President Ranil Wickremesinghe stated to a gathering full of the nation’s top business leaders yesterday that Sri Lanka has absolutely no plans for reforms moving forward and will instead be thinking larger and bolder in terms of its economic agenda.
The necessity for immediate reforms has been the talk in recent months, especially after the collapse of the economy, but the nation’s leadership declared there would be none moving forward.
“What is the reform strategy?
Sincerely, I don’t have a plan. What reforms when there is no economy? Wickremesinghe asked during the opening speech of the Sri Lanka Economic Summit 2022.
He claims that the current economy, in which the people are fully aware of how fragile it is, is not worth altering because it is certain that the model will fail eventually. Wickremesinghe emphasized that as the current situation is not favorable for the local economy, reconstructing the same edifice would just hasten its demise. Going forward, he asserted, the crisis-stricken nation would not benefit from competition alone. He asserts that Sri Lanka must be “extremely competitive” before it can even consider competing with other regional powers like China, Japan, Korea, and India.
The fact that Sri Lanka is currently experiencing a talent flight, or as Wickremesinghe put it, “youth voting with their feet,” indicates that neither the government nor the private sector have been successful in creating an environment that will allow the local human resource pool to stay in the nation. Therefore, stop blaming one another. We must ensure that we move forward. Thus, “The Next 25 Years” will be the name of our future program, according to Wickremesinghe.
