Daily News Editorial

President sets the record straight

05 October 2016

President Maithripala Sirisena, it appears, has had enough. For one year, he said, he has remained silent. It was now time to open up. Keeping mum all this time on the allegations made by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa that the present government was not doing anything new but merely continuing with the projects initiated by the former government, President Sirisena on Monday set the record straight.

Addressing the gathering after opening the Sugaladevigama model village in Dimbulagala built under a concept of Housing Minister Sajith Premadasa President Sirisena said it is the responsibility of a new government to allocate funds for the unfinished work left behind by former governments and to continue with the projects. In the same breadth the President said he did not demolish commemorative plaques of projects initiated by former leaders and replace them with his name and open them.

He then went on to refer to the Nelum Pokuna cultural theatre saga. The theatre, he said, was the brainchild of former President Chandrika Kumaratunga and was being built by the Chinese Government, on a request by CBK. When Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected in 2005 he (President Sirisena) too was an invitee to the grand opening of Nelumpokuna. What he saw he never bargained for. The plaque mentioning President Kumaratunga's connection with the project had been bulldozed and a new plaque erected with the name of Rajapaksa.

The President also went on say that the government has taken action to allocate funds for balanced development in every province. “The agenda of the government is to develop the entire country instead of following the agendas of other leaders to develop only their areas”. The reference is of course to the penchant of Mahinda Rajapaksa to develop and upgrade only his Hambantota fiefdom, to the exclusion other locales in the country.

No one will fault the former President for paying special attention to Hambantota, the seat of Rajapaksa power. But did the so called development projects bring about the desired results? The whole country knows what has become of the fate of the Mattala Rajapaksa International airport or the Hambantota port. Billions of public funds were poured into the projects with no tangible results. Mattala, which saw no aviation traffic, is to be merged with the national carrier and there is no word of what is going to be the fate of the port which has hardly seen any maritime traffic.

Not only that, shrines to commemorate the departed members of the Rajapaksa family came up in Hambantota, all paid for by the tax payer. So, when Rajapaksa says there is nothing to catch the eye of the public under this government he is being less than honest.

Public funds cannot be spent like is done by a drunken sailor. Projects should take in the cost benefit factor. The present government too can go on a splurge like the Rajapaksas, undertaking unsolicited projects offered by dubious operators. Governments instead should act responsibly, since it is public money that is at stake. It cannot rush headlong in undertaking anything without a proper evaluation.

The present government, which is barely one year old, cannot show results all at once .It also has to take cognizance of the parlous state of the economy left behind by the Rajapaksa regime, with debt repayment taking up a good proportion of the funds that could otherwise have been utilized for development and offer relief to the public. The Government also is placed in a dilemma, in that, if it defaults on its debts, it will be caught up in a vicious cycle of being forced to borrow again to repay the new loans it may take for development. It is easy for the Joint Opposition to shout from the rooftops that there is no development, since it has left the government holding its own baby.

Be that as it may, as President Sirisena rightly points out, governments cannot scrap undertakings of their predecessors. It is not as simple as that. There are the project developers and the funding agencies who have to be considered. The Colombo Port City project is a case in point .There is also the local financing component and the government is not in a position to disregard such obligations. Does Rajapaksa expect the government to abandon ongoing projects merely because they were commenced under his watch?

Many governments, in the past, were as not shy of borrowing from their predecessors. For instance the Janasaviya Programme of President Premadasa was adapted by the Chandrika government, albeit renaming it as Samurdhi. The baby cannot by thrown with the bath water.

In the past, more often than not, the entrenched practice was for new governments that are elected to office to scrap development projects started by their predecessors, purely based on political rivalry, without considering the merits or demerits of such programmes. If this is allowed to continue, the country will be at a standstill, development wise, with every incoming government trying to undo what the previous government did. Hence Mahinda Rajapaksa's allegation that the present government is merely continuing with what he commenced is misplaced and made to derive political capital.