Our country has proved itself to be an exceptional. Just this month alone, ‘we, the people’ peacefully and bloodlessly unseated powerful president Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Though for a day the country was in a political vacuum, the military made no attempt to seize power, but allowed the political process to playout. Subsequently Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe was appointed Acting President as per Contitutional requirements.
Yesterday, again as per Constitutional procedure, the House of Representatives met to accept nominations to fill the vacant post of the presidency, in the aftermath of ex-president Gotabaya fleeing the country.
During the short sittings, three names were proposed to fill the vacancy - the name of Acting President Wickremesinghe was proposed by Leader of the House Dinesh Gunawardene and seconded by MP Manusha Nanayakkara. Leader of the Opposition Sajith Premadasa proposed the name of Dallas Alluhaperuma and was seconded by Minister G.L. Peries. Anura Kumara Dissanayake was nominated by MP Vijitha Herath seconded by Harini Amarasuriya.
Yes indeed, Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans need to be lauded for the peaceful manner in which the anti-government protests were conducted, for the non intervention of the military whose behaviour was mostly exceptional and non-partisan, as well as for the calm manner the constitutional procedures are being followed to peacefully replace a president who was forced out of office.
Even the ex-president needs to be lauded for fleeing, rather than attempting to stay in power and probably triggering a bloodbath.Ex-president Gotabaya stands accused by his fellow countrymen for running the country into its present state of bankruptcy - through the piling up of loans, irresponsible printing of money, unwisely lowering taxation, bad administrative decisions and committing corruption on a massive scale. By the end of March, our country owed a staggering US$51 billion to foreign financial institutions.
Bad administrative decisions such as the ban on imports of agro-chemicals adversely affected production in the plantation sector - one of our largest foreign currency earners, resultantly the country ran out of hard currency to purchase fuel, cooking gas, medicines, basic food necessities, which in turn led to tens of thousands of people taking to the streets to demand the president and his premier resign.
In addition, the ban on import of agro-chemicals caused havoc among the farming community and ruined paddy and cash crop production leading to a shortage of food in the market.
Children are unable to get to school as public transport has been cut. To make matters even worse, school exams have had to be postponed due to a shortage of newsprint.In the north and east of the country where minority communities predominate, the streets have been comparatively silent, as they feel their problems are not reflected in the demands of the Colombo-based protestors.These are, but some of the problems which a new administration due to be elected by Members of Parliament will face once they are elected to power.
Whoever the new president, he and his new government’s first task will be to successfully negotiate a debt restructuring facility via the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Using such facility, the new president and his team need as quickly as possible to ensure a regular stock of fuel is once again made available in the country. Without an assured and regular source of fuel, the economy can never take off, making debt repayment a distant dream The new government needs to have the political acumen to negotiate with China to come to an agreement for a debt restructuring facility, as China claims such a facility is not known in its system.The education system has completely broken down and needs urgent attention, else the up and coming generation will comprise semi literates unable to meet the needs of the country’s job market.Our giant neighbour India has been a constant source of help in the recent past helping bring in a few droplets of fuel. Our new leadership needs to be more astute and procure fuel in sufficient quantities to ensure that the economic wheels of the country will, in the future, never grind to a halt as it did since the beginning of the past year.
The new administration needs to take note of minority community alienation and take immediate steps to correct this huge failure which has divided the country.
During these stressful times, we also need to make sure that while extricating ourselves from the debt-trap which our politicians led this country into, we do not fall into the hands of one power block or the other. We need to strive to maintain our long-held policy of non-alignment.
