Ceylon Today Editorial

DRASTIC CUT IN HEALTH ALLOCATION
02 December 2016

 

Among many criticisms regarding the Budget 2017, one of the major ones was the reduction of the allocations to the Health Ministry. According to the Draft Budget estimates 2017, the allocations for the Health Ministry were reduced from Rs 175 billion in 2016 to Rs 160 billion. A more concerning factor is that the capital expenditure had reduced from Rs 60 billion to Rs 40 billion reflecting less development in the health sector in 2017.

When the Budget Speech 2017 and the Economic Policy statement made by the Prime Minister this year and last year are closely analyzed it can be easily noticed that the emphasis given to the health sector is very little. In fact, in none of these important speeches, are the government objectives regarding the expected achievements of the health sector are mentioned while they specifically mention about exports, education, Higher Education, Trade, and so on.

This by no means a scenario that can be ignored. The matter has to be taken up seriously. Although politicians boast about free health in the country in many State hospitals in the country, two patients have to share a bed. Sometimes, a patient who was operated on has to share a bed with someone due to inadequacy of the physical resources.

Accordingly, the government only allocates 4.7 per cent from its total expenditure to the health sector which is a very low percentage compared to the allocations made by other countries. According to the World Bank, Costa Rica spends 26.5 per cent of its total expenditure to the health sector. In France, the percentage is 15.6, in India it's 4.4 per cent, in Japan it's 19.7 per cent, in Nepal it's 16 per cent, in the UK it's 16.2 per cent and in the US it's 19.5 per cent.

The allocations for the health sector as a percentage of the GDP has also declined in Sri Lanka. Assuming that the GDP in Sri Lanka grows by 5 per cent, the allocations for the Health Ministry would amount to 1.4 per cent of the GDP in 2016 and will be expected to decline to 1.2 per cent of the GDP.

Statistics shows that the allocations for the health sector as a percentage of the GDP is higher in other countries. However, it should be noted that it also includes the private spending on the health sector as well. For example, this is reflected in Bangladesh as 2.8 per cent of the GDP, in India it's 4.7 per cent, in Japan it's 10.2 per cent, in the Netherlands it's 10.9 per cent, in the UK it's 9.1 per cent and in the US it's 17.1 per cent.

Accordingly, Sri Lanka's expenditure on health (both public and private) was around 3.2 per cent of GDP, or US$ 89 per head in 2012, according to estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO). Interestingly, the private sector provides around one-half of outpatient curative care and around 5 – 10 per cent of inpatient care. In most instances, the expenses are from the pocket of individuals, as insurance cover is not prominent in Sri Lanka. It should be noted that people often tend to go for private healthcare as public healthcare is time consuming as well as inconvenient. Further, more often than not the public healthcare system does not provide all the medicines and medi-care required.

Hence, patients end up paying a considerable amount of money to purchase prescribed drugs. The Health Minister can cover the bitter truth by saying that prices of the drugs had reduced, but reduction of allocations to health sector is certainly an obstacle for human development.

At any given day, decrease of funds allocated to the health sector is not acceptable. Through a quality free health system, every segment of the society would benefit, which is not the case in every other sector. Health has more redistribution effect, thereby the common man always tends to benefit.

In Sri Lanka, there is a dearth of more than 25,000 nurses and 2,500 doctors. Although, free health exists for namesake it is really a question whether the public receives a quality health service. Reducing funds to the health sector, in that context will hurt the common man further, while the government spends millions of rupees to provide treatment for politicians.

Economic growth or economic development does not merely mean increase of the GDP. Such development would benefit the people of the country, not a small segment of the society. To put it in simple terms, what is the point of development if a sick person dies on the road?

Noble Prize Winner Prof. Amartya Sen had highly appreciated the efforts of Sri Lanka to preserve free health. Sen argued that the goal of economic growth and increases in per capita income is to achieve human development. Therefore, he said, human development is more important than economic growth, and he citied Sri Lanka as one of the major successful countries which gained human development through a free health system. However, it appears that the present government and its so called economic experts had forgotten what it is meant by development.

