The ongoing implosion

The world itself is facing its own reckoning and needs Sri Lanka to grow up economically as well. To believe this is possible, and each day do whatever we can, each in our sphere, and collectively, to make it true

Here in Sri Lanka, the economic crisis mounts. Food inflation is stratospheric, interest rates prohibitive, the upcoming corporate tax may make “profit” a nostalgic concept. There are problems with poverty, children’s malnutrition, and medical supplies. 

These are the transitional agonies and pangs when reality avoidance and ‘magical thinking’ have prevailed for too long. And yet, it seems that decisive reforms of expenditure, inefficiency, or a clear game plan seem elusive. 

I have urged creating a “Recovery Scorecard” where the best and most imaginative are gathered, and akin to a “Balanced Scorecard” we plot recovery metrics in terms of “Financial Health,” “Good Governance,” “Human Capital” and “National Capabilities and Assets”. A different quadrinity could be proposed but aligning on the relevant indicators and their success criteria with a real depth of debate, from deeply experienced people, would align and unify and focus. It would also be a global first if truly institutionalised and used to manage performance.

Singapore used a similar blueprint, even though it may never have been publicly published as such. And then “big bets” including tourism and tea and fertilisers and digital innovation need decisive leadership, not a medley of “initiatives” disconnected from an established “bull’s eye”. We need the “steak,” not just the “sizzle.”

On the tourism front, we have to get our communication narrative right if we are to expand our visitor base and attract a larger range of visitors who can spend more abundantly on our treasures and gifts, which must be showcased and parlayed appropriately. We also have to manage our communication with the UN and Human Rights bodies in terms of our global citizenship. And with “bets” like Port City Commission, there is still no clarity at large in terms of the “end in mind”, nor an execution path people can cheer on and be enthused by.

It is myopic to think that a PR agency will “fix” all this. PR agencies have to deeply understand the brief (which must therefore be articulated and crystallised), and they must understand their audiences, and they must accordingly taper their messages. This requires guidance and cannot be done on “auto-pilot.” We seem to have an allergy towards guided, focused, strategic communication.

It is a shame as there is so much that is potentially compelling and engaging and enticing, we “could” communicate and energise people with and around.

The world at large

Sadly, the world has little tuition to offer right now. The idiotic “lockdown” (lock up an already widespread air borne pathogen?) mania went on and on, smashing small businesses, criminalising the bourgeois lifestyle, shutting places of worship, all allegedly for the greater glory of “science”. 

This was all a demonstration of how readily masses of good people will acquiesce. The complete lack of efficacy of this disastrous approach, the recurring waves of infection that came regardless, a generation of students and workers pointlessly devastated – leads us to consider the flickering candle of capitalist enterprise and the state-run bureaucracies that have stepped to the fore in its stead.

The world’s affairs are being mishandled by a bureaucratic quasi-socialism that is strangling and seeking to now extinguish the spirit of middle-class innovation and progress. 

These are not new fears. But despite these post World War II forebodings, for a brief, golden period, it seemed these prognostications were bosh.

The United States and Britain had a reboot of enterprise and personal drive politically and culturally in the 80s. Japan came to the fore as an innovation and quality powerhouse, catapulting itself into world leadership. Hong Kong and Singapore followed suit in the late 80s and 90s, becoming two of the “freest” economies (despite their cultural and political systems) in the world, with world class jurisprudence, rule of law, free flow of capital and more. 

If only the Indian subcontinent had opted not to remain mired in bloated state institutions and bureaucracy and had invested in their human capital and competitive edge in anything like the same way, so many fortunes would have been different. These East Asian countries and their example also helped catalyse the flourishing of Taiwan and South Korea, and to a lesser extent, but still palpably, Indonesia and Malaysia. 

High cash reserves, high productivity, soaring education rates, technological advance and more, were cornerstones of this “miracle by design”. 

The collapse of the Berlin Wall as the world seemed to convulse forward was a perfect poetic and graphic backdrop and the “end of history” (in its conventional sense) was forecast.

Unfortunately, these commanding heights were relinquished. Instead of small enterprise, large conglomerates came increasingly into ascendance as wealth grew. Companies sought to “colonise” by striking deals with all kinds of political leadership worldwide, retarding rather than stoking progress. 

Credit rather than creativity and “juggling” of financial instruments rather than the bringing into being businesses that created real value, increasingly took centre stage.

Erosion of value

Children of the late computer, early internet age living on inflated and hyped incomes took their “goodies” for granted. As here in Sri Lanka we kept borrowing and living a lifestyle with a safety net we could ill afford. We charged untenably low prices for items and people’s low income and lack of development was chloroformed in their perception with this “lifestyle”.

In the “developed” world, unearned credit provided palliatives. And so anti-responsibility hatred took over the academy, and genuine wealth (other than celebrity with the right political “talking points”) became a focus for “class hatred”. It came at others’ expense, or the Earth’s expense, or the expense of justice or class or some other standing. A forcible redistribution of the social order was suddenly “morality.”

For too long we sat idly by thinking iterations of computer and digital progress would remake the world, rather than just have relative irrelevance be more efficiently, instantaneously disseminated. 

And we beamed at the left-wing agitations without realising the potential for seduction really bad ideas have that strip personal accountability away and allow you to blame everyone else for any inadequacies or frustrations. 

We are facing now the detritus produced by malevolent predatory bureaucrats the world over, the hegemonic ambitions of power brokers who have no interest in democratising economic opportunity.

Globally, people docilely went along with the lockdown insanity. Early treatments were ignored and vilified. Civil liberties stripped; constitutional protections set aside. And the media was complicit globally in “selling” this and casting any protest as some example of right wing extremism.

