V2025 success is in its implementation

TSUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2017

he President and Prime Minister coming in one car for the launch of V2025 (Vision 2025), the blueprint for the future of a “rich Sri Lanka” was clearly to deliver a message. ‘We are in this together – till 2025.’

This was against all the evidence to the contrary that the two coalition partners of the National Unity Government, viz., the SLFP and the UNP were drifting further and further apart and only on a ‘holding operation’ till the end of this year. The more than symbolic ‘coming together’ as it were at the BMICH on Monday, was also in the immediate afterglow of the SLFP’s 66th year convention the previous day where President Maithripala Sirisena told his followers that there is now a Government that talks in one voice. In Hakmana the same day, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa told that faction of the SLFP opposed to Mr. Sirisena’s leadership that the party had sold its soul to the UNP under the incumbent President.

How much President Sirisena’s heart is in V2025 remains in question. He hardly spoke on economic issues in a Q and A session that day. His backers in the SLFP openly voice opposition to the UNP’s economic policies of privatisation. Had V2025 received the endorsement of the SLFP convention the previous day, it would have added more weight to this eight-year plan, but that might have been political hara-kiri for the President vis-avis his own party.

He has had to, from time to time, pull the reins on the UNP’s economic initiatives, and he has not always been wrong. The lack of transparency behind some of the UNP moves, especially through the CCEM (Cabinet Committee on Economic Management) headed by the Premier has resulted in the President neutralising it with a National Economic Council, which he now chairs himself.

The bane of post-Independence politics in Sri Lanka has been what A/Level economics students were taught as the ‘thattu maru’ system. This has its origins in the Tamil lexicon for shared agricultural cultivation practices among different owners, especially brothers who tilled the land the way they wanted when they had ownership of the property for a given period with no long-term consistency. It was the same with political parties when in power doing what they wanted while undoing what the previous occupants had done.

Thus, at least this Government is trying to show there will be long-term consistency in economic policy. The whole world has moved away from the State monopolising the commanding heights of the economy; the best example being China. The second biggest capital-driven economy in the world today now advocates global free trade with Communism only a façade. Once Marxist-Leninist Russia is not far behind.

While a common economic plan is essential for economic development, equally so is an economy which is not riddled with corruption at the top. The State-private sector status quo was maintained during the Rajapaksa era but they put this country into a debt trap like never before. From next year (2018) when repayment of the loans taken by them start kicking in, to the tune of US$ 4 billion by 2019 – reaching nearly 80 % of GDP, Sri Lanka will become an “outlier among its rating peers” in the words of V2025.

In the midst of this impending debt crisis, the country has fallen into continuing reports of further loans and inflated Government infrastructure projects be they the now nearly aborted Jaffna housing project or the Central Expressway.

V2025 frequently refers to a “social market economy” and emphasises the role of the private sector and of the PPP (PublicPrivate-Partnership formula) to deliver a million new jobs and a per capita income of US$ 5,000 by 2025. Notwithstanding President Sirisena’s presence at the launch of V2025, the SLFP has yet to give its imprimatur to it, as a party. The proof of the V2025 pudding will be in its implementation – long-term.

Thus, the nagging question among diplomats who attended the launch of V2025 was the stability and the longevity of this Government beyond December 31 this year – not 2025.