The airport to nowhere
The deserted international airport in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, constructed in 2013 now receives only one flight per day.
This remote coastal scrubland, a haven for wild elephants and migratory birds that is several hours away from the nearest city, seems like an odd place to attempt to create a major commercial hub.
Yet such was the whim of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, a local son who, thanks to Chinese loans, poured immense sums into pet projects during the decade he held this island nation in his grip.
Since he was voted out of office in January, Rajapaksa’s extravagant spending in his home district, much of it named for himself, looks ever more like monuments to folly.
A giant Indian Ocean harbour being blasted out of the island’s southern shoreline is costing well over $1 billion (U.S.), and officials say it is unlikely to break even for years. A $210-million international airport built two years ago has hundreds of employees but receives just a few passengers a day.
The 35,000-seat Mahinda Rajapaksa International Cricket Stadium and a new convention centre are rarely used, as are kilometers of expansive new highways that get little traffic apart from the occasional herd of cattle.
“It’s a crying shame how much money was spent,” said Harsha de Silva, deputy minister for policy planning and economic affairs in Sri Lanka’s new government. “Why is an airport in the middle of nowhere? Why are you building a road to the middle of nowhere?”
It’s not as though Sri Lankans didn’t ask those questions before, but under Rajapaksa’s increasingly despotic administration, dissent was ignored or punished. After his narrow and surprising election defeat, the country of 20 million is waking up to the excesses of his rule.
Sri Lankan Airlines, the deeply indebted national carrier, announced that it would cease operating from Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport in the town of Mattala, north of Hambantota. The twice-daily flights were losing the airline $8 million a year, company officials said.
The new president, Maithripala Sirisena, ordered a review of all of Rajapaksa’s projects — a long list. To cement the government’s victory in a 26-year civil war against northern Tamil rebels, Rajapaksa embarked on a $6-billion infrastructure spending binge starting in 2009.
More than two-thirds of the projects, including the port and airport at Hambantota, were financed by Chinese banks at interest rates as high as 6.3 per cent annually, several times what other lenders offered, without open bidding, officials say.
Authorities are investigating whether contracts were padded to benefit members of Rajapaksa’s government, which included more than two dozen members of his extended family. No charges have been filed.
In the meantime, finance officials are exploring ways to restructure the Chinese loans. Government lawyers are poring over contracts, trying to scale back some projects that haven’t yet begun, such as a 202hectare development on reclaimed land in the capital, Colombo, where the Rajapaksa envisioned luxury highrises and a Formula One racetrack.