OH SO PREDICTABLE

The naysayers who at least wait normally till the ink is dry on the congratulatory messages before debunking any project, got into their act extremely fast with regard to Mattala airport and summarily began tearing it down even before the ceremonial plaque was unveiled. The dogs may bark but the caravan moves on, but for the record, after the honours were done in Mattala yesterday and the airport was opened in grand style, it is required that the piffle purveyors are taken on, at least for the purposes of the record.

One Rajan Philips, writing in the editorial pages of a national weekly takes on the garb of a project evaluation expert to tell us that the economy is a ‘cockup’ and that Mattala airport -- which he says is built for the purposes of having an airstript for the first family to come home -- is a symptom of it.

Nobody would have bothered with this loquacious purveyor of hype -- but it is necessary to point out, literally, where he comes from, because the man is posing off as some kind of economics expert who has a special knowledge that enables him to make pronouncements on the Sri Lankan economy. For the information of the reader, for the best part of the last thirty years or so, Rajan Phillips has been domiciled in Canada!

He is some sort of engineer there no doubt, but that certainly does not make him either an expert in economics, or on Sri Lanka. The man rarely sets foot here except occasionally, to see friends and family in the old country.

Though Sri Lankans who are no longer residents or citizens are not forbidden from writing about the place they left behind, an article without divulging the fact that he is as foreign to this country as any Canadian tourist is – for all practical purposes – an attempt to write as if the man is a hands-on expert on the Sri Lankan economy, which is not just galling but is also an insult to the intelligence of this country’s people.

Without an organic connection to the heartland, how does he decide so glibly that infrastructural development efforts are not benefitting the people, without talking to them -- without having the benefit of a modicum of first-hand knowledge?

But wait – it’s not as if in the absence of any real connectivity to Sri Lankans and their aspirations, Phillips gives the reader any facts figures and tabulated data to support his claims either. All he has is what he says is a pronouncement made by economist Saman Kelegama that the Sri Lankan economy is not performing well in the export sector, which apparently Kelegama says cannot be due to the global economic downturn, because Thailand and the Philippines for instance are doing well by contrast.

Well, if Phillips does not know that Sri Lanka is a country that is coming out of war, and will take a little time to find sea legs after years of economic atrophy, he should be possessing no common sense -- never mind a knowledge of relative economic performance.

But for what he lacks so conspicuously in substance, he compensates for by being bombastic, garrulous and generally morose. He decides that what he says is an under-performing economy, in contrast to Thailand, has disturbed ‘the old triad of land infrastructure and exports supporting each other’ -- and this has been replaced by unwanted infrastructure development that is a ‘cockup.’

This is Rajan the Oracle Phillips who said much worse about the Rajapaksa effort to rid the country of his favourite Tamil Tigers. Now we can brace for the customary denial on his never being an apologist for the Tamil Tigers and on the contrary being a person who decried the Tiger methods, but then, it is difficult now to find ex post facto, a single Tamil diaspora sage who did not lambaste Prabhakaran during the war. Never has a cheer squad turned so swiftly on the former subject of its adulation, but then alas – oh these times, these mores!

At least one would expect a man of science – an engineer we take it by profession – to display a modicum of regard for perspective, as opposed to flourish. But no, the man has to say that Mattala airport exists to bring the first family home. The statement exposes the banality of his kind of evil. Does he produce a modicum of evidence that Mattala airport is not all about the people of the South, and the vast economic opportunities that it provides for an entire region in the country? None – why let the facts get in the way of an argument, eh what, Mr. Canadian Curmudgeon?