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.
Grand offer of Lanka to Kali Amma
First the fertiliser ban, then the ban on cattle slaughter. Victor Ivan argues the dairy herd is being destroyed to keep a vow, and that a president is a custodian of the country, not its owner.
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.
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.
The rule of law
Dicey on the rule of law, applied to a president who stands above it. Victor Ivan reads the pandemic regulations and the Easter Sunday investigations as the same failure in two settings.
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.
Paving the way for a transformation
A social-media questionnaire on how to choose a leader turned into a public argument, so Victor Ivan sets out the philosophy behind it: a transitional constitution, a constitutional assembly, and power returned to the people.
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.
Changing the nation’s fate
Not a manifesto but a method: Victor Ivan sets out how a mass of citizens could file fundamental rights petitions together, and what a Centre of Public Movement built on that would be able to do.
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.