President of Sri Lanka Ranil Wickremesinghe.
| Photo Credit: PTI

Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe will contest the Presidential election as an independent candidate, his aide said on July 7.

Deputy Chairman of the United National Party Ruwan Wijewardene confirmed that the presidential election will definitely be held and Mr. Wickremesinghe, 75, will contest the election as an independent candidate, News 1st reported.

“Only one leader possesses the knowledge to solve Sri Lanka’s economic crisis. That is Ranil Wickremesinghe. He has proved it with his actions,” he was quoted as saying by the news portal.

On July 7, Election Commission Chairman R.M.A.L. Ratnayake said the electoral body would be legally empowered after July 17 to announce the date for the election.

Mr. Ratnayake added that the commission will announce the date for the next presidential poll before the end of this month.

The Election Commission in May said the presidential election would be conducted between September 17 and October 16.

Mr. Ratnayake said the commission is currently in the process of putting final touches to the 2024 electoral register which will be the basis for the election. Over 17 million would be eligible to vote in the election as per the revised list, officials said.

In April 2022, the island nation declared its first-ever sovereign default since gaining Independence from Britain in 1948. The unprecedented financial crisis led President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to quit office in 2022 amid civil unrest over his inability to handle the crisis.

In July 2022, Mr. Wickremesinghe was elected through parliament to become stop-gap President for the balance term of Mr. Rajapaksa.

Mr. Wickremesinghe, also the Finance Minister, hasn’t made any public statement on his bid for re-election.

“This election isn’t merely about selecting individuals but about choosing the most effective system for our country’s progress. If you believe in the merits of the current approach, let us proceed accordingly,” the President’s Media Division quoted him as saying earlier.

The government under Mr. Wickremesinghe has set in place hard economic reforms as dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme.

President Wickremesinghe last month said that his government has finalised a long-delayed debt restructuring agreement for $5.8 billion with its bilateral lenders, including India and China, in Paris to meet a key condition of an IMF bailout.

Copies of the ‘The Conspiracy’ book written by toppled Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, are on display at a bookshop in Colombo on March 7, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

 

Two years after his dramatic ouster from office by a popular people’s movement, Sri Lanka’s former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has sought to defend his tainted regime, by launching a book that attributes his political downfall to a “conspiracy” involving foreign and local parties.

Announcing his book ‘The Conspiracy to oust me from the Presidency’ on March 6, Mr. Gotabaya said in a statement: “From the time I was elected President in November 2019, certain foreign and local parties were intent on removing me from power.”

During Mr. Gotabaya’s Presidency from November 2019 to July 2022, Sri Lanka experienced its worst economic crisis since Independence in 1948, as the country ran out of dollars for essential imports, following a host of fiscal decisions taken by his government. Citizens spent days in long queues, struggling to access basic food items, cooking gas, and medicines, while grappling with prolonged power cuts in their homes. Holding his government responsible for their suffering, people from diverse backgrounds took to the streets in a historic protest along capital Colombo’s seafront and in several other district across the island nation.

They relentlessly agitated with the demand “Gota go home”, eventually forcing the besieged leader to flee the country and subsequently resign in July 2022, less than three years since he was elected President, and barely two years after his pulled together a formidable majority in Parliament.

In a significant judgment last year, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court reiterated the position held by the citizens’ movement, ruling that the Rajapaksa brothers — Mr. Gotabaya, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Basil Rajapaksa — along with top officials in their government, “demonstrably contributed” to the 2022 economic crisis and “violated public trust”. However, taking no responsibility for the country’s financial collapse, Mr. Gotabaya squarely blamed “conspiratorial forces” for his removal from office. “What this book explains is the firsthand experience of an internationally sponsored regime change operation,” he said in the statement.

In an excerpt from Mr. Gotabaya’s self-published book, featured in local portal Newswire, the widely discredited leader attempts to reconstruct the last moments of his Presidency as he saw them, before he fled the island and took refuge in the Maldives first, and Singapore later. “The plan was to fly to Singapore in a private plane, but the Indian authorities had not allowed this private plane to fly to Male. So, I gave instructions that tickets be obtained on a commercial flight to Singapore,” Mr. Gotabaya writes.

Later, in a reference to the time he took the decision to resign while in Singapore, Mr. Gotabaya writes that he had, by then, decided Mr. Wickremesinghe would be his successor, “because I saw him as the only person capable of restoring law and order in the country.” On July 20, 2022, Ranil Wickremesinghe was elected President through an urgent parliamentary vote, in which the Rajapaksas’ party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP or People’s Front) backed him. Mr. Gotabaya returned to Sri Lanka in September 2022, after seven weeks in Singapore. He lives in a state bungalow in Colombo with special security accorded to him by the Wickremesinghe administration.

Meanwhile, Sri Lankan newspaper Daily Mirror reported that Mr. Basil, the SLPP’s strategist, is scheduled to meet with President Wickremesinghe and former President Mr. Mahinda Thursday evening to discuss a possible alliance for the presidential polls and general elections scheduled later this year.

Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Sri Lanka hopes to avoid repaying debt till December 2027 after the completion of the ongoing restructuring process and repay them in the period running up to 2042, President Ranil Wickremesinghe said on March 5, as he defended his unpopular reform plans to revive the bankrupt economy.

Sri Lanka is currently stuck with debt restructuring with negotiations taking a long to reach an agreement. “By 2022, Sri Lanka had to meet external debt repayments worth six billion per year. It is 9.5% of the GDP and an amount hard to sustain,” he said.

“We hope to reduce this to 4.5% of the GDP by debt restructuring”, Mr. Wickremesinghe, also the cash-strapped island nation’s Finance Minister, stressed.

“Currently, we are actively engaged in discussions regarding the restructuring of all loans including domestic and foreign loans. We are optimistic that these negotiations will reach a successful resolution soon. Our goal is to obtain temporary relief from debt defaults from 2023 to 2027. Subsequently, we plan to diligently work towards repaying the loans in the period from 2027 to 2042”.

He said if the country was able to maintain the economic momentum gained since 2022 after the economic crisis, the state revenue could be maintained at a higher level making it easy for the debt repayment. He said through his unpopular hard economic reforms the state revenue collection had been raised to 11% of the GDP.

“For this, we had to impose Value Added Tax (VAT) which was a very painful decision to make. It was a tough decision but to overcome this economic ailment we have to suffer temporarily”. Mr. Wickremesinghe said despite hardships the country has reached a degree of stability.

”The critics say despite stability the people don’t feel it, people have been made to suffer heavy tax burdens, electricity and fuel prices have been raised to make them unbearable for the public,” he said.

He said the current success was due to the planning jointly made with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bring in economic stability.

Sri Lanka in the second quarter of 2022 had declared bankruptcy announcing the island’s first ever sovereign default. Negotiations with the IMF for a bailout began almost immediately and the first tranche of the $2.9 billion facility was released in March 2023.

The IMF under its bailout facility over four years has compelled Sri Lanka to set in hard reforms to revive its bankrupt economy. Total Central Government external debt as of the end of December 2023 amounted to $37.3 billion, according to the Ministry of Finance.

According to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, the top three bilateral creditor countries are China, 43%, Japan 23% and India 15%. Additionally, there are international sovereign bondholders who represent 85% of the commercial debt category.

In April 2022, Sri Lanka declared its first-ever sovereign default since gaining independence from Britain in 1948. The crisis led Mr. Wickremesinghe’s predecessor Gotabaya Rajapaksa out of office through a campaign of public agitation. Mr. Wickremesinghe stepped in to fill in Rajapaksa’s remaining term till 2024.