The price of rubber shot up by Rs. 10/= overnight in the wake of the government's economic bailout package announced on Tuesday night after the mini-budget. Lodestar, the company producing solid rubber tires for heavy vehicles, is the main buyer of Sri Lankan rubber having offices scattered over most parts of the rubber producing areas in the country. After the rubber market collapsed in the wake of declining crude oil prices, the price of sheet rubber came down to Rs. 80/= on the open market, but Lodestar continued to buy limited quantities at the rate of 125/= from producers. On the open market, buyers were not paying even Rs 80/= per kilo and Lodestar had very restricted buying operations with strict quotas being allocated to each producer. In the wake of the government's bailout package which aimed at stabilizing the price of rubber at Rs 150/= per kilo, Lodestar began buying unlimited quantities at Rs 135/=.

Cinnamon had begun to pick up on its own accord, before the bailout package. The price of cinnamon which had touched on Rs 700/= went down to 240/= and even at that price, people were not buying. However as December drew to a close, the price of cinnamon picked up and at the time of writing, has reached the Rs 550/= mark which is not a bad price at all. The government has moved to buy tea in the Colombo auction so that the price does not fall below Rs 300/= while this price would be able to guarantee the price of Rs. 45/= for green leaf for the tea smallholders if it can be worked successfully. A 50kg bag of fertilizer will be sold at Rs 1,000 (fertilizer prices are coming down alongside oil prices) and repayment of loans taken to improve tea factories will be suspended for one year.

Furthermore the cess on tea imports would be increased. Malinga Herman Gunaratne, a veteran planter turned author turned tea factory owner described the measures taken to uplift the tea industry as being comprehensive and adequate. He said that there is no shortage of demand for Ceylon tea, but because of the global credit crunch, importers in some key buying countries are having problems in getting letters of credit opened to import. He suggested that a bonded warehouse for tea be opened up Russia so that tea could be sold to Russian buyers for cash. Another suggestion that he made was that no private sale of tea be permitted and that all sales should be through the Colombo auctions. The sector which will continue to decline will be the garment industry because sales were abysmally low in both Europe and America this festive season, and the repercussions of this are going to be felt in Sri Lanka during 2009.

By and large, it can be said that he country began the year on a more upbeat mood than would normally be expected in the current global situation. The tourist belt in the south was full during the last two weeks of December, with even the more up-market boutique hotels having full occupancy. The Seylan Bank was taken under the administration of the Central Bank last week. Its chairman, Lalith Kotelawala, been barely on talking terms with the Central Bank Governor Cabraal but the president had intervened and smoothened things. In the event, the take over was an amicable affair with Kotelawala cooperating fully. Following the collapse of the Golden Key, a flagship venture of the Ceylinco group, there was a run on the Seylan Bank as well, which was averted by the take over. Seylan Bank share prices improved significantly thereafter. The timely action was described by one economic commentator as a 'masterstroke' that averted a crisis that would have spread to other banks as well. The Golden Key collapse had more to do with maladministration than with the global financial melt down and would have happened even without a global crisis in the background.

Kilinochchi

The liberation of Kilinochchi overshadowed everything last week. Even the share market picked up. Miles Young, president of the well known international advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, a foreigner who does not understand a word of Sinhalese, who saw President Rajapakse announcing the liberation on television, had commented to Herman Gunaratne that he came across as very sober and sincere by simply observing the president's body language. Obviously Rajapakse was scoring left right and centre in the past week. The hoi polloi for their part lit crackers, until there were no more crackers to be bought. We leave Kilinochchi to the military analysts but the obvious political spin off from this will be that it will have an impact on the two impending provincial elections.

When the Wayamba and Central PCs were dissolved, the opposition said that what should have been done was to dissolve all PCs simultaneously and to have elections on one day. Both the JVP and the UNP are lucky that the government decided to have the elections on a staggered basis. Had the elections to the Western PC also been held in circumstances like these, the UNP would have been hard pressed even in the Colombo district.

The liberation of the psychologically important Kilinochchi also undermines S.B.Dissanayake's Central Provincial campaign. He, a former SLFP general secretary and senior SLFP and UNP minister will be running against Sarath Ekanayake of the UPFA, a provincial nonentity in political terms. But for SB, a veteran in politics, winning this election will be a Herculean task given the circumstances.

The biggest embarrassment of recent times for the government was the Supreme Court decision on petrol prices. But the government has dealt with that firstly by announcing a comprehensive economic bailout package which included reductions in the price of fuel and now with Kilinochchi, the SC decision pales into the background although what the court will do about the non-compliance of its original order remains to be seen.

But whether the UNP wins or loses in the central province, SB will still emerge triumphant. The whole purpose behind his contesting the provincial election was to get his civic rights problem solved. The SC will make the final determination only after the elections are over. If it rules that he is not disqualified because of his conviction for contempt of court, then he will have his civic rights plus a seat on the PC with the prospect of returning to parliament at the next election which is likely anytime after April this year. If the court decides otherwise, SB will at least know with some finality where he stands with regard to his civic rights. So it does not matter much whether he wins or loses.

