The elephant, goat and the rope
Rohan Samarajiva answers back, so Victor Ivan sets out the case against independent commissions in detail, drawing on India and Hong Kong to show what an appointing body has to be before it can work.
There is no cure for stupidity!
Reading the Budget, Victor Ivan finds no vision in it beyond holding on to power, and repeats that cutting imports is not a solution to a balance of payments crisis — going to the IMF is.
Lawful public uprising: Theory and practice
Part three. Victor Ivan explains why leaders who call the presidency corrupt keep it anyway, revisits the common-candidate strategy of 2015, and argues reforms must be won before power is handed over, not after.
Ugly State!
Victor Ivan asks the President, the Chief Justice and the Speaker to shut their eyes and look properly at the state they run — including a Parliament whose members trade with the government they sit in.
Agenda for transformation
Written out of Victor Ivan’s last conversations with Mangala Samaraweera: a numbered basic document of reform principles and a system of governance to replace the one that failed.
Pandemic and crimes
Sri Lanka had every advantage against the pandemic and squandered them. Victor Ivan reads the COVID statistics, the discrepancies in them, and a set of crimes he calls mysterious.
Indecency glorified
The land swap, the constitutional frauds, the things presidents do that no civilised country would tolerate. Victor Ivan catalogues indecency raised to the level of ordinary practice.
Is Lanka insane?
A nation, Victor Ivan writes, can go mad the way a person can. The column diagnoses the intellectual paucity behind the debt crisis and sets out what an IMF programme would have to be built on.
The puzzles of Sri Lanka’s crisis
Two puzzles put to the leaders who want power: why keep the presidency, and why ban chemical fertiliser? Victor Ivan uses Champika Ranawaka’s answers to both as the test case.
The crisis and agriculture
What could be done for agriculture if the fertiliser ban were lifted: co-operative societies, the wild animal problem, dairy and beef, dhal and chillies, and paddy. A practical column, unusually free of politics.