The Island Editorial

Silva in a paddy

21st October 2015

 

Transport Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva, who also handles civil aviation, has called for immediate removal of paddy stocks currently stored at the Mattala airport. What he witnessed there during a recent inspection tour put him in a paddy. The Mattala warehouses are equipped to store only sealed cargo and the sensitive scanning equipment has reportedly gone haywire due to paddy dust.

Paddy Marketing Board (PMB) Chairman M. B. Dissanayake has passed the buck. He has told this newspaper that his outfit only carried out a government order. We are reminded of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s argument before the presidential commission probing corruption; in response to an allegation that the state-owned ITN has incurred a huge loss owing to his election advertising for which nobody has picked up the tab, he sought to shift the onus to the UPFA.

Who came up with the brilliant idea of storing paddy at Mattala? Will he come out of hiding and disprove Minister de Silva’s contention? Had the paddy storing scheme been successful there would have been scores of government politicians and their bureaucratic lackeys falling over themselves to take the curtain call.

The government is in a tight spot over the paddy stored at Mattala because it naively believed in its own propaganda rhetoric. Its big guns, before the last presidential election, showed visuals of agricultural produce being sundried on either side of the road leading to the Mattala airport with no aircraft.

It is said that during the United Front government (1970-77), troubled by railway unions engaged in a protest campaign, an irate Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, condemning the railway as a useless service, threatened to close all railroads and cultivate manioc thereon. However, she knew better than to translate her rhetoric into action. The present-day politicians, in their wisdom, went ahead and stored paddy at the Mattala airport in a bid to prove their point that airport served no purposes and ridicule the development strategy of the previous government.

The Rajapaksas, no doubt, got their development priorities mixed up. Their penchant for Ozymandian projects was monumental. They dug up land to construct an inland port in Hambantota and contracted the Chinese to fill part of the sea off Colombo to build a city! The Lotus Tower, still under construction, in the Colombo city which needs flyovers, monorails etc to ease congestion is a monument to the grandiose development plan of the Rajapaksa government. But, it is equally stupid for anyone to try to spite the Rajapaksas by ruining what has already been built at an enormous cost with foreign borrowings.

If the PMB hadn’t had enough storage facilities to store paddy in Hambantota, it could have used the warehouses at the Mahinda Rajapaksa Port, which the government says is without ships. That way the government worthies could have solved the storage problem and held up their bête noire, Rajapaksa to ridicule without ruining the country’s second largest airport for political reasons.

On March 16, 2009, we quoted the then Agriculture and Agrarian Services Minister Maithripala Sirisena as having said, at the opening of the renovated Gothatuwa Agrarian Service Centre, that the JVP had torched 247 out of 545 agrarian service centres during its second uprising in the late 1980s. He revealed that the outfit had also destroyed many PMB storage facilities with large stocks of paddy therein during its reign of terror. It is known to one and all that the UNP, after its 1977 electoral win, ruined the PMB whose assets, especially warehouses, were sold to private traders for a song.

We suggest that the UNP and the JVP atone for their sins. The incumbent UNP-led government ought to launch a project as a national priority to build warehouses for the PMB with the help of the JVP which can deploy its disaster response team, Red Star Brigade for that purpose. And, fast!