FISHERIES I

My year as Chairman of the Coconut Development Authority was followed by some confusion in the mind of the new Secretary / Public Administration about where, if anywhere, I should be put. Most appointments in ‘the higher civil service’ were in any case matters for the President / Cabinet. I was asked to come in as Secretary / Fisheries (an offer I declined on the ground that either the Minister or the Secretary should be familiar with that sector), subsequently as Secretary / Defence (a hurried decision, General Hamilton Wanasinghe being due to retire), which I declined, - my interests lay elsewhere; as it turned out, what that Ministry was about was the cascade of commissions that arms procurement could bring.

I was told that the President, Chandrika Bandaranaike, was about to sign me in as Secretary / Agriculture when it had been whispered in her ear that I was ‘not reliable’. That reliance on ‘reliability’, as in ‘my Mother, right or wrong’, has thrust the whole country into the paws of kitchen cabinets, financiers, hit-men including ‘top-cops’ many of whom should be in jail, blackmailers and others who become cronies and ‘advisors’ on this and that.

That such has been the defining feature of ‘politics’, time and geography regardless is incontestable, - though not on the scale to which it has grown. In his Trials of Transition, despite his venomous treatment of those who led the rout of the UNP in 1956, Tarzie Vittachi complained: ‘Our problem is that wen we think a man is a good man – that is to say, reasonably honest / literate / civil – he always belongs to the wrong party. And when we think we should vote for the right party, the candidates are usually boors, cut-throats, ex-convicts and various unhung villains, or at least OBEs and Knights’. In current parlance the latter would have among them some Deshamanyas, Deshabandus, or, those who at the least had acquired the certification of Doctor (Honoris Causa). Such advisors / appointees thirst for the exercise of their Boss’s power, a power mandated by the people on patently false premises/promises, as behoves politicians of that ilk. They are often seen on safe media with hands clasped in obeisance to god knows what or who. Those who have nothing left but the idiot-box for entertainment see that whatever sansara and nirvana may be, for their rulers who steal their paddy and sell off whatever they own, no Bliss could be more Supreme than where they have got to. Such bosses, whatever ‘colour’ they parade, do not pay the price for ‘loyalty’: the people do. The present note touches on a relatively minor manifestation of how ‘loyalty’ has come to be construed.

A dozen years earlier, in 1982, when the Secretary (and the Minister) summarily left the Ministry of Agriculture, J R Jayewardene, President, had suffered a similar whisper in his ear: He is a Communist, our man is one of ours (besides being an unfailing supplier of R&R). That man, who had spent his years in district/divisional administration, had spent one year in a Ministry, when he wanted to get his son to a Colombo school.

Eventually I was appointed Chairman & Managing Director of the Fishery Harbours Corporation (CFHC). I knew very little of that subject either but it offered an opportunity to get to know a major sector of our economy. My stint in this area was terminated in under five months, the Minister informing me over the phone that I had ‘let him down’. I asked him, ‘How’? He said he would write to me (which, of course, he never did). His letter (of dismissal) was hand-delivered to me on a Monday. Incidentally it was the first day I had stayed home - as I was indisposed. The accountant and the senior engineer were to see me at home that morning, so I had not quite taken the day off.

The previous Friday, quite late in the evening, I happened to be with him and his Legal Advisor, Suranjith Hewamanne, when the Minister received a warning over the phone. As I recall it had come from Douglas Devananda: the Minister was ‘a soft-target’ and was to be targeted that night as he left the Ministry. There was nobody else there other than a couple of his security men. I suggested to him that he uses the new double-cab I had purchased for the Fishery Harbours Corporation: it was dressed in a bright red, his colour, would take him anywhere round all the coast we have, was ‘people-friendly’. He demurred; his driver was not accustomed to such vehicles (the man specialised in the Benz, the Volvo and such; and he was at his best with Police out-riders to show him the way). They didn’t know my driver; in any case he was probably too old. I said I would drive it (‘my’ driver was quite a bit less gone in years than I), and that I’d have the rear gate to the Ministry premises, sort of fashioned with takaran and rarely used, opened as soon as he got in it – while his official vehicle took off through the main gate. What followed is not material; that escapade was incidental too.

The Corporation to which, at that Minister’s request, I had accepted appointment, had responsibility for building fishery harbours and sprucing-up anchorages, the provision of support services such as fresh water, ice, fuel and workshops for the fishing fleet, and the maintenance of such services. Among the services it provided was that of dredging the harbours as required: the requirement was frequent as our ‘plantation economy’ had silted up our rivers.

Fishing within our territorial waters and out in the ocean within our economic zone as well as beyond, in ‘international waters’ or ‘no-man’s sea’, has the potential to become a major contributor to the GDP. I saw in a news report a few days ago that predators who use our fishery harbours free of payment of any kind under cover of their being ‘a BOI Project’ have been given some kind of leeway by our Courts. You may draw your own conclusions from that.

