of displaying on their tuk-tuks a catchy slogan, which read in Sinhala, “Sajith peradichcha eka hondai, neththam api thama hithan inne Gota veddek kiyala”—‘it is good that Sajith lost [in the 2019 presidential contest], otherwise we would still have been under the impression that Gota was a maven’. Whether the NPP, in case of its victory in the upcoming parliamentary race, will be able to prevent the aforesaid slogan reappearing on trishaws, with ‘Gota’ replaced with ‘Anura’, remains to be seen.

On Tuesday, Nov. 5, Americans will vote for a new president at an election that most observers and commentators agree is destined to be as consequential, if not even more so, as only two other elections in the chequered history of the United States of America. Americans will either choose to continue with the Great Experiment of democracy envisaged by the Founding Fathers over two centuries ago; or they will change course and adopt an authoritarian government on the model of other authoritarian nations in the world, like Russia.

The U.S. constitution decrees that a presidential election be held once every four years on the first Tuesday following a Monday in November. This is to ensure that the Polling Day does not interfere with Sunday worship and also that it does not fall on Nov. 1, also for a religious reason. Unfortunately, Sri Lanka has no ironclad date for holding elections, both presidential and parliamentary, and incumbents have considerable flexibility of when elections will be called. This is often used for their own advantage.

We in Sri Lanka will vote on Nov. 14 to elect our 17^th Parliament which will convene on Nov. 21, completing two national elections to choose an executive president and a new parliament within a few weeks of each other. We voted in a new president as recently as Sept. 21. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake had during his campaign pledged that his first executive action, if elected, would be to dissolve the then parliament. This, of course was a sine qua non – an essential or indispensable requirement – as the NPP/JVP had only three seats in the last parliament and is now governing the country with the world’s smallest cabinet of just three ministers.

It is unlikely that the result of the U.S. election will influence voters here. There has been little or no mention of that subject in ongoing campaign rhetoric although the U.S. election has been extensively reported and commented upon both here and the world-over. Most Lankans, we believe, are convinced that the election of Donald Trump in what appears to be a very tight race in the “swing states,” would be an unmitigated disaster not only for America but also the wider world. There have been five examples – two recently – at U.S. presidential elections where the winner literally lost. The recent examples are 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote and lost to George. W. Bush in the Electoral College. Then in 2016 Hillary Clinton who won the popular vote lost to Trump..

The 2024 U.S. election is being fought on a variety of issues, with immigration and reproductive freedom taking center stage. The economy used to be a major issue, but recent reports of a vast improvement in the economy consequent to the policies of the Biden administration – Bidenomics – has had the effect of a dramatic reduction in inflation, which now stands at 2.2%, down from 9% in 2022. Glowing reports about the continuing success of the economy, which The Economist recently headlined as “The envy of the world” has largely silenced Republican critics. As has the prediction of a majority of economists that Trump’s nebulous economic plan, based mainly on increased tariffs on imports, will result in higher prices and recession.

Convicted felon Trump keeps hammering on about the catastrophe of an open Southern border, with gross exaggerations about criminals, murderers, rapists and people who bring drugs, crossing the border in their millions – “vermin who are poisoning the blood of the people”. He is creating hatred and fear of immigrants in a land of immigrants, continuing a strategy which won him the presidency in 2016.

However, the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Republican backed US Supreme Court, will likely play a major role in the final outcome of the election. Women’s reproductive rights had been guaranteed by the Supreme Court judgment of Roe v. Wade, since 1973. The Court had ruled that that abortion was a decision to be made by the pregnant woman, her physician, her parents (in the case of a minor) and her God. After 50 years, Donald Trump appointed, three decisively pro-life judges to the Supreme Court, which now has a 6/3 Republican majority, which overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the constitutional right to abortion.

