Courtesy Newyork Times
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — When he was turned away from a gas station in Sri Lanka’s capital on Monday after waiting in line for six hours, Ravi Chandra, a tour manager, decided to return before dawn the next day to see if his luck would improve.
Tuesday was no better: Five hours in, the pump was still covered with “No Petrol” signs and sealed in yellow crime-scene tape. “They say they are out of petrol, and they don’t know when they will get more,” he said.
A day after Sri Lanka’s new prime minister warned that his first peek into the government’s books had revealed an economic crisis even worse than imagined, the island nation found itself all but out of fuel, with life growing increasingly miserable for its 22 million residents.
Ranil Wickremesinghe, who took on the role last week as widespread protests forced his predecessor into hiding on a military base, said on national television on Monday that the government could not find even $5 million to import gasoline. With no money to pay them, fuel ships remained anchored offshore in Sri Lankan waters, their cargos out of reach.
“The next couple of months will be the most difficult ones of our lives,” Mr.
Wickremesinghe said in his address to the nation.
Despite years of warnings that the ruling Rajapaksa family was mismanaging the
country, the dizzying pace of Sri Lanka’s economic collapse in the past few
months has brought economic desperation that many describe as even worse and
more widespread than during the nation’s three-decade-long civil war that ended
in 2009.
The country had kept borrowing beyond its means to feed the needs of a bloated
system, a large military, and the vanities of a leadership that took on huge
postwar construction projects with questionable economic logic. When pandemic
restrictions dried up the flow of tourism dollars and the debt piled up to
unsustainable levels, the leaders showed little urgency in finding solutions or
seeking help.
Now, a large part of the population is struggling to scratch together three
meals a day, and cooking gas has been out for weeks. Hospitals are short on
lifesaving medicines because pharmaceutical companies have not been paid for
months.
The
country’s new prime minister said that Sri Lanka had no dollars to import
gasoline.Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times
Weeks of protests have rid the government of all the Rajapaksas except the
president, Gotabaya. His brother Mahinda Rajapaksa, the prime minister, departed
last week after inciting his supporters to attack peaceful protesters,
unleashing a wave of violence and anarchy. Mahinda Rajapaksa, along with other
family members who served in senior government positions, were flown to the
safety of a naval base.
Mr. Wickremesinghe, 73, who became prime minister for the sixth time, said he
had begun trying to gather information on the state of the economy. The country
will bring in far less in revenue than had been predicted by the previous
government, he said, ballooning the budget deficit. He said he would be forced
to print more money to pay government salaries, which will only further
depreciate a currency that has fallen by about 40 percent against the dollar
over the past couple of months.
The most damning figure in his speech on Monday was the clear admission on the
fall in foreign reserves, which he said had stood at $7.5 billion when the
Rajapaksas returned to power in 2019 after a five-year gap and had since fallen
to almost nothing.
Mr. Wickremesinghe said he was seeking urgent aid from allied countries. The
government is also working with the International Monetary Fund to secure
assistance and restructure its foreign debt, which last month it had declared it
would be unable to pay. But Sri Lanka’s political crisis has undermined the
I.M.F. negotiations, and officials and diplomats say any tangible help could be
months away.
The revelations of the economy’s dire state came on the second day of the
Buddhist Vesak festival. In better times, families would light lanterns and
gather in parks and public places for festivities. Neighborhoods would be
peppered with Dansal stalls — offerings of food, drinks and sweets to anyone who
came by.
On the first day of the festival, protesters who have been camped outside the
presidential secretariat for weeks marched by the thousands in Colombo, circling
the barricaded residence of the new prime minister and continuing their call for
the president’s resignation.
“Usually, the country would shut down to celebrate,” said Manisha Balraj, a
lawyer who had joined the protest. “But obviously, because of the fuel shortage,
the economic crisis, we can’t.”
Among the protesters was Piyal Dissanayake, 54, who had taken a bus in the
morning with his family from the town of Mawanella, about 70 miles from Colombo.
A Sri Lankan flag neatly folded over his arm, he marched with his wife and two
children. He had cut his staff of seven at his small restaurant down to three,
and the establishment remained shut most days.
The family planned to take a bus home in the evening but was nervous that
finding one might prove hard because of the fuel shortage.
“This is the most difficult time in my lifetime,” Mr. Dissanayake said. “Even
during the war, it wasn’t this difficult,” he added.
Outside a government-subsidized milk dispensary behind the U.S. Embassy in
Colombo on Tuesday, Saminda Manimperi stood in line in the shade of a wall for
three hours before it opened. A cashier at a coal plant, he was there for the
five packets of 400-gram powdered milk he gets twice a week for himself and his
mother.
He said his salary had already been shaved by about 30 percent since the crisis
began, even as food prices have shot up. To be able to get milk at a discount,
he would have to miss work.
“I was marked absent, so that’s 2,000 rupees cut,” he said, from a salary that
is down to 35,000 rupees a month, or about $100.For more hotels or booking requests please contact
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