The absence of leaders: A crisis
2015 was the last chance, Victor Ivan writes, and it was spent dishonestly. The column goes back through independence, the 1978 constitution and revolution and counter-revolution to explain the vacuum now left.
Halting the use of chemical fertiliser
The overnight fertiliser ban. Victor Ivan sets the President’s organic dream against the history of paddy cultivation and the chemistry of soil, and warns of the harvest that will follow.
Dreaming of the presidency
Victor Ivan turns on the men already planning their presidential runs and asks how anyone can want the office without first proposing to abolish what it has done to the country.
The crisis of not having mature leaders
Six opposition leaders, all of them products of the old order. Victor Ivan asks what a mature leader would look like and why the post-independence period has produced so few.
Dr. Neville Fernando and Lankan politics
A conversation from 1991 with Dr. Neville Fernando, recalled at his death, in which a government backbencher explained how Parliament was bought — and why, Victor Ivan argues, it has never recovered.
Structural reforms key to recreating the State and the social system
COVID as an index of state failure. Victor Ivan reads the handling of the pandemic, the soldiers placed over the civil service and the growing dependence on China as symptoms of one structural collapse.
Alas, Sri Lanka!
Victor Ivan recounts taking the collapse of the state to the Speaker, to the Auditor General and finally to the Supreme Court with 62 signatures behind him, and being met each time with silence.
First, rescue Parliament, then the country
Johan Galtung once told Victor Ivan what Sri Lanka would become. Thirty years on the column takes that forecast as its starting point and argues the Parliament must be rescued before the country can be.
Recreating the State
Answering the response to ‘End of an era’, Victor Ivan sets out the changes themselves — an itemised programme for rebuilding the state, from investigating the presidents to regulating the broadcasters.
What went wrong with Ranil?
Known as the cleverest operator in Sri Lankan politics, Ranil Wickremesinghe ended up caught in someone else’s trap. Victor Ivan sets out what he thinks went wrong, and what it cost the country.