Crisis and the nation’s survival
Some disasters are avoidable. Victor Ivan argues this one still is, and that going to the IMF — even on its conditions, even if that means selling SriLankan Airlines — is part of how.
Playing with the crisis
Victor Ivan notes that he predicted bankruptcy three years earlier as a political analyst rather than an economist, then sets out what the import restrictions and the fertiliser ban will do next.
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.
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.
Prime factors of the crisis
The pandemic did not cause this. Victor Ivan takes the crisis apart into its four components — the social order, the riots, the political system and the economy — and gives the remedy for each in brief.
What may happen?
The winner has the cake and it is not edible. Victor Ivan describes a government that has taken enormous power at exactly the moment power stops being worth having.
Ignoring the crisis
A throne speech that never mentions the crisis. Victor Ivan sets the President’s words against the World Bank’s forecasts, the collapse of state revenue and the half-million jobs about to be lost in the Gulf.
The post-election saga
Whatever the election returns, Victor Ivan expects deadlock — a shrinking economy, half a million jobs lost abroad, and three underlying failures that no majority can vote away.