Daily News Editorial

Gammanpila’s love for Karuna

02 December 2016

Joint Opposition maverick and Pivithuru Hela Urumaya leader Udaya Gammanpila may perhaps have stunned his followers and the public in general by his latest protestations. Gammanpila is known to all and sundry as a diehard nationalist and a minority hater. At least that is the impression given to the public by his daily ravings and rantings against perceived concessions granted to the Tamil community by the government. In his book, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is bent on dividing the country at the behest of the western powers and the Tamil diaspora. To him (Gammanpila) Northern Province Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran is another Prabhakaran in a politician’s garb, to whom the government is only too willing to oblige, if not surrender. The MP has already sounded dire warnings that the proposed new constitution will be a federal one, giving Tamils a large slice of the cake.

There can be no compromise with the Tamil community on any issue, is the trenchant standpoint of Gammanpila, who even has threatened to blow up an imagined Hanuma bridge, linking Tamil Nadu with the North, to save the nation from enemy invasion. To the Pivithuru Hela Urumaya leader, the Tamils in the North are still of the Eelam mindset and hardly a day passes without him trying to din this message into the minds of the Southern polity.

But lo and behold, Gammanpila appears to have had a change of heart, at least about one Tamil. Addressing a media briefing on Wednesday, the MP was seen practically weeping for the plight of Karuna Amman, who the CID has thought it fit to arrest and subsequently placed in remand - all for the small matter of misusing a luxury bullet proof vehicle, that had cost the state an insignificant Rs. 93 million. The Colombo district MP did not stop at that. He went onto admonish the government for what he sees as a blatant injustice - placing behind bars an individual who had renounced separatism, while releasing those still espousing division.

This mellowing of Gammanpila from his hard line position as an unrepentant nationalist, who sees a Tiger behind every bush, to a more sober, accommodating moderate, has be welcomed indeed, if only this was not yet another political gimmick of the JO firebrand to show the government in poor light, both before the Tamils and the nationalist electorate in the South.

If this indeed is the motive, his project is doomed from the outset. In the eyes of most Tamils in the North, Karuna is a renegade and traitor who sold his soul to the Sinhalese. Not only that, the Karuna faction also helped the military to defeat the LTTE and ultimately made the Tamils humiliated as a vanquished race by way of post war military parades where the accent was on majoritarian supremacy. The total rejection of Karuna was demonstrated in serial defeats, his group suffered at all elections, since he left the LTTE.

On the other side of the coin, most Sinhalese would not forget the barbaric acts of Karuna when he was LTTE commander of the East. They certainly could not erase from their minds the horrendous cold blooded massacre of 600 policemen who surrendered to the LTTE on the instructions of the then government. Nor the attack on the Jayashri Maha Bodhiya, the gruesome killing of twenty novice monks at Aranthalawa, and last, but not least, the attack on the Sri Dalada Maligawa, the pinnacle of Buddhist worship.

Gammanpila had no qualms to Mahinda Rajapaksa offering this blood thirsty mass murderer, not only a ministership in his government, but also the post of Vice President of the Sri Lanka Freedom party. Hence Gammanpila’s sentiments on behalf of Karuna Amman today is not surprising.

Be that as it may, the Pivithuru Hela Urumaya leader who is today waxing eloquent on the virtues of Karuna Amman and is enamoured by his transformation from a diehard separatist to an anti-Eelam crusader, has Ranil Wickremesinghe to thank for, for this metamorphosis. For, if not for the “peace talks” that Gammanpila and his fellow travellers in the JO are today reviling against, Karuna would have remained the terrorist that he was and continued to have led the LTTE in the East, putting paid to all efforts to end the war, given his (Karuna’s) reputation as a good military strategist and commanding the most committed fighters of the LTTE, over that of those in the North.