Nominations for the Wayamba and Central PC elections closed on the 31st December. In Wayamba, both the ruling party and the UNP were having problems. On the government side, even though Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa was expected to resign from parliament to run for chief minister, he had apparently declined to do so because he wanted to field his younger brother, Chandana Yapa, as a candidate at the election. Fielding Chandana Yapa however does not solve the problem of a chief ministerial candidate and this still hangs in the balance as far as the ruling party is concerned. The present incumbent, Athula Wijesinghe is contesting again as the group leader for the Kurunegala district. Wijesinghe, who is the Kuliyapitiya organizer for the SLFP, has done some work for the Kuliyapitya area but is said to be not popular among the ruling party provincial councilors in the district.

The ruling party has as a consequence, no named chief ministerial candidate with the choice finally resting with the president. The agreement apparently is that the candidate with the highest percentage of preference votes will be appointed chief minister. The absolute number of preference votes will not be taken into account because this will place the candidates from the Puttalam district at a disadvantage with the population of the Kurunegala district being almost three times that of the Puttalam district. So the criteria that will be applied will be the percentage of the preference votes received as a proportion of the votes received by the party. By this criteria, it could well be the case that Asoka Wadigamangawa will end up as chief minister. He is the most senior politician among all the candidates in the fray in Wayamba.

The decision of Minister Yapa not to resign from parliament to contest as chief minister could also have had something to do with the mini cabinet reshuffle that took place last week. He was made minister of enterprise development and Dr Sarath Amunugama who held that ministry took on public administration and home affairs vacated by Karu Jayasuriya. Amunugama, a former civil servant, is one of the best possible choices for this demanding job.

The media ministry

But why was Yapa shifted out of the media ministry and given investment promotion and enterprise development? From the very beginning, there was friction between Yapa and the heads of the institutions under his ministry as they were all not his appointees but those appointed direct by the president. Yapa would have felt powerless in his own ministry as the heads of the institutions under him had direct access to the president. Some time ago, there was a flare up between minister Yapa and Bandula Jayasekera the former editor of Daily News. Jayasekera was a close protégé of the president. Bandula Padmakumara the present chairman of Lake House, is also a friend and protégé of the president, and minister Yapa did not have any control over him either. We saw similar problems in the Ranil Wickremesinghe regime in 2001-2004 as well when Imtiaz Bakeer Markar was the media minister and all the institutions under him were controlled by Wickremesinghe appointees.

In a context where the head of government or head of state feels that he should personally oversee the activities of the media ministry, there is no sense in having a separate media minister. Like the defence ministry, the media ministry with its state media institutions is best controlled direct by the head of government or the head of state as the case may be. Now that the president has taken personal control of the media ministry, there will be less conflict over control.

It must be said that Anura Priyadarshana Yapa was a very decent and civilized media minister. He was the deputy minister to Mangala Samaraweera at the height of Chandrika Kumaratunga's power in the latter half of the 1990s. But fortunately for this country, he learnt nothing from his superior and when he himself inherited the mantle of media minister from Samaraweera, his way of doing things was very different. Samaraweera's approach is to get under people's skin, and his theory seems to be that the more outrageous the things he says, and the more the listeners are scandalized, the more successful the communication has been.

For years under Chandrika Kumaratunga, Samaraweera played the 'enfant terrible' with devastating consequences for the Kumaratunga regime. But then Kumaratunga herself was one with Samaraweera on this particular approach to communication. What they did, when combined with what they said, resulted in that regime rapidly losing popularity. The woman who was elected president with the highest ever margin of victory was to lose the parliamentary majority and the government just seven years later in 2001 despite all the election malpractices that one could think of. And one of the prime reasons for that defeat was the way the Kumaratunga and Samaraweera duo carried on.

Samaraweera undoubtedly was one of the more talented ministers in the Kumaratunga regime with a capacity to do things. He was able to do something in the telecommunications area and it was he who changed the face of Matara. Yet mass communication is obviously not one of his strong points. After a long period of hibernation, Samaraweera came before the cameras once again a few weeks ago to speak of the unromantic aspects of the ongoing war. To see Samaraweera on camera again, brandishing documents in front of the audience and saying outrageous things that no other politician would say, was a revolting reminder to all of us of the dark days of the Chandrika Kumaratunga regime.

Just as the sight of Sanath Gunatilleke reminds people of the CBK regime, the sight of Samaraweera articulating a point while brandishing a sheaf of documents is evocative of all those bad memories. Samaraweera will do well in any ministry because of his capacity to work. But in his own interests and the interests of whatever political party he may happen to be in, he should be kept away from the cameras.

