Editorial

When haste leads to trouble

Published

3 years ago

2021/10/25

Monday 25th October, 2021

Farmers’ protests against the prevailing fertiliser shortage are gathering momentum, but Agriculture Minister Mahindananda Aluthgamage insists that there are enough stocks of fertiliser in the country. He says the protests are politically motivated. It is doubtful whether anyone will buy into his claim. There would have been no such protests if fertiliser had been freely available. The possibility of agrochemical companies having a hand in protests cannot be ruled out, but what actually fuels the street demonstrations is the anger of farmers who have suffered crop losses due to the fertiliser shortage.

The incumbent administration implements its policies exactly the way the country’s war on terror had been fought prior to 2006; governments launched much-publicised offensives against the LTTE only to call them off owing to heavy losses the military suffered. The SLPP government has launched several blitzkriegs, as it were, to achieve some policy objectives, during the past several months, but without much success or, in some cases, with disastrous consequences.

The overuse of agrochemicals has been a ‘grave’ problem. What is given free of charge is often overused or wasted, and the previous Rajapaksa administration’s wisdom of giving a fertiliser subsidy stands questioned. Most farmers used to apply agrochemicals liberally even to loosen soil before harvesting manioc. The practice of spraying insecticides on vegetables ready to be harvested has been prevalent among most cultivators. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has rightly pointed out that water in streams and wells adjacent to paddy fields cannot be used for drinking due to agrochemical runoff or leaching. The unregulated use of agrochemicals has also led to ecological disasters; it has killed insects and birds that prey on pests such as rats, and mosquito larvae. The owl and the dragonfly are among the worst affected species, according to environmentalists. Soil cannot recover due to the repeated application of overdoses of weedicides, pesticides and chemical fertilisers. These issues must be tackled, but systematically. It was a mistake for the government to ban all agrochemicals overnight. It should have taken steps to reduce the use of agrochemicals while introducing organic fertilisers and educating the farming community on the advantages of the proposed changeover. That way, it could have won over farmers because they want to keep production costs low and lead a healthy life. The fertiliser blitz, as it were, has backfired with farmers taking to the streets, and wily politicians cashing in on their frustration to gain political mileage.

Traders at the Manning market are complaining of a decrease in vegetable supplies, and they blame it on the agrochemical ban. If this claim is true, then it can be argued that the market situation presages serious problems for both the public and the government. Shortfalls in supplies will send vegetable prices through the roof, making it even more difficult for the people to make ends meet.

The country is in this mess because the government, in its wisdom, telescoped its organic fertiliser programme, which should have been phased over a couple of years. Even some Agriculture Ministry higher-ups have admitted that the sudden fertiliser ban was based on wrong advice, according to newspaper reports. Former President Maithripala Sirisena has gone on record as saying that he and the SLFP urged the powers that be to tread cautiously instead of banning agrochemicals overnight. Their advice went unheeded, he has claimed. Their SLPP counterparts are raking them over the coals for having said so. Sirisena and his party may be flayed for many things, but they have got it right on this score, and the government worthies had better stop bashing the SLFP and make a course correction.

One cannot but appreciate President Rajapaksa’s initiative to promote organic agriculture like his renewable energy programme. But it should be carried out gradually in a sustainable manner. If only the President and his advisors heeded the oxymoronic adage, festina lente— ‘make haste slowly’.

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Editorial

Pledge to catch thieves: All bark and no bite?

Published

4 hours ago

2024/10/10

Sahan Weerasooriya

Thursday 10th October, 2024

SLPP National Organiser and unsuccessful presidential candidate, Namal Rajapaksa, seems to believe that attack is the best form of defence. He has chosen to go on the offensive; he keeps daring the NPP to carry out its election pledge to bring back billions of dollars which, it said, the Rajapaksa family had stashed away in Uganda. He has offered to cooperate with the law enforcement authorities fully if an investigation gets underway! The NPP’s response to his challenge has been to make even more allegations against him and his family and obfuscate the issue.

Most systems in this country have been rigged to protect the corrupt in positions of power. Crooks at the levers of power can cover their tracks. One may recall that anti-corruption activists, the Opposition and the media had to fight quite a battle for months to have the then Minister Keheliya Rambukwella arrested and prosecuted for the procurement of fake and substandard medicinal drugs.

The best opportunity for the self-proclaimed anti-corruption activists to trace and recover Sri Lanka’s stolen funds presented itself after Maithripala Sirisena’s upset win in the 2015 presidential race. The UNP-led Yahapalana government, backed by the JVP, squandered that opportunity by conducting a series of show probes and show trials. The Rajapaksa regime had become a metaphor for corruption, and that was one of the main reasons why the people voted it out of power in 2015, but the politicisation of investigations into allegations of corruption made the Yahapalana anti-corruption drive fall short of its goal, and helped the Rajapaksa family play the victim, gain public sympathy and make a comeback. Worse, the Yahapalana government made a mockery of its commitment to good governance by carrying out the Treasury bond scams and various other rackets. The JVP backed that corrupt regime to the hilt.