The development of the fisheries industry requires investment on its basic infrastructure: well-built and well-equipped harbours, boats suitable for fishing close to shore and, for those that venture out on longer forays, a sufficiency of financial support – and security of the enforceable kind. It requires facilities for minimising losses, such as ice plants, and an extensive marketing network.

Most especially, as with the paddy cultivator or anyone engaged in agriculture, mechanisms for ensuring a fair return to the people who may be said to be the primary producers need to be worked out. The expansively lauded Market no longer protects them: the mudalalis, many of them foreigners who poach in our waters, (and their protectors, the would-be mudalalis who have ‘taken to politics’ as a career), are The Market.

I shall not go any further into these multi-faceted problems in this note, which relates primarily to my personal experience of them.

There are several bays and many coves around this island, but you wouldn’t know it by the number of fishery harbours that have been developed to serve the industry. Other forms of development are taking place now – Hikkaduva, Dikovita, Dodanduva, Arugam Bay.

On a kind of trawl, with a port engineer from Norway, along the southern coast in a Navy training vessel, I gathered some understanding of the conditions that make for a harbour and for an anchorage: depth of water, rocks that protect and /or impede the movement of vessels, the culture of fishing as it relates to the kind of vessels in use. The primary importance of water, fuel and food to sustain life at sea needed no confirmation but experiencing it even on a small scale helped me see how a harbour or an anchorage from which the fishermen set out, and to which they return, should be furnished to provide such support.

Much investment had been made on such infrastructure under the previous administration. Much, if not quite all, of it had remained either in a state of disrepair as in Galle or, as in Beruwela and Mirissa, had never been used. The Minister had graced the opening ceremonies and left; the plants remained closed.

Unfortunately, by the time that Mahinda Rajapakse, whom Chandrika had from time to time shuffled off into some kind of ‘Pool’, was posted to Fisheries, most, if not all, those assets had been sold off by his predecessor.

Kirinda, on which the Japanese had invested some 600 million rupees on breakwaters, a workshop with sophisticated equipment, buildings for the sale of fish, for mending nets, living quarters for the staff etc including one for an ice plant (which had remained less an ice plant), had proved to be, on the scale they envisaged, a non-starter. The Japanese fishing industry had zeroed in on Galle, spent much money there in ‘developing facilities’ so that it could be the hub of ‘the tuna industry’ here (which, naturally, they would control). Unfortunately, the Navy moved in, took over a good half of the fishery harbour there. Hence the investment in Kirinda. Money had been put into Mirissa as well but the traditional users of that harbour had proved to be obstreperous: it was almost as if they claimed it to be theirs.

Later, China, seeking a piece / pieces of the fish pie, had a look around and fastened its sea & sun weathered gaze (no need to go back many centuries to the visits of Admiral Ching Ho), on Mirissa. They didn’t get far on that a decade ago, but there have been reports on the recent development of that harbour, probably the best situated for an export industry with the Koggala airstrip useable, even as is, for ferrying fish to Katunayake and on.

Japan went back to Kirinda, built another breakwater and groynes to keep the sand out. I walked around and saw such confirmation as a layman may, if he so choose, require, that the silting of the harbour came from the mouth of the estuary of the Kirindi Oya, about a mile away, due to the inexorable operation of the tidal currents. Japan invested another 400 million rupees, maybe to make a round billion, to extend breakwaters, on a new groyne, on dredging, and a date was set for a second ceremonial opening.

There were lacks, though: a fuel station and an ice plant. The first was attended to within two weeks by my namesake and first cousin, the Engineering Manager of the Petroleum Corporation. I had the unused ice-plant moved from Mirissa to Kirinda. It produced flake ice, not the block ice our fishermen were accustomed to, and had no demand. Fishermen like to continue to see the ice on the fish; flake ice absorbs the heat from off the fish rapidly and, likewise, melts fast, its job done.

The establishment of a new cadre of ‘Harbour Managers’ had been put in motion (I had moved the officer in residence at Kirinda out as he seemed to have left control over what happened there to a mudalali, and sent a ‘new’ man in). I informed my Minister of that, so you may imagine my chagrin (is there another word?) when, at the opening ceremony at Kirinda that second time, he chummied up to the mudalali, held a can while the mudalali pumped the fuel into it, let himself be led to the mudalali’s boat for a joy ride.

The man escaped the tsunami; he had chosen to stay home that day. The structure of his mansion was damaged but he survived. The new ocean-going dredger, Veligovva, (the name was proposed by a clerk in the CFHC), was flung up on to a sand dune, relatively undamaged. (My successor had flown to the UK to receive it at the manufacturer’s dockyard). The equipment in the workshop was gone, who knows where, but the building was undamaged; so it was with the ice plant and the building that had housed it.

Till the Veligovva arrived, the big ocean-going dredger of the CFHC was Ruhunu Putha. (The Master of that vessel had bashed it twice on a single rock, well-known to the fishermen, and visible to the naked eye much of the time, off Kirinda). More on that later.