We were all to be pathogen carriers wearing idiotic face masks that no study has ever shown works, no country has found stops spread, cannot work given the size of particles with a face otherwise open on all sides, and which are themselves petri dishes of infection and lack of hygiene. But totemic compliance and “value signalling” showed us what happens when fact and data-based firewalls give way.

We were jabbed in clear violation of those hard-won Nuremberg precepts by not being remotely fully informed of what was being shot into our systems. To this day no government has the courage, candour or humanity to properly investigate vaccine safety. 

While generic drugs that have had billions of doses and clearly pose no threat to us (shown over decades) are demonised by distortions, untested new technology is sped through “emergency use authorisations” with inadequate trials, no control groups, for an illness with a 99% recovery rate and where average mortality is almost exclusively above life span. It is surreal!

So, with two years of life expectancy gone for too many in the world, we have despair riddled once business owners, indebted societies, children with lower test scores than in generations (or out of school altogether and thrown into child weddings or child labour or simply suffering the ravages of malnutrition), inflation raging worldwide, with an “electoral” rescue being the only hope for anything

What is the remedy?

We need cultural antibodies to come back to the fore. How do we get the spirit of enterprise back? And how do we let it finally take root in this resplendent isle as well? 

Globally we have to understand the dangers of corporatism. The structures that manage wealth get so complex, “managers” are asked to govern them, and guide them, and oversee them. And that act, decoupled from the enterprise that created the wealth and value that needs the stewardship in the first place, tragically begin to predominate. 

When life becomes tranquil and peaceful and productive, its fruits are too readily taken for granted. And while what got us there was imagination, coupled with rationality, coupled with execution, it is easier to just prance around the “systems” and the “order” and forget the vitality that should be animating them.

The entrepreneurial drive gets smothered by managerial bureaucracy in large firms and certainly government itself. And large firms hook up with governments to become cartels and protect against competition and find subsidies and other support to impede small and medium sized firms that are the backbone of true development. 

Creative men and women either take to the fringes or the niches (which is fantastic for those pockets, but not the world at large), or spend their lives trying stay at all true to themselves while hacking through the bureaucratic thicket.

As insulation is provided, colleges and “think tanks” and research bodies that are invested in to become mouthpieces and amplifiers of mainstream dogma create a type of “coerced utopia” for their evangel. And students with no real skills head out, to infuse the managerial chemistry of large corporations and government departments. Through them, “wealth” becomes ever more parasitic and less productive.

Perhaps, just perhaps the sheer insanity, the wilful contempt for life and liberty, the unsustainability of this wreckage, will again spark, as it once did, creative fires, and people determined to create value, and we will rediscover the local, the artisanal, the creative.

And perhaps we will discover again a “renaissance” of the human spirit. This seems fanciful, but it always has been in history, and yet it has happened. 

We have to hope as we look into the darkness, we may yet rediscover our potential, the productive potential of people premised on contribution, character and creativity not bureaucratic gullibility, homogenisation, and following the herd.

And here in Lanka?

We have to be more than chagrined. When the poverty level rises above 40%, when smart companies are providing “economic counselling” for staff on how to live within their means, we know we are dealing with debt fever. And now the resolute action needed, needs to spark resolution across the populace.

As above, populism and economic collectivism, particularly in a country without the earlier economic vitality to have built the reserves or the economic engine to manage these antics for a bit, is overall a recipe for disaster. 

Protectionism needs tackling, public finances need reform, new leaders need to be ushered in constitutionally, and new leadership habits need building, and the private sector has to step up to campaign and to backstop and to underwrite. 

Tourism needs a far more energetic, visionary and decisive approach and it needs it fast. Overall, a new gameplan needs communicating and should be articulated from a wide cross-section of those with deep expertise and experience in various areas. 

Our new President has indeed stabilised the country from the sheer chaos and incompetence prevailing earlier. And he has marshalled important dialogues and put in place some capable people. Amidst the hue and cry, we must acknowledge that. The country is at least, for now, “functioning.”

But the poverty and pain, and upcoming taxes and the prolonged forex crisis requires addressing, and it needs accountability, and it cannot just take aim at public disorder as the only “outrage” to respond to.

We need a strategic path forward, we must tell people the truth, we must galvanise whatever can bring in foreign income and do it not ceremonially but with all the energy and insight and imagination we can muster. And we must practice this above all:

Face the facts en route to transforming them; demand accountability for results that matter; prioritise things that most crucially will make a difference to people’s lives; ignite enterprise at all costs. 

And finally jettison the myopia that says we can “borrow” our way to normalcy or stability. That may temporarily stop the freefall, but we have to find fresh wings.

A recent story doing the rounds is from the memoirs of Gorbachev, studying with Japanese students in Europe after World War II. Japan was a ravaged country with crippling economic sanctions, before their own dedication and the more restorative elements of the Marshall Plan kicked in. 

During classes he reports these students took turn writing notes. One of them wrote while the other restored his pencil (the Japanese pencils had brittle lead tips which broke frequently). 

They were often encouraged to use English pencils, as they were as cheap, and of far better quality.

Emotionally in turmoil, they felt they had to stick to their national product, support the impetus for improvement, envisioning despite the painful humiliation, a day when “quality” and Japan would become synonymous. 

Well, we need that type of fire to forge our faith here now, not a beggar’s bowl. The world itself is facing its own reckoning and needs Sri Lanka to grow up economically as well. To believe this is possible, and each day do whatever we can, each in our sphere, and collectively, to make it true. And those of us who love Sri Lanka and believe in its potential, must report for duty accordingly.

(The writer is the founder and CEO of EPL Global and founder of Sensei Lanka, a global consultant with over 30 years strategic leadership experience and now, since March 2020, a globally recognised COVID researcher and commentator.)