The NPP heavyweights who have taken upon themselves the task of bringing the corrupt to justice and recovering the country’s stolen funds are all hat and no cattle, so to speak. During the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government, the JVP/NPP made a public display of a slew of files, which numbered more than 400, claiming that they contained irrefutable evidence against those who had cut corrupt deals and amassed ill-gotten wealth. What has happened to those files is anybody’s guess.

In July 2024, the then President Ranil Wickremesinghe, during a function at the Presidential Secretariat, claimed that most of the files being exhibited by the JVP/NPP were empty and others contained photocopies of original documents, which, he said, were in his possession. Will the NPP government take action to obtain those documents from their erstwhile Yahapalana chum, Wickremesinghe? What one gathered from Wickremesinghe’s snide remark at issue was that the files the NPP was displaying had belonged to the Anti-Corruption Secretariat, which was set up at Temple Trees during the Yahapalana administration. How come those files have ended up in the hands of Wickremesinghe and Dissanayake?

Those who have mastered the art of helping themselves to public funds are adept at hiding their wealth. They use various fronts and shell companies for that purpose, as disclosed by Panama Papers and Pandora Papers. Efforts to disable the rogue global finance industry have so far met with limited success for many reasons, some of which being its sheer size and complexity, political influence, the absence of transparency and its remarkable adaptability. Public Security Minister Vijitha Herath has reportedly ordered a probe into revelations made by the Pandora Papers about some Sri Lankans. This is a welcome measure.

Efforts to trace Sri Lanka’s stolen funds and institute criminal proceedings against the corrupt who have enriched themselves at the expense of the public must go on, but equally important is the task of building robust mechanisms and introducing stringent laws to prevent corruption, and the next Parliament must carry it out as a national priority.

The public may not take Namal’s challenges to the NPP seriously, but having won last month’s presidential election basically on an anti-corruption platform, the NPP will have to make good on its solemn pledge to bring the corrupt to justice and recover the stolen funds. Gone are the days when bribes were carried in briefcases. Today, millions of dollars change hands electronically in faraway money laundering hubs. So, there is absolutely no need for anyone to transport loads of greenbacks in planes.

There is something the NPP government can do expeditiously to stop the barks of crooks. Instead of biting off more than it can chew in trying to nab the corrupt, it must order a fresh probe into the Airbus bribery scam. A British court revealed that Airbus had offered a huge bribe of USD 16 mn to the wife of a SriLankan executive to land a high-value contract here, and paid her USD 2 million initially. It is public knowledge that the person who accepted the bribe only acted as a collector. The NPP must find out who the real beneficiary of the Airbus backhander was. Will Namal dare the NPP to do so?

Editorial

Vital issues about victuals

Published

1 day ago

2024/10/9

Sahan Weerasooriya

Wednesday 9th October, 2024

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has met a group of food importers and discussed, inter alia, ways and means of making imported food items available to the public at affordable prices, according to media reports. He seems to think that discussions and moral suasion would help persuade the mudalali fraternity to refrain from profit maximisation for the sake of the public. If the government is really keen to serve the interests of the public, it should make a decisive intervention to tackle the problem of market cartelisation, which enables unscrupulous importers and wholesalers to jack up prices and exploit the public.

Egg prices have increased again after a temporary slump. Supporters of the new dispensation naively went so far as to attribute the egg price decrease to Dissanayake’s ascension to the presidency! What egg wholesalers with cold storage facilities did was to bring the egg prices down artificially so that they could buy eggs on the cheap and hoard them before increasing the selling prices. They have the best of both worlds while egg producers and consumers are gnashing their teeth.

Large-scale rice millers have offered to reduce the prices of rice. Never do they act out of altruism, and why have they become mindful of the maximum retail prices all of a sudden? It is not difficult to see through their game plan. They can afford to reduce prices temporarily but their small-scale counterparts cannot do so as they lack the wherewithal. If the prices of rice drop drastically, the small timers in the milling trade will go belly up; the rice market will be even less competitive in such an eventuality, and the Millers’ Mafia will be able to exploit the public to their heart’s content by increasing prices again.

Big-time millers leverage their wealth and political connections to deprive their smaller counterparts of funds for purchasing paddy by delaying bank loans, and fill their silos with paddy bought at lower prices. By the time the small-scale millers receive funds, there is hardly any paddy left for them to purchase and what is available is of inferior quality. This happens year in, year out.

Successive governments have done precious little to help the small-scale millers. The new government should ensure that funds are available for them to buy paddy when harvesting commences. The Paddy Marketing Board should be provided with funds and adequate storage facilities to compete with the Millers’ Mafia so that the farmer and the consumer will benefit. The JVP/NPP government is duty bound to do so because the JVP torched more than 240 agrarian service centres with paddy storage facilities in the late 1980s, according to Maithripala Sirisena, whom it helped become President in 2015.

