By Asoka Seneviratne –

Asoka Seneviratne

Lady Margaret Thatcher famously made the above statement when she was the first ever female Prime Minister of Great Britain in the 1980s. My opinion is that she was right on the money. The business of a government should never be doing business. Why because such a business cannot continue to flourish without the greed of private ownership the motive of which will be to maximize profits.

All over the world, generally speaking, government have never proved to be good business owners. Yes from time to time, a government might make profits from its own business ventures when the right person is running it with a dedicated leadership like what Sri Lanka is experiencing right now under President Anura Kumara Dissanayake.

Indeed the goal of AKD might be to prove a point that government owned businesses can be profitable but what happens when the President is no longer AKD at a future date? Given the smart leader in President AKD, he must be fully aware that profitability of a government owned business cannot be sustained, no matter who runs it.

In a country like SL with its past corrupt political culture, the only people who profited from government owned businesses were the politicos and their bigwigs who ran them. Millions of dollars’ worth of  money belonging to Lankans were siphoned to their personal benefit with total impunity. Sadly, under previous governments, not a single soul was held to account and jailed even for a day.

Think of Sri Lankan airlines, shipping corporation, fisheries corporation, port corporation, timber corporation, CWE, Insurance corporation, petroleum corporation, harbor corporation, salt corporation, film corporation etc etc.. God only knows how many billions of people’s monies have  been spirited out though the back door by the chairmen and their boss politicos.

I know for sure a chairman and his whole family of a very profitable government owned corporation whose brother was a famous minister under Sira/ RW, who lived in the US doing a very menial job, used to travel several times a year on business class between Colombo and Washington DC. How dare in a country where millions can barely afford one good meal a day? Don’t these vermin have a conscience?

And when these corrupt corporations lose millions year after year, they come begging to the treasury who happily hand over millions of borrowed money to rescue them. Heard of Sri Lankan airlines and Mihin Air?

Whatever happen to the unqualified chairman of Mihin Lanka who was a MR lackey? Is he in jail yet?

More importantly, why not even one chairperson of these corporations ever was charged with corruption? Like Gota used the claim “Sri Lanka, a country like no other!!” Huh!

The only business of a government in a successful capitalist economy should be to create an environment and incentives for private sector investment and create an efficient bureaucracy to make doing business easy. I have no doubt that President AKD is fully aware how cumbersome and inefficient is our current bureaucracy is. SL needs a wholesome refurbishing or revamping of our lethargic bureaucracy who is still living in the middle of 20^th Century with equipment of the 21^st century.

Like former US President Nobel Laureate Barak Obama famously said Capitalism is the most powerful engine of growth known to man for economic progress and creating wealth, provided that capitalism functions in an uncorrupt democracy who understands and nourishes Capitalism with proper oversight and anti-trust laws while not killing the incentives and ease of doing business.

Talking about doing business in SL, I want to relate a first hand experience I had back in the 1980’s during JRJ times. A billionaire businessman in London who had extensive diamond, gold and fisheries investments in Africa was exploring a possible large investment in fisheries in SL. I remember we visited an office of the EDB along Galle Road Kollupitiya where the senior EDB man was in charge of promoting fisheries investment in SL. From the time we sat in front of him, we realized he had absolutely no interest in the FDA opportunity we were working on. Every world he spoke was negative.

Then he started talking about a well-established fishery product export company in SL then. He went on to tell us how the CEO of that company was giving him free foreign travel and perks and that no foreign company was even think about getting into that business. Obviously this highly paid top guy whose job was to promote FDI was in the payroll of that company. A huge conflict of interest. Lankan tax payers taken for a ride!

We were pushed from pillar to post with making no progress.

Another European  investor doing business in SL advised us to go to a lobbying company run by the wife of a then very famous Minister who was very close to JRJ whose office was located on Duplication Road in front of British Council library. For a cost, she was able to get us the approval of the then minister. Her very word was that Minister so and so owes her a favor so getting his signature was guaranteed.

At the end of the day the project got approval but the conditions were horrible as if the London Investor has no other country to invest his money. He laughed at the conditions and threw the paperwork to trash can.

Now this is what I was referring to the so called “ease of doing business and incentives”.

I do not see handing over our natural god given assets for private companies to do business is wrong provided such sales are done in a transparent, uncorrupt manner with a partial government ownership. Government trying to do business will never be sustainable in the long run.