Thursday, October 31, 2013

Toilets and Flyovers


The theme of the blog entry came out of an article I read in the Island newspaper of October 29th. See link http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=news-section&page=news-section&code_title=42  which refers to the maniacal race of this Govt. to put infrastructural projects of some prestige, before actual needed work in the economy from basic nourishment of our people, as they both feel that their political capital is kept intact with these prestige projects, that they can highlight to the media on a daily basis, AND they can give their henchmen the chance of making huge sums of money, so that some of it could be put aside for the costly election campaigns, and be able to trounce anything a bankrupt (financially) opposition can fire at them!

It is this sense of being cocky that even a UN report that says that a third of the school children in Sri Lanka do not have basic sanitary facilities does not even elicit an utterance in contradictions! Even if the opposition picks up on this and highlights this in a press conference, even the media cannot put a big enough spin on it to overcome the full page ads and supplements trumping the Katunayake Highway as the greatest gift of this Govt. to the nation! This is the crux of what the opposition are faced with.

More people believe, the most expensive per KM highway in the world is a better bet for the economy, than a few (1 million kids) being inconvenienced by the lack of toilets and water in their schools!! A sad fact of life.  

Norochcholai after a 2 month layoff for repairs and maintenance has been shut down yet again, and that does not make news, as much as when it opened in the first place to the generation of 300MW. The sheer waste of the borrowed money to build this power station, that even our local CEB engineers sneer at is not something that is known amongst the people. The political capital has already been harnessed by the opening, the harping on about the high interest loan, the lack of electricity production, and the old technology being highlighted, and the colossal waste, now is seen as sour grapes on the part of the opposition, trying to minimize the value of this “great” asset!  


Is this whole argument one of a sense of priorities? Or is it really one where a strategic decision has been made to engage in daylight robbery and quit town before you are found out, by which time you have long gone leaving the country to carry the debt for generations. This simple fact is not explainable to the masses who do understand daylight robbery, thinking it is just NORMAL!!!            

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i think the strategic decision has been made to re-establish the infrastructure and necessary amenities in the country after 30 years of war. second phase is to allow those investments to pass on economic benefits to the beneficiaries of those improvements. the third phase is to continually increase the tax collections as a result of those economic improvements and continually improving the delivery of government services through increased revenue.

the daylight robbery is a side effect, and the biggest culprits are actually the robber baron business community that trades on the inside information

Anonymous said...

these words "commissions" and "interest" are used widely in the derogatory but nobody has explained the derogatory nature of these words yet. how about an artiuclation about how these things work and why you think they're bad for the country? actually that needs to be done regularly by politicians in the public rather than whispered areound here and there as if inferring some kind of unartiulated wrongdoing.