POWER AND THE ECONOMY

That 90 per cent of the discussion at the editors’ meeting with the President yesterday was dominated by the matter of the electricity price hike is no mean indication of how the issue has in part been made into something that it is not - a political bludgeon.

While no doubt the common man had enormous concern about the issue of his power utility bill going up, the fact that a unit of electricity that takes Rs. 24 to create is being sold at Rs five or six, has been all but ignored by the national media. The refrain instead has been on how there is an impending jolt that would be tantamount to a high voltage shock.

The fact is that subsidies eat into the economy. They have to go sooner or later if a nation is to grow. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but there is commensurate growth, and while there is a temporary struggle as a result of drastic measures, the point is that the positive effects of a growing economy would not take too long in coming.

The country has to find ways however to grow this economy. That is where the collective national effort has to be sincere, concerted, and devoid of the petty shenanigans of regular politicking. But in a large swathe of so called civil society and among the opposition, it is business as usual.

In these quarters, they work overtime in the attempt to show that subsidies are the norm. The exaggerated claims about the power price hike being a high voltage shock amounts to that.

If the media was this irresponsible in the past, we as a nation would have been in the era of the rice ration and the haal potha. But we have come a long way past the ration book age, and we have also come leagues past the chronic era of economic atrophy that resulted from excessive subsidies.

But as a nation we are yet to move away from the subsidy mindset with regard to education, health and utilities. The Sri Lankan economy can grow provided that there is a real impetus. That has to accrue by rationalizing the economy.

Subsidies have to go in areas such as higher education as well, but it is easier to demolish the subsidy culture with regard to utilities first - which explains the power tariff hike. But sooner or later, a private sector trigger has to come into play if subsidies are to be removed across the board.

This has to be done by facilitating greater private sector inputs in areas such as education and higher education in particular. But each time the policymakers move in that direction, there is a mobilization of mass protest. Such mobilizations are tantamount to mob incitement against progress. They are retrograde – and seek to be populist, but in fact threaten to keep Sri Lankans down in perpetuity.

Therefore, the war to grow the economy is as much as a media war as it is a trench war. The message must be that romantic Marxist liberalism is out, because that kind of mindset keeps us enslaved. Risk taking is also part and parcel of the game of success in the kind of economies that operate under capitalism. This applies to nations as well as individuals.

The constant baying by the disruptive anti-regime pack is for a throwback to all the retrogressive policies that belonged in the 1970s. Of course these people thrive on some measure of disaffection and discontent that is the upshot of growth that is still on the path to reaching full potential. In other words, a measure of transitory hardship is a concomitant aspect of growing middle income economies. But ideologically the nation has to prepare itself for going from subsidy-ridden, welfare oriented and quasi-socialist to being industrial, productive and pragmatic. That task can be accomplished, and if the conventional media cannot effectively give the message – it has to percolate somehow, even if it is through the grapevine…