A not-so-merry season

Usually, the end of the year is a period of joy, with families getting together over meals, children enjoying their school holidays and everyone looking forward to a new year filled with hope and aspirations. While Christmas is the most important religious holiday for Christians, even those who do not follow that faith enjoy the festive spirits. 

December is usually a good period for the Sri Lankan economy. It is peak winter tourist season when hundreds of thousands of travellers visit our shores. Many migrant and expatriate workers also return home for the holidays and Domestic spending increases during this time, further driving economic activity. Overall, end of the year merry-making provides a much needed boost going into the New Year.

Sri Lanka has also experienced many devastating ends to the year. In 2004, a tsunami struck on 26 December killing over 40,000 citizens and causing colossal losses to property. There have been numerous years when festive cheer was dampened by war raging in the north and east. Yet we Sri Lankans soldiered through all these calamities.

This year’s gloom is markedly different. Unlike the tsunami and even the brutal civil war, there is a deep malaise that the current economic plight of the nation is by and large self-inflicted. There is the sense that the current rulers did not even attempt to fix issues or institute sound policy that might have lessened the impact of the economic rip-tide the country now faces.

The COVID pandemic which swept across the globe could have been managed better by our leaders. For many months there was a denial of a crisis and subsequently made all the wrong policy choices to deal with the crisis that could no longer be hidden.  The regime began with standard racist and divisive policies, first castigating segments of our society as being responsible for the spread of COVID and then blatantly implementing an openly bigoted policy of forced cremations. Rather than securing the necessary vaccines, even the minister in charge of health was promoting concoctions made by dubious witch doctors. Instead of enforcing lockdowns in a scientific manner, it was done half-heartedly in response to political pressure. Such measures not only failed to curtail the spread of COVID, but devastated the economy as well.

On the economic front, manmade disasters were even more devastating in the past year. An ill-timed, ill-conceived and unadvised fertiliser ban has made food security a major issue in 2022. Exacerbating this situation, there is a foreign exchange crisis that would further deteriorate the possibility of importing essential items while production dropped drastically domestically. Not curtailing government spending, including the expansion of the public sector amidst an economic crisis, pig-headed policy to defend the rupee has wasted valuable foreign exchange and prevented many hundreds of millions coming in through remittances have all contributed to the current economic downturn.

Making things worse is the callous disregard of the ruling elites to the plight of the general public. They continue to go on their many foreign jaunts, with hardly any reduction in expenditure and spend public funds lavishly on cocktail parties and merry-making. There seems no accountability either for the numerous mistakes, scandals and wrongdoing. From the corruption accusations on importation of sugar, coconut oil and organic fertiliser to the revelations made in the Pandora Papers remain unaccounted for. Not a single person has been held responsible. Even while domestic gas cylinders are exploding on a daily basis, having even killed more than a dozen people, the Government has been unable to hold a single person accountable. Therefore it is not surprising that there is now a palpable, simmering discontent and public anger towards the ruling classes spilling out into the cricket stadiums and restaurants.

Even during such gloomy times, it is important to remember what the season is truly about. It is about being grateful for family and friends. For those people who will help each of us get through tough times. While politicians and leaders may fail us, let us take joy and comfort in each other and get through this difficult time as families often do – together.