Mocking us all

In Parliament yesterday, an Opposition MP mocked the Government’s diplomatic finesse, or the lack of it, in the case of Sivarasa Anojan, the young Sri Lankan facing a death sentence in Saudi Arabia.

To make his point, he recalled how a Foreign Affairs Minister under his own party’s Government had once marshalled the country’s best legal and diplomatic talent to secure clemency for a Sri Lankan on death row. Mid-recollection, he groped for the name, then remembered: Rizana Nafeek.

The performance was deplorable! Nafeek was executed in 2013, beheaded despite personal appeals from the then President himself. Whatever effort the MP was crediting his party with, it did not save her life. Fishing for her name while holding her up as a success story is careless with a dead woman’s memory in service of a debating point. We demand better of our Parliamentarians. We are not naive enough to expect it.

The same MP opened by declaring the Opposition would press ahead with its public protest campaign against the 22nd Amendment, even after the Supreme Court determined a referendum was unnecessary.

Whatever one makes of the amendment itself, treating a Supreme Court determination as an opening bid rather than the law of the land is a curious stance for a party-hack that spent the rest of his speech accusing the Government of undermining institutions.

It suggests the Opposition has already decided the judiciary is captured, a serious charge dropped in passing and never defended.

This would matter less if it were one bad morning. It is not. It is symptomatic of a country that has done the hard part, three years of austerity few populations would tolerate without revolt, and now seems to be exhaling too early.

Everyone appears to be waiting for business as usual. Even President Anura Kumara Dissanayake is not immune, dangling tax relief and subsidies to a population that has earned the sympathy, if not the policy. The IMF says cutting taxes now is premature. So does the Institute of Policy Studies, a think tank that does not pick fights for sport. Verité Research goes further, arguing withholding tax rates should rise, because those who can afford to pay simply are not.

On welfare, the picture cuts the other way. The IMF has consistently pushed the Government to widen the safety net for vulnerable groups, precisely so harder reforms can hold, a fact lost on reflexive IMF-bashers. But Sri Lankans have also shown a talent for gaming the very system meant to protect the poorest, with billions reportedly siphoned from Aswesuma transfers. A country cannot ask for a wider safety net with one hand while picking its pockets with the other.

The change this moment demands will not come from the President, and certainly not from Parliament, least of all an Opposition that had its own turn and left little to show for it. It has to come from the public.

It is worth remembering that the loudest voices now warning against money printing include a former Finance Minister who printed money without hesitation to fund his own Government’s 100-day program. They mocked us then, they are still mocking us.

There is no shortcut here. The economy needs difficult policy to persist well beyond the point where it stops being convenient, certainly for as long as bombs fall over the Middle East. Patience is not a virtue Sri Lankans have been asked to practice lightly these past three years. It remains, unfortunately, the only policy worth taking seriously.