Adapting examples

Singapore has long been Sri Lanka’s collective dream and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is hoping that he can put together the best of both countries during his term. 

The Government very early on decided that working with Singapore would be beneficial to Sri Lanka. A State-run Singapore company has been given the task of creating the master plan for the Megapolis project and Cabinet last week approved a capacity-building venture for local public employees to be carried out with the assistance of the Singaporean Government. 

More crucially, the two countries hope to kick off a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that is expected to attract investment and offset a volatile external environment. 

The Government is also considering a Temasek-like model to reform its public enterprises, which would be massively dependent on Sri Lanka’s ability to depoliticise its public sector and stamp out corruption. 

The Prime Minister will also be addressing a conference of diaspora, ostensibly to update them on pending reforms by the Government and encourage them to invest in Sri Lanka. But that also means the Government will have to get more of its policies off the ground faster. 

A Cabinet nod has also been given to the Board of Investment to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Surbana Jurong, the same company in charge of the Megapolis Master Plan, to set up a consultancy unit with the BOI. The plan is to eventually launch a joint venture between the two institutions. 

The Government is clearly banking on the credibility of the Singaporean company to encourage hesitant investors and provide confidence to turn around Sri Lanka’s abysmal record on attracting FDI. The ploy is a plausible one but heavily dependent on the Government being able to implement key policies at home. 

It has got off to a shaky start with the VAT bill, which could take months to simmer down. In the meantime, it will have to roll out a special trade and investment bill - which has been hinted at since the start of this year but is yet to be tabled in Parliament - that aims to reduce red tape and push forward ease of doing business. 

One key element of it is a national payment platform that received Cabinet approval last week and when set up will open up key institutions such as the Customs, Inland Revenue and Excise departments to online payments. 

Small steps are being made but an area where Sri Lanka has not moved closer to Singapore is in the honestly of its public servants. Singapore has some of the world’s highest paid State employees and is constantly attracting the best of the best from around the world. But where they have excelled in is stamping out corruption and ensuring development plans are consistently upgraded and implemented. Understandably both these elements are much envied by the rest of the world but on the corruption front Sri Lanka has much to do even to present a façade of good governance. 

Over the last few weeks two of the Government’s largest tenders for gas and coal have faced huge questions over transparency. Both are under investigation for opaque decisions, which have political and public sector implications. With so much on the line, the Government will have a tough time living up to its promises.