Responding to the ongoing crisis in Sri Lanka, the Economist slams the governance of the Rajapaksa regime noting that their response has been “a mix of intimidation and ineptitude” which has produced “a political crisis to compound the economic disaster”.
Photo of army-seized agricultural land in Jaffna Reporting on Sri Lanka's ban on chemical fertilisers, the Economist highlights the dire economic straits the country finds itself in with inflation near 6% and food prices rise more than 11%. Whilst the Rajapaksa regime had initially planned to implement the transition to organic fertilisers over a ten year period, the announcement of a sudden total ban caught many farmers off guard. Sri Lanka's Planter's Association predicts a massive fall in tea production and export revenue of around 25% across the next six months and thereafter nearly a...
Following the appointment of Basil Rajapaksa to the cabinet, the Economist highlights growing unrest throughout Sri Lanka including farmers, teachers, war victims, and civil society actors. In light of this growing unrest, the Economist writes that “the Rajapaksas’ suffocating hold on power look like a weakness”.
Sri Lanka’s president Gotabaya Rajapaksa “has made explicit the link he sees between an all-powerful state and the centrality of Buddhism, whose more chauvinist priests he courts,” writes the Economist this week, as it warned that Rajapaksa is “amassing personal power”. “Gotabaya’s message of security and competence, along with jabs at the Muslim and Tamil minorities designed to please the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, propelled him to the presidency,” wrote the Banyan columnist. “A Gotabaya presidency makes a return to the earlier hounding of critics possible,” the column added. “Out of...
Despite the on-going damage to national reconciliation, Gotabaya Rajapaksa is insistent on the normalisation of “military’s influence in the civilian sphere”, warns the Economist. The normalisation of the military The Economist notes that Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s rise to the presidency was based on the support of former officers, soldiers and his own “band of brothers”. After the civil war ended in 2009, the army and intelligence sectors played an increasing role in Sri Lanka’s public life, as well as the disappearance of government critics. Gotabaya’s ascendance to presidency did not so much...
There is a growing scepticism about the veracity of Sri Lanka's GDP statistics.
Are we strangling the peace process and thereby strangling the economy as well?
If our economic policies are based on fanciful ideas of non-existent bountiful natural resources, we are heading for disaster.