The Millers’ Mafia employs another ruse to bring the prices of paddy down. It increases the prices of rice ahead of the harvesting season, compelling the government to import rice. When the state-owned warehouses are full with imported rice, the big-scale millers reduce prices, causing the imported rice stocks to rot as locally grown rice agrees with Sri Lankans’ palates more than the imported varieties. When the prices of rice fall, farmers have to sell their paddy at lower prices. After hoarding paddy, the crafty millers increase prices. Unsold imported rice stocks have to be disposed of as animal feed. The only way to end this despicable practice is to conduct raids and confiscate hoarded paddy. One can only hope that the JVP/NPP government will prove equal to the task of taking on the Millers’ Mafia.

Most people believed in the NPP’s pledges and rhetoric and voted for Dissanayake at last month’s presidential election. Having talked the talk—very eloquently at that––President Dissanayake now has to walk the walk. Unless the food importers and wholesalers stop exploiting the public, the government will have to get tough with them unlike the previous governments that chose to play ball with them for obvious reasons.

Wholesalers and importers of food and other essentials fleece the public with impunity thanks to their political links and slush funds, which help them have politicians eating out of their hands. Financiers’ interests take precedence over those of electors after elections.

There is a pressing need to ensure that politicians and their parties disclose the sources of funding so that the public will know who is in the pay of unscrupulous importers and traders. Let the SLPP, the UNP, the SJB, the NPP and other political parties be urged to reveal whether they have received any funds from such elements.

Editorial

Easter carnage probes and AKD’s call

Published

2 days ago

2024/10/8

Sahan Weerasooriya

Tuesday 8th October, 2024

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, addressing a group of Easter Sunday terror victims, their family members, Catholic priests including His Eminence Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, and others, at the Katuwapitiya Church, on Sunday, pledged to expedite investigations into the 2019 carnage and ensure that justice would be served fast. In saying so, he only repeated one of his election promises.

President Dissanayake should have addressed the specifics of some issues the Church had raised about the 2019 terror attacks, one being the fate that has befallen the reports of two vital probe committees appointed by President Ranil Wickremesinghe. Spokesman for the Colombo Archdiocese Rev. Fr. Cyril Gamini Fernando, speaking at a discussion on the Easter Sunday terror attacks, recently, demanded to know what had become of the report of a committee President Wickremesinghe appointed to investigate some allegations that Channel 4 (UK) had levelled against Sri Lanka’s military intelligence in respect of the Easter bombings. The Church leaders should have requested President Dissanayake to make that report public.

What characterises the presidential probes in this country is lack of transparency on the part of the Presidents who order them. Committees and commissions are appointed to investigate issues of national importance, but not all their reports are released to the public, who have a right to know their findings. Sri Lankan Presidents have a remarkable ability to swallow committee reports whole!

Leader of Pivithuru Hela Urumaya Udaya Gammanpila, addressing the media yesterday called upon President Dissanayake to release the report of the committee appointed by President Wickremesinghe to investigate the Channel 4 allegation that Sri Lanka’s military intelligence was involved in the Easter Sunday attacks. Gammanpila also asked President Dissanayake to make public the report of the committee appointed by President Wickremesinghe to probe four specific issues concerning actions and responses of Sri Lanka’s military and intelligence officials in relation to the Easter Sunday bombings with special emphasis on the conduct of the head of the State Intelligence Service and the Chief of National Intelligence. That committee was headed by retired judge A. N. J de Alwis.

Gammanpila argued that on Sunday President Dissanayake would have been able to field questions from the victims of terror confidently at the Katuwapitiya Church and provided specific answers thereto if he had perused the aforesaid two reports, copies of which were available with Saman Ekanayake, who served as the Secretary to President Wickremesinghe, and the Attorney General. Whether President Dissanayake has read those reports, we do not know, but if he has not, it is high time he studied them and took action to make them accessible to the public.

There is no need to probe the Easter Sunday attacks all over again, and therefore it is hoped that no attempt will be made to reinvent the wheel. The Presidential Commission of Inquiry (COI) which investigated the 2019 carnage, has presented a corpus of information in its final report although it examined the alleged foreign involvement in the terror bombings perfunctorily. The COI findings could serve as the basis for a future investigation. If a new probe committee/commission seeks to begin from the beginning, investigations are likely to drag on until the cows come home. More than half a decade has already elapsed since the 2019 terror attacks.

The Catholic Church has said the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday carnage is the person who called himself ‘Abu Hind’ and his true identity is known to current Secretary to the Ministry of Public Security Ravi Seneviratne, and the members of the COI. Arresting the suspected terror mastermind will be half the battle in ascertaining who was actually behind the Easter Sunday carnage.

The Ministry of Public Security is now under Minister Vijitha Herath, who can ask Seneviratne, whom he handpicked as his ministry secretary, to reveal the true identity of Abu Hind, and President Dissanayake should make public the reports submitted by the Imam and Alwis committees.

Meanwhile, it is hoped that the NPP/JVP government, which has undertaken to have the Easter Sunday carnage probed thoroughly and serving justice expeditiously will not baulk at going the whole hog in view of the fact that Mohamed Yusuf Ibrahim, father of two National Thowheed Jamath bombers, Mohamed Ibrahim Ilham Ahmed and Mohamed Ibrahim Insaf Ahmed, was a JVP National List nominee in the 2015 general election.