MOODY’S SHOULD PUT YOU IN THE MOOD

Sri Lanka’s economic growth has been within the space of a week given a thumbs-up in both Moody’s International Ratings and the assessment of the World Bank Managing Director Sri Mulyani Indrawathi who was here in Colombo last week. Sri Lanka’s per capita income is the best in the region says Moody’s, while the World Bank Managing Director informs that the country’s growth rate is very impressive in her reckoning. (Please see our front page news story in this edition.)

That should shutter all those loudmouths and Cassandras who say that the post-war progress in this country should be defined by what some of those in the international NGOs tell us. The know-it-alls in these outfits constantly say that the peace dividend has not been reaped, and that the country is going down the precipice because – according to them -- there is a democracy deficit, and serious and unresolved governance issues.

But for a country coming out of a decades long armed conflict, the 8 percent (+) growth rate recorded in the last financial year when there was a major global economic crisis, is a triumph that should make all the naysayers look rather sheepish.

No country is without problems, and to dream of the post-war utopia that the INGOS and the NGOs want is absolute rubbish. But if the current leadership has been following the South Asian Singapore/ Malaysia model here, and concentrating on gains now and governance later -- well, nobody can say that for such a deliberate decision taken, there has been no payoff. The goods have been delivered, at least for those not expecting miracles. On the other hand what has been delivered upto now is nothing short of a miracle either.

But the favourite pastime of the civil society cynics has been to say that there has been a governance slide, which negates everything, including achievements on the economic front, which they do not deign to acknowledge as being real anyway.

The short response to that is that both Moody’s and the World Bank Managing Director cannot be wrong at the same time. The economic gains made have been solid, and inflation too has been curtailed, and this all at a time when the rest of the world is reeling from the aftershocks of the recessions in Europe and the United States.

Sri Lanka’s growth may not be impressive to those who want Shangri-la in a day, but then, we have got the Shangri-la hotel chain, which is what matters most, as somebody said!

If we have that and the Sheraton franchise, Shangri-la will dawn tomorrow, and that’s the point. Meanwhile the governance issues that are being raised are neither fair nor realistic by any stretch. As Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva has said, constitutional provisions are the only legal instruments that can be used in the impeachment of a Supreme Court judge for instance. If anybody wants to change that he or she must agitate to change or amend the constitution.

There cannot be exploratory lawmaking and voyages of discovery in the process of meting out justice. As it has been pointed out elsewhere in another newspaper, the recent Supreme Court judgments on the Divineguma bill are ‘politically incorrect.’ That is not in the same sense that the words are sometimes intended to describe politically embarrassing gaffes. But it is the wrong politics, in a manner of speaking, to say that the new Divineguma legislation undercuts provisions made out through the 13th Amendment to the constitution.

The correct perspective on the so called governance issues that ‘civil society’ keeps pointing to is that nothing becomes a governance crisis merely because it does not fit in with somebody’s agenda or some NGO’s definition of what is ideal. Many in the air-conditioned auditoriums of think-tanks may feel that the 13th Amendment and it implementation is the country’s only salvation, and it is their right to be stupid in that conviction, but that does not mean that if the country does not go in their prescribed direction, there is a crisis in governance. In other words, a divergence of opinion does not translate to be a constitutional crisis or calamity, period.