The “peace talks” took Karuna to the world capitals, as a permanent member of the LTTE delegation, giving him more than a glimpse of the bright neon lights and the real life outside a mosquito infested bunker. It did not take long for the dyed in the wool LTTEer to have a change of heart. Primer Wickremesinghe, at the time, dealt a masterstroke that would even have escaped the minds of the best military strategist, albeit unwittingly. Gammanpila, who today speaks in glowing terms of Karuna, for renouncing separatism, should at least now appreciate the contribution of Ranil Wickremesinghe that made this possible, and on the long run, towards winning the Eelam war.

The Island Editorial

A welcome gavel blow

02 December 2016

 

Mervyn Silva may not have thought he would, one day, have to pay for the sins he committed as a powerful minister of the Rajapaksa government. A law unto himself, he ran a separate state of sorts in Kelaniya and carried out attacks in other areas as well. But, thankfully, a judicial gavel blow sent him reeling on Wednesday. The Supreme Court ordered him to pay a petitioner Rs. 400,000 as compensation for demolishing a boundary wall and two toilets on the pretext of widening a road.

Under the last UPFA government, the then President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s legal immunity was transferred to the members of a cabal to all intents and purposes; Mervyn was one of them. He remained above the law by licking the sandals of his masters. He was once charged with a cheque fraud, but the Rajapaksa government manipulated the Attorney General’s Department in such a way that he got away by paying only the state cost! This is a country where people are thrown behind bars even for letting out ostentatious yawns in courts!

Pulling down walls and toilets was not the only offence Mervyn committed. Let the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government be urged to probe all other allegations against him without handling him with kid gloves in return for his contribution to the vilification campaign against his estranged political masters.

All governments since 1977 have had the likes of Mervyn. One of the thugs the JRJ government used against its opponents was Kalu Lucky, who even stoned the houses of Supreme Court judges with impunity; there was also a much-dreaded strongman known as Gonawala Sunil, who was a convicted rapist, pardoned by the late President J. R. Jayewardene. The late President Ranasinghe Premadasa had as one of his pets a notorious killer and rapist called Soththi Upali; even senior police officers used to salute that criminal in public. Underworld kingpin, Indare, was close to the D. B. Wijetunga administration. A serial killer cum extortionist, Beddegana Sanjweea, was in President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s security division; he was subsequently recruited as a police officer for the services rendered. Wambotta, a contract killer, was one of the thugs who faithfully served the Rajapaksa government.

Thankfully, all the aforesaid criminals are now pushing up the daisies. Others like Mervyn and Eraj, who tried to shoot a group of UNP MPs in Hambantota in 2014 have switched their allegiance to the ‘yahapalana’ government. President Maithripala Sirisena has appointed Eraj an SLFP organiser! A local government member who boasts of having raped hundreds of women and was protected by the Rajapaksa government—the late Ven. Sobitha Thera once condemned him in public—was one of the organisers of the SLFP’s May Day rally in Galle this year!

But for international pressure on the Rajapaksa government former Tangalle Pradeshiya Sabha Chairman Sampath Vidanapathirana, another pet of the Rajapaksasas, and his confederates responsible for killing a British national and gang-raping the victim’s fiancée would have gone scot free in spite of corpus delicti just like the pro-government criminals before him. It is easy to deal with criminals according to the law when their political masters lose power. Death penalty recently awarded to 18 thugs for killing the Noori Estate superintendent is also a case in point. Allegations against the leaders of the last government would never have been investigated if not for their defeat. The same goes for the rogues shielded by the present dispensation. They will enjoy legal immunity so long as their political masters remain in power.

This country used to be a better place when governments were denied steamroller majorities and the opportunity to secure two or more terms consecutively. The rot set in under the United Front government (1970-77), which abused its two-thirds majority to extend the life of parliament by two years arbitrarily. The situation took a turn for the worse under the JRJ regime which secured a five-sixths majority. The second term of each and every executive president has also been a disaster. Those who abuse power, help themselves to public funds, and shield racketeers and other criminals must be denied a second term.

As for Mervyn’s recent pratfall at Hulftsdorp, while raising one’s hat to the judiciary for its ruling, one fervently hopes that its gavel will land equally hard on the ruling politicians and their backers as well.