Monday 27th January, 2025
Daisy Achchi’s estate is in the news again. A son of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa has been arrested over an issue related to it. A bag of gems belonging to Daisy Achchi received much publicity during the Yahapalana government (2015-2019), whose allies including the JVP dismissed her claims about how she inherited her property as a tall tale, but the Rathu Sahodarayas’ own assertion that they are leading the good life thanks to the generosity of some undisclosed well-wishers is no less absurd. They and their unnamed benefactors remind us of orphan Pip and his huge fortune, in the classical Dickensian bildungsroman, Great Expectations.
The JVP/NPP leaders speak ad nauseam about the market values of some former Presidents’ official residences and their imputed rents. Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa has said he would leave the state-owned house he is occupying if a written request/directive is made to that effect. So, all that the NPP administration has to do to see the back of him is to send him a letter, requesting/directing that the house at issue be handed over or a rent commensurate with the government valuation of the property be paid. That is the proper way to set about the task. The NPP should stop labouring under the delusion that the VIP housing issue will help it distract the public from its incompetence, numerous U-turns and broken promises and arrest the decline in its popularity.
There are still long lines of fully-loaded container trucks around the Colombo Port, awaiting Customs clearance; importers and truckers are up in arms against inordinate delays. Shortages of rice and coconuts persist with the prices of those commodities remaining in the stratosphere, but large-scale millers are buying paddy currently being harvested, at unconscionably low prices, much to the resentment of the farming community, who voted for the JVP-led NPP, enabling it to savour power. Rice growers’ appeals for a guaranteed price for their produce have gone unheeded. Usually, governments wait until the big-time millers who help them in numerous ways finish purchasing paddy to introduce a minimum price. Private buses have knocked down the highway segment of the Clean Sri Lanka initiative, so to speak. The NPP government has apparently given up its efforts to have former Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran extradited from Singapore to stand trial here over the Treasury bond scams. It has made a mockery of its election pledge to solve the passport crisis overnight; it has said the problem will not be over until August 2025. The country is reportedly beginning to experience a salt shortage as well!
It is said that everything that King Midas touched turned to gold. We have had governments, whose touch turned everything into an unholy mess. Prominent among those bungling, blundering dispensations were the Yahapalana government, which made a dog’s breakfast of national security, and the Gotabaya Rajapaksa (GR) government, which became a metaphor for chaos itself. The incumbent NPP administration has also got into the same rut as its predecessors, with its leaders talking incessantly without delivering results. Interestingly, after the UNP and the SLFP-led UPFA fell out in late 2018, and the then President Maithripala Sirisena made an all-out yet abortive attempt to dislodge the UNP-led Yahapalana rump, the JVP propagandists famously said that when a clown got into a palace, instead of becoming a king, he turned the palace into a circus. They said so during the GR administration as well. The NPP government will have its opponents using that slogan against it unless it gets its act together.
If the current regime is not to face the same fate as the Yahapalana regime and/or the GR government, it will have to stop the ongoing political dog and pony show and knuckle down to the formidable tasks it undertook in its election manifestos. The GR administration failed and lost popular support although it mustered a two-thirds majority in Parliament. The NPP ought to learn from the failure of the Yahapalana government, which it backed to the hilt, to retain popular support by means of rhetoric, gimmicks and show trials which were intended to create an illusion of justice and justify politically-motivated arrests. What marked the beginning of the end of that UNP-led government was a setback it suffered in the 2018 local government (LG) polls.
The NPP administration has a lot of concerns weighing on it. Above all, it will have to face the LG elections slated for April 2025 while its popularity is on the wane, with many issues remaining unsolved. It has also been facing setbacks in the co-operative society elections.