Women, Democrats, Republicans and Independents, form the majority (52%) of the electorate. They are overwhelmingly in favor of the re-instatement of Roe v. Wade. Vice-President Harris as vowed to sign this into law as one of her first actions on election as president. The fact that women usually exercise their right to vote in greater numbers than men may just swing an extremely close, most consequential election in favor of Vice-President Harris and the Democrats.

Here in Sri Lanka we have President AKD calling on the electorate to give the NPP/JVP a parliamentary majority to ensure smooth government with a single party controlling both the presidency and the legislature. He wants the voter who crowned him executive president to do a “satyagraha” to give him the parliamentary majority as well. Sajith Premadasa seeks the majority pledging to work with the president on everything good it attempts while Ranil Wickremesinghe lectures that politicians with experience must be elected MPs. He is eloquently silent on why he, the country’s most experienced politician, does not offer himself for election. He has even ruled out a National List entry to parliament for himself like he did in 2020 when the UNP won zero seats and scraped a single National List slot. But he eventually took that place after months of foot dragging. The rest is history.

Saturday 2nd November, 2024

The latest fuel price revision has landed the JVP/NPP government in an unenviable position, with only 12 days to go before the next general election, where the ruling alliance’s stakes are extremely high. Unless the NPP succeeds in obtaining a working majority in Parliament, newly-elected President Anura Kumara Dissanayake will run the risk of being reduced to a mere figurehead, to all intents and purposes.

Only the prices of 95 Octane petrol and Super Diesel have been reduced much to the disappointment of the ordinary people, who mostly use 92 Octane petrol and Auto Diesel. The government would not have found itself in this situation but for its much-advertised election pledge to deep-six the fuel pricing formula and slash the prices of petrol, diesel and kerosene. It would have been prudent for the JVP/NPP to leave all fuel prices unrevised at this juncture.

Cabinet Spokesman and Minister Vijitha Herath has claimed that the so-called pricing formula is not the sole basis on which fuel prices are revised monthly. If so, why hasn’t the government reduced the prices of the widely used fuel types? The fuel price revision at issue may make economic sense because the cost reflective pricing helps reduce state expenditure, but it has come at a political cost to the NPP, which raised the people’s expectations by offering to reduce taxes on fuel, eliminate corruption in the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation and slash the prices of petrol and diesel immediately after capturing power. Its rhetoric led most people to believe that diesel and petrol would be available again at the pre-crisis prices.

Three-wheeler drivers, who use 92 Octane petrol, are the most vociferous critics of how the government is handling fuel prices. It was not out of altruism that the trishaw fraternity campaigned hard for JVP/NPP leader Dissanayake in the presidential race. They obviously expected economic benefits in return under an NPP government.

President Dissanayake never misses an opportunity to declare that he cannot perform miracles. But he made himself out to be a miracle man when he was an Opposition MP. He would wax eloquent in Parliament, telling successive governments how to slash taxes and tariffs, grant relief to the public and lower the cost of living. Therefore, it is only natural that the people expect miracles under his presidency. The JVP-led trade unions staged protests and even strikes, demanding pay hikes, and the JVP/NPP sought to rubbish the then rulers’ claim that salary increases could be granted only through the annual Budgets. The JVP/NPP has now made an about-turn; it says it will consider the state sector pay hikes when the next Budget is presented.

It is not being argued that the NPP government should reduce fuel prices and increase the public sector salaries haphazardly at the expense of the economy. The Opposition should refrain from trying to recover lost ground by pressuring the government to do things that would hurt the economy. The government is right in adhering to the cost-reflective fuel pricing and insisting that pay hikes cannot be granted at this juncture. Even if Ranil Wickremesinghe had won the September presidential election, he would not have been able to do what he is now asking the NPP government to do.

The JVP/NPP leaders must be regretting the many promises they made to win the presidential election. The biggest challenge before the government, which has come to terms with the sobering economic reality, is to make the public, whose expectations it elevated beyond measure, to do likewise and exercise patience. Unfortunately for the JVP/NPP, patience is not a virtue associated with Sri Lankans, who want election promises to be fulfilled the way hoppers are baked.