From a sociological point of view, Samaraweera was a breath of fresh air in politics, an unconventional individual with the courage to stand up for his unconventional ways. But while this may be so, his tendency to try and rub things into people, is not a successful strategy when it comes to communicating ideas. In contrast to Samaraweera, Yapa was a very conventional and decent media minister who never tried to force his views on people and never played the enfant terrible. Some may have thought that under his stewardship the state media institutions were not doing enough to project the point of view of the government. But this is dangerous ground. The state media can ruin a popular and successful leader through over exposure, excessive sycophancy or through attacks on political opponents.

President Premadasa was ruined largely due to a combination of excessive sycophancy and unbridled attacks on political opponents by the state media. Chandrika Kumaratunga did not have the sycophancy aspect all that much, but her venomous hounding of political opponents through the state media may have helped bring her government down.

The best way for a government to utilize the state media would be to allow them to function as staid, conventional and respectable media institutions while making a few well planned interventions on behalf of the government at crucial times. A constant barrage of government propaganda will be counterproductive politically. Attacks on political opponents will be an absolute disaster. It is the state media institutions that mould the image of a government either way. As media minister, Yapa did not make the government unpopular by misusing the state media and that is what can be said about his stewardship of this crucial ministry that can make or break governments.

Wayamba

The UNP has chosen Chamal Senarath, the man who took over as the leader of the opposition of the Wayamba PC, after Asoka Wadigamangawa defected to the UPFA as their chief ministerial candidate. Senarath is not very well known politically and this will be a handicap at the election. Wayamba has hitherto been considered a UNP stronghold. In 1998, the reason for the unprecedented violence launched by the Chandrika Kumaratunga government at the Wayamba PC election was because they feared losing the PC to the UNP. The Kurunegala district is still one of the UNP's best districts with only Rohitha Bogollagalma having defected to the government. But their inability to run a better known candidate for chief minister may mean that they are losing the edge that they held in the province. Losing people can be costly as the LTTE's experience shows.

Prabhakaran sacrificed cadres with cavalier abandon in the past and now it has come to a situation where they no longer have good fighters in sufficient numbers. The same has happened to the UNP which has seen too many defections. Now it has come to a situation where the UNP does not have good candidates to put forward at elections. Good candidates cannot be found overnight. The best candidate they had, Wadigamngawa, was given on a platter to the UPFA. The strategy of importing prominent people from other fields of activity is not working too well for the UNP either. Had he lived, Janaka Perera may have done well as a politician because he already had experience in dealing with people as an army officer administering a populated area with no civil administration. But the Sabaragamuwa UNP chief ministerial candidate Ranjan Ramanayake has been having problems.

It would appear that he has no experience dealing with the people except cinema fans. Here he only needs to smile, a wave and sign an autograph. But as this column pointed out, Ramanayake was a disaster as the organizer for the Katana electorate having been hauled before the UNP's organizational committee at least twice in just one year for having failed to carry out organizational work effectively. Despite this abysmal track record, he was sent to Sabaragamuwa as the chief ministerial candidate because of the expectation that his name would attract votes. It certainly did and to that extent the gamble paid off. But now the UNP is having to reap what they sowed. Ramanayake is a political neophyte with no understanding of what it takes to be a successful politician. His sojourn in Sabaragamuwa seems to be shaping out to be no different to Katana.

He has attended all but one of the meetings of the Sabaragamuwa PC but he has no 'public day' as such, and he is not accessible to the people of Sabaragamuwa to the extent that the leader of the opposition has to be. Those seeking appointments with him say that it is almost impossible to meet 'One Shot'. When they are referred to him by some other party big wig, he agrees to meet the relevant party, but rarely does. Among all the politicians in the UNP, he apparently is the most elusive.

Besides, almost all other provincial councilors are at loggerheads with him. Talatha Atukorale, one of the UNP's two remaining parliamentarians in the district is also against him and the only support he seems to be able to count on in the district is from parliamentarian Dunesh Gankanda. Regional politicians naturally resent political 'parachutists' who have been sent amongst them. Before Ramanayake descended on Sabaragamuwa to contest the PC election, the leader of the opposition was A.Wijetunga. He would have been the UNP's choice for a chief ministerial candidate if Ramanayake had not appeared on the scene. The agreement had been that if Ramanayake was able to win the Sabaragamuwa PC election, he would become chief minister but if he were to lose the election, Wijetunga would continue as the leader of the opposition. It was on this understanding that Wijetunga had stood aside without a fuss and allowed Ramanayake to be come the chief ministerial candidate.

But Ramayake stayed on as leader of the opposition after having lost the election to Mahipala Herath and this is part of the problem. In fact, Ramanayake had over-confidently told Wijetunga in the presence of many party big wigs that even if he were to become chief minister, he would within two years give Wijetunga the chief ministership and resign in order to contest the parliamentary election. Wijetunga, the opposition leader of Sabaragamuwa, was unable to contest as the chief ministerial candidate because of Ramanayake, but the leader of the opposition of Wayamba has managed to contest as the chief ministerial candidate of Wayamba because the party was unable to find a prominent 'parachutist' for Wayamba. This amounts to differential treatment for provincial opposition leaders and this is going to crate additional problems in time to come.