The NPP's most painful problem

ONE cannot but help being sorry for the National People's Power government of late at least. Best understood at multiple levels of national feeling, this phenomenon spans the emotional gamut from sorrow to sympathy.

- By Wijith DeChickera

If a newspaper is a nation talking to itself, a hijacked (or is that sabotaged? or is it both?) national reformation agenda is the NPP still whispering soft, sweet-nothings - and sometimes, thundering grandiose denouncements - to the polity in public while no doubt muttering dire imprecations against its detractors in private.

Secret sorrows

On the one hand, there is the sorrow a nation at large may undergo at what appears to be the abandonment of a project with promise (pun intended) and no little potential.

Once the toast of a town baying for the blood of those in city, chamber and corridors of power responsible for bringing a nation to its knees, the JVP-led Marxist/socialist/progressive combine came into power with a promise of system change and received two resounding mandates to match its ambitions.

If the agenda for sweeping reforms to nation, state, country, governmental ethos and socio-political culture have failed to materialise, the NPP has to hold itself accountable in the main.

A crippling cost of living matrix compounded by IMF strictures uncritically embraced by the new administration despite decrying the burdensome taxation regime among other millstones while in opposition. An odious executive presidency critically unengaged to date by a promised new constitution. The plethora of albatrosses around the citizenry's necks - from a draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) through an insidious Online Safety Act (OSA) to the brutality of a police state in the face of ongoing criminal activity undeterred by the government's 'Clean Sri Lanka' campaign.

These are but the tip of the socio-political iceberg. What lies beneath the surface a sea of shimmering stresses and tensions in troubled socio-economic waters - threatens to rock the country's economic boat again.

Let there be some light shed on this through a few examples of present woes.