{"id":43083,"date":"2015-04-11T16:25:02","date_gmt":"2015-04-11T23:25:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=43083"},"modified":"2015-04-11T16:25:02","modified_gmt":"2015-04-11T23:25:02","slug":"ranil-not-following-singapore-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2015\/04\/11\/ranil-not-following-singapore-model\/","title":{"rendered":"Ranil not Following Singapore Model"},"content":{"rendered":"

-Metteyya Brahmana<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Ranil and his UNP-led government made much to-do over the Singapore Model they wanted Sri Lanka to follow in their election manifesto, but after nearly 100 days of their government, this model is nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n

In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, used Singapore\u2019s strategic location near major international shipping lanes to first establish Singapore as a major maritime hub, starting with ship repair and then ship building.\u00a0 Eventually the knowledge gained from ship building was transferred to other manufacturing activity and became the foundation for Singapore\u2019s extraordinary economic growth over the next 30 years.<\/p>\n

Ranil, on the other hand, has promised to scrap Colombo Port City, which is the centerpiece of Sri Lanka\u2019s efforts to become a major maritime hub.\u00a0 Ranil has also stopped nearly all of the infrastructure development that would be necessary to expand from a major maritime hub to an offshore manufacturing center of other products.\u00a0 Ranil is using \u2018corruption\u2019 as an excuse for his actions, but anyone knows you can investigate corruption while still moving forward with port and other infrastructure development.<\/p>\n

In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew was also concerned about how to engage the United States so that the country could benefit from healthcare expertise, technology transfer and technological know-how \u2018without\u2019 becoming a colony of the United States.\u00a0 He opened the doors wide-open to foreign investment, but required these investors to respect local culture and traditions, and was especially suspect and restrictive of foreign ownership of land, the media, banks, telecommunications, power generation, and foreign influence over domestic policy and politics.\u00a0 Ranil, in the election manifesto promised to \u2018privatize\u2019 state assets, which would open the door to foreign control of vital state institutions.\u00a0 He has already started the process by putting \u2018his\u2019 people on the board of all state institutions, including banks, and seems to be waiting until after the election to move more aggressively on his privatization scheme.\u00a0 Foreign ownership of land and other landed property designated for residential purposes would also exacerbate an already high cost of living for local residents in Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n

On foreign policy, Lee Kuan Yew was staunchly independent and positioned Singapore as a key player in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).\u00a0 Ranil does not seem to value Sri Lanka\u2019s independence from the West at all, and is more comfortable being an ally of the United States and Europe.\u00a0 This shift has major negative implications for Sri Lanka’s economic development, as China is rising fast, while the US and Europe are peaking.\u00a0 China has now surpassed the United States as the largest economy in the world.\u00a0 When Lee Kuan Yew first became the leader of Singapore 30 years ago, China and Japan were nowhere near the economic powerhouses they are today, which explains why he initially leaned on the US for technology transfer and then aggressively expanded Singapore\u2019s relationship with China once the Chinese economy began its rapid growth.\u00a0 Singapore is now one of the few countries with roughly an equal balance of trade with China, exporting about the same amount as it imports.<\/p>\n

Finally, on racial and religious harmony, Singapore eschewed division like the plague.\u00a0 Lee Kuan Yew remarked in one of the last major interviews before he died (Google: lee kuan yew, charlie rose\u201d), that his greatest fear was racial and religious conflict between the Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists in Singapore, so he required through sophisticated land use law the integration at the block level of all racial and religious groups so they would be forced to grow up together as neighbors.\u00a0 This is in sharp contrast to Ranil\u2019s effort to push the divisive 13th Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution, which essentially sets up separate governed regions based on race and religion.\u00a0 Lee Kuan Yew also required \u2018everyone\u2019 to learn English so that the different racial and religious groups could communicate effectively with each other and the rest of the world.\u00a0 Ranil, on the other hand, now allows the national anthem to be sung in two separate languages, which only reinforces the sense of separatism.<\/p>\n

So it really is unclear what Singapore Model Ranil is following because it has little resemblance to the actual model pursued in Singapore. \u00a0 Ranil doesn\u2019t seem to have the background or vision to understand how to leverage the massive international sea traffic that passes Sri Lanka each day to Sri Lanka\u2019s economic advantage.\u00a0 He also does not understand how to build from one base of manufacturing activity to other products, and how infrastructure development (roads, highways, bridges, dams, airports, and ports) facilitates this process.\u00a0 Ranil also seems clueless to the dangers of dividing Sri Lanka into separate racial and religious groups, where no meaningful integration between the groups can occur.\u00a0 Instead of the Singapore Model, it appears that Ranil is actually following the divisive models in North and South Sudan or East and West Timor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

-Metteyya Brahmana Ranil and his UNP-led government made much to-do over the Singapore Model they wanted Sri Lanka to follow in their election manifesto, but after nearly 100 days of their government, this model is nowhere to be found. In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, used Singapore\u2019s strategic location near major international shipping lanes to first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}