An unhappy commentary

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake

Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp of action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own - Charles de Gaulle

After the storm comes the calm and after the darkness, the dawn. It is the commonplace maxim about storms and perhaps cyclones. 

Calm is not something we will have in the foreseeable future. Dawn will not follow darkness any time soon. Instead, we are promised a convulsively deranged cacophony of recriminatory slanging between the Government and the Opposition. The Opposition has suddenly acquired plenty of wisdom on hydraulic engineering and metrological forecasting. 

The sheer buffoonery of a Government parliamentarian attempting to preside over a meeting where the Kandy District Secretary was responding to a group of Opposition politicians is not a reassuring sign of how the cyclone wreckage is to be dealt with.  

There were three contenders for the executive presidency. Anura Kumara Dissanayake made it and has inherited the wind. Now, as he himself has said, he must start from zero.  

Sajith Premadasa’s glee club may tell you that their man is the most competent to ‘verticalise’ the economy ‘horizontalised’ by Cyclone Ditwah. 

The UNP’s Goblin from Galle may tell you that only his leader is fluent in the lingo of the loan sharks of international capital markets. 

The tycoon who wants to make us an entrepreneurial state is hell bent on a trajectory of reigniting primitive tribal instincts.

A wise observation by Al Gore, the decent democrat and climate change activist who lost his White House bid to George Bush Jr thanks to a ruling by the US Supreme Court, is an appropriate point of departure for this brief missive. 

“As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.” 

The Opposition has suddenly acquired plenty of wisdom on hydraulic engineering and metrological forecasting

What happened to us is not unprecedented. The most improbable happened.  

I have not kept count of rock falls, earth slips, mudslides and the frightening floods in almost every district.

According to the Asian Disaster Reduction Centre “nearly 20% of the land area from 65,000 sq km of total area in Sri Lanka was identified as landslide prone. These landslide prone areas are spread over in Badulla, Nuwara Eliya, Kandy, Matale, Ratnapura, Kegalle, Kalutara, Galle, Matara and Hambantota districts.”

President Dissanayake must start from zero on a national policy on land use and land management. In the process he must ensure equal opportunity of learning in state run schools. Privatising Royal College by handing it over to its old boys is a commendable idea.  

Opposition and SJB Leader Sajith Premadasa

He must do something about our monk’s predilection to construct stupas and statues on every scenic and inaccessible hilltop in our resplendent island. 

To start with he could request his Minister of Buddhasasana Religious and Cultural Affairs to make Venerable Walpola Rahula’s ‘What the Buddha Taught’ available to every child who is studying Buddhism in school. Originally written in English it is available in Sinhala. It is a lucid distillation of what the Buddha taught. 

Next, he must find an economic advisor who has read Chapter 12 of John Maynard Keynes ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.’

It is the best book that has ever been written on speculative markets. Keynes tells you “ it would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.” 

Keynes wrote it in 1930 in the middle of the great depression. It is a must read for anybody seriously attempting to restore economic wreckage. 

As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions

“Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. 

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism, which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object.” 

Our ‘City of Dreams, our Port City, our Shangrila’s and Ratnadeepas are speculative ventures. Our house maids in Arabia, our under paid tea pluckers in the currently uninhabitable hill country, our apparel workers in the presently flooded free trade zones earn tangible convertible currency which the Government now hopes to collect with dollar denominated bonds.

Keynes expanded on what he perceived as the difference between wise enterprise and greedy, myopic speculation.

“If I may be allowed to appropriate the term speculation for the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market, and the term enterprise for the activity of forecasting the prospective yield of assets over their whole life, it is by no means always the case that speculation predominates over enterprise. As the organisation of investment markets improves, the risk of the predominance of speculation does, however, increase.” 

Anura Kumara Dissanayake must assemble a team of wise men and women. They must be people of vision plus practicality. There are lots of smart people who may be available. What we need today are creative non-conformist minds as those assembled by Deng Xio Ping to rebuild China

Anura Kumara Dissanayake was elected by ordinary people. Ordinary people aspire to ensure a level playing field for their children in this age of transformational technology. Every child must learn English which is the dominant language of digitisation. Such ambitious goals are best achieved in a secular republic where science repudiates ritual and pageantry is performed in the guise of piety. 

Anura Kumara Dissanayake must assemble a team of wise men and women. Not necessarily from the Chamber of Commerce. They must be people of vision plus practicality. There are lots of smart people who may be available. What we need today are creative non-conformist minds as those assembled by Deng Xio Ping to rebuild China.  I don’t see that happening yet.