The rude awakening to 2024 in the Lankan year of the VAT

As the people waited with great trepidation for new year dawn to break, not even the tremendous crack and dazzle of the midnight hour’s fireworks could exorcise their mounting dread as they shuddered to face Lank’s year of the VAT.

Like condemned men, prisoners of a lost economic war, lined up to face the morning firing squad, they faced the certainty of waking up to meet an economic death after their commanding officers had been found guilty of negligence and desertion by an international court martial conducted by a Washington based monetary tribunal.

The sins of the wayward shepherds had visited the flock, and now, godforsaken, they stood, the innocent sacrificial scapegoats, to be slaughtered at dawn.

The prospects of surviving the newly dawned year were indeed grim. If the broken spirit of a nation sought an inspirational streak from the symbolic rising of a new year sun, they found only the depressing reality of risen costs brought starkly home to their doorstep. Never before in recent memory had the people met such a rude new year awakening with a blanket eighteen percent tax arbitrarily placed upon almost all consumer goods and services. And this was only for starters.

For who could say what each new day might bring to nail them harder to the cross, to lower them deeper into their economic graves, and banish hope further beyond their ken, with the same fatalistic dirge mournfully sung at the solemn funeral mass. They had been assailed by taxes after taxes in the old year only to be walloped in the dawn of a new. In the mist of the morn, they could hear the new VAT toll the distant death knell.

Of course, it had been exquisitely eulogised, as the penance that had to be paid to atone the original sin, and artfully explained why the Lankan public had to be exiled from their welfare paradise and branded with the mark of VAT on their foreheads. The new crucibles the people had to endure while waiting redemption with the advent of a new prophet who, contrary to expectation and harboured hope, might preach an even gloomier message. If the present seemed dim, the future seemed bleakest.

The entire exercise, it was claimed, had been undertaken to discharge a binding obligation to the IMF for its 2.9 billion dollar bailout loan. One of the conditions imposed is that the deficit between government income and government expenditure is drastically reduced.

The 18 percent VAT on almost the entire gamut of goods and services, has been necessitated, they say, by a shortfall in the revenue estimated in the 2023 budget.

It’s hardly surprising if fancy expectations fall far short of estimated revenues as a result of the laws of demand and supply, as envisioned by Treasury mandarins in air-conditioned comfort in their echelon offices, fail to hold good in the market, where price is the dominating factor.

The gross failure of the government to crack down on corruption, the failure to eliminate wastage in the public sector, the tolerance shown towards the continued extravagant spending spree by ministers and high-ranking public servants; the continued maintenance at a stupendous cost the world’s 18th largest army as needed to defend the territorial borders of this tiny bankrupt island, as if it could defy ‘a whiff of grapeshot’ by an international or regional superpower; all these ill-affordable indulgences signify, we are suicidally bent on living beyond our means.

And most shocking of all failure, is the total apathy shown toward recovering the stolen billions alleged to have been stashed abroad by corrupt past leaders. Three months ago, the Justice Minister told Parliament that a total of 56 billion US dollars have been parked abroad by powerful people in the past two years. This year alone a sum of 9 billion dollars had been stashed abroad’.

Are these little snippets revealed at certain intervals in parliament, uttered to merely humour us? To tickle our sensitive soles? To amuse us?

The minister further added: ‘It will be possible to settle all debts which Sri Lanka owes other nations if these parked funds are brought back.’

If so, why is the government, while sitting on a stolen 56 billion dollar treasure chest, taking such a laidback attitude and, instead, flaying the skins of the people with taxes? Why isn’t it making a concerted effort to marshal the combined resources of international government agencies specifically assigned to monitor and track the movement of black money? Or rather than ruffle certain political feathers, had it preferred to take the easy route and seek the assistance of the IMF for a bailout loan, and tax the hapless citizens endless to meet its stringent conditions?

This is not only the year of the VAT but it’s also the Lankan year of elections. Change is in the air, but it must be emphasised it is not the time for a revolutionary change, not the time to tinker nor to experiment. It’s not the time to test the untested nor to try the untried, nor to vest faith in the self-proclaimed uncorrupt, eagerly waiting their own turn to willingly fall prey to the seductive temptations of high office.

If the people make the wrong choice and board the wrong crest of the many political waves now dashing to the shore, then they will commit the same unforgivable folly they naively committed five years ago, and once again have none to blame but their own foolish selves alone.