VIEWPOINTS

GREAT EXPECTATIONS YET HUMBLE RESULTS!

Wijith DeChickera wonders why countless sterling visions and sundry one-size-fits-all fixes haven’t helped Sri Lanka get with the programme

As is customary in election years when voting time approaches, the underbelly of the franchise – if one can envisage such a creature – comes to the fore… for sure, what’s taking the headlines and making breaking news is a plethora of sweeteners, from slashed commodity and essential items to utility rate cuts.

The cost to state coffers (read: taxpayers’ money) of such price reductions is the fine print that neither politicos nor their clients want to scrutinise too closely lest the ‘good news’ turns out to be nothing short of the postponed – yet, inevitable – disaster of being un­able to foot the bill sustainably.

Let it not be said that some of us failed to recall that the treasuries of successive governments since independence lived in that ‘la-la-land’ of living beyond one’s means.

This is regrettably in tandem with a citizenry who appear only too willing to forget that the country’s books didn’t balance in 70 out of 76 years – and help future generations who must now repay their debt (for one must beg, borrow or steal to assist the living dead to die beyond their means) to remember their ancestors in unprintable terms.

While it may seem funny to external observers that an island race remains committed to the cyclic nature of getting and spending, borrowing and repaying sovereign debt through renewed indebtedness, without a hope of escaping the perennial plight that loops back on us, it’s tragic that those who enforce it on us may have no clearer sense of how it may (eventually, if at all) end well.

Is that not what respected American political scientist and economist, writer and international relations scholar Dr. Francis Fukuyama had in mind when he essayed: “[The international development and aid community] would like to turn Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya and Haiti into idealised places like ‘Denmark’ but it doesn’t have the slightest idea of how to bring this about.”

Forbid me to essay that there is something rotten in our state of Denmark!

It is not for want of trying that Western nations and associated international agencies that are comfortable with – or as our red brethren would have it, ‘complicit in’ – the Washington Consensus have failed to impress our perpetually developing polity that we need to ‘get with the programme.’

Have not the IMF, World Bank et al (among other global fellows of the Washington D.C. based group; the radicals may say ‘cabal’) told us time and again that fiscal policy discipline is the key to economic vim, vigour and vitality?

And that as a nation, we and our would-be governors must avoid gargantuan fiscal deficits relative to GDP?

That wasteful public spending with an eye on patron-client politics must be redirected to the broad-based provision of pro-growth and pro-poor services – such as education, healthcare and infrastructure investments?

And that tax reforms, broadening the tax base and maintaining moderate marginal tax rates may make for sunnier weather even in rain beset tropical sinkholes?

Have blatantly capitalist and reluctantly ‘socialist but with a human face’ regimes not been told ad nauseam by our global interlocutors who ostensibly ride to our rescue time out of mind that interest rates must be market determined and positive but moderate in real terms?

And on top of competitive exchange rates, we must strive to liberalise trade, imports and inward foreign direct investment (FDI)?

As well as privatise state enterprises – especially nonperforming entities – and deregulate, yet with prudential oversight of financial institutions in addition to (last but by no means least on the list of this decade of ‘must-dos’ that comprise the package of reforms that are de rigueur for debt wracked developing nations) ensuring legal security for property rights?

If we’re honest, we’d admit that sundry administrations and their tone-deaf bureaucracies have had this mantra from Western think tanks immune to native wit and alternative solutions dinned into us from day one of our borrowing, beggary, eventual defaulting on sovereign debt repayments and subsequent declaration of bankruptcy.

But to little or no avail for us to avoid repeated failure…

And if the few unabashed neoliberals left in policy-making camps still stand by these tried, tested and fit to be rejected formulae, they would enjoy cold comfort from the assessment of critical global voices raised against visions that don’t measure up to experienced reality.

Because all the goodwill and clear thinking in the world are powerless in the face of avarice; bureaucratic complicity in the rape of state coffers; corruption that is not only endemic but systemic and ‘un-uproot-table’ – without a radical change of heart and mind, among citizenry and elected representatives alike, and the capture of state institutions by a panoply of elites.

Indubitably, the quality of governance as well as the calibre of citizenship must change.

Any takers? More pertinently, any credible combine of electors representatives?

Or else, we may have to lament in the spirit of political writer and anticorruption specialist Prof. Dan Hough, who observed that “success stories are thin on the ground.”