SHIFTING SANDS  While our politicians jostle to grab power of city and rural councils in the aftermath of the local government (LG) polls, the people (including the 40 percent or so who didn’t bother to vote this time around) have been left wondering what ‘Clean Sri Lanka’ really means.

We have heard this sort of grandiose promise many times in the past – more recently when ‘yahapalanaya’ promised good governance, and ended up in a scrapheap of graft and mismanagement.

In recent months, we have watched in disbelief as ragging, rape and youth suicides (and a failure to act promptly – because as opposition forces and critics of the incumbents charge, some allegations have pointed the finger at people who are known to the powers that be), crime and shootings in broad daylight (at an average of more than 10 a month – i.e. more than 80 since the presidential election with in excess of 50 fatalities), and raging diseases such as dengue and chikungunya have taken centre stage – and made life as we know it more miserable than it was.

Meanwhile, our politicians have been busy spinning the LG election results in their favour and resorting to what they’re known for – horse trading to grab power of the councils that rarely make a difference to the quality of our lives.

The hard facts are that the ruling coalition’s two-thirds majority at the general election was washed away, so much so that it even failed to win by an absolute majority (it’s share of the vote was 43.2%) with the combined opposition securing as many as 120 councils against a count of 116 for the incumbents (with 29 turning out to be dead heats).

Some commentators have attributed the government’s popularity downgrade to a growing impatience among the electorate to see it keeping the multiple promises it made at election time – chief among them being a pledge to abolish the executive presidency, reduce poverty (more than a quarter of the population continue to live in abject poverty – and youth unemployment remains unacceptably high), bring the corrupt to justice and reveal the masterminds of the Easter Sunday attacks of 2019.

What’s more, when the people learn that they now have a commander in chief who travels in private jets (even if they’re paid for by friendly people or nations), who would blame them for wondering whether double standards are becoming the norm – because after all, the president and his men were vocal critics of excesses by past incumbents, be it a waste of the public purse or insensitivity when the citizenry is being asked to tighten their belts, in addition to facing shortages of some essentials, passports and most recently, vehicle number plates!

There’s also the economy to consider…

First and foremost, we could be on the brink of kissing goodbye to the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility (EFF) unless – among other imperatives – the government reverses its electricity tariff cuts of earlier this year to counter the losses reported by the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) in recent months.

The risk of a country rating downgrade would then be on the cards.

And for no fault of its own, the administration will also have to navigate the headwinds caused by the stupendously higher tariffs proposed by the US and dire implications of a global war on trade.

It goes without saying that should this transpire, the already unbearable cost of living will take yet another hit.

There have been reports too that the government’s high risk lifting of the vehicle import ban isn’t delivering anything like the revenue from taxes and levies outlined in Budget 2025 – and that could spell disaster for Sri Lanka’s forex reserves and balance of payments, which in turn could see the Sri Lankan Rupee tumble back to where it was at a time when we spent days and nights in queues not long ago.

And if one were to look beyond the immediate horizon, there will come a time when our obligation to start repaying Sri Lanka’s mountain of debt kicks in: that horizon is only 30 or so months away.

So it isn’t surprising that the ground is shifting and voter apathy is setting in; not surprising also in the light of the utterly hollow statements made by so many contestants in the countdown to the recent elections.

It is a fact too that the main contenders have played ball with each other in the past – meaning that they’ve all been part of ‘boru’ and ‘horu’ administrations at one time or another.

So much for ‘system change’!

Indeed, their respective track records speak for themselves; and while people forget the good, the bad and the ugly with gay abandon, they wake up every four years, only to find that they don’t have a choice of voting for clean politicians, despite promises to clean things up.

What matters is that there is law and order, economic stability, far less corruption, poverty alleviation and most of all, an end to empty promises that are rarely kept.

It is plainly obvious that people who are hero-worshipping either the boru or horu parties are seeing the outcome of the recent polls ‘their way’ while the rest of us have only one hope: that our precious nation will see an end to a political circus that has run for some seven decades.

– Editor-in-Chief