Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe got a promotion to acting President when Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his wife “left aboard an air force plane bound for the Maldives.” Things are getting tense in Sri Lanka on Wednesday as police are using the tear gas and water cannons again. Wickremesinghe told them do whatever they needed to do, just “restore order” and please get the angry mob out of my office. Both offices.
President abandons his post
Former Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his wife managed to hop a plane out of the country on Tuesday. They spent the whole day Monday camped out at the airport but weren’t allowed to leave unless they showed their faces in public with the rest of the travelers.
As he nervously boarded an air force plane, he officially handed the keys over to Wickremesinghe and left him holding the bag.
Meanwhile, it’s reported, protesters “defied tear gas, water cannons and a state of emergency to storm the building today.” They want Wickremesinghe to quit also. They got even angrier when they learned President Rajapaksa slipped out of their grasp.
He let the whole country run out of gas, literally. The inflation rate is a whopping 60 percent. The money they printed doesn’t even make good toilet paper and all the hard foreign currency in the treasury was spent long ago. The whole nation is flat broke. What food they had is running out fast.
A whole bunch of new photos hit the press showing “armed security personnel standing by in the grounds of Wickremesinghe’s office as protesters, some holding national flags, milled and took pictures.”
“Some tried to break down the gates leading to the office buildings with a make-shift ram.” The new president was powerless to stop the mob from storming the state TV studios.
The job is open
Right now, anyone who wants the job of Sri Lanka’s top administrator can have it. Nobody wants it. According to General Shavendra Silva, “We have requested political leaders to decide the way forward till a new president is sworn in and notify us and the public by this evening.” As soon as tens of thousands of protesters showed up at his door in Colombo, Rajapaksa promised “a peaceful transition of power,” went into hiding then split.
The “storming of both of the prime ministerial and presidential offices was a dramatic culmination of months of unrest in Sri Lanka with experts predicting more protests to rock the country in the coming months.”
Right now, it looks like the main opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya party, Sajith Premadasa, who lost the 2019 presidential election to Rajapaksa, “will stand to replace the president.”
The mass unrest started back in March with the first hints of “severe inflation, economic hardship, blackouts and fuel shortages.” China will now be fighting it out with India for the spoils. “China was a major source of the loans for the huge projects Sri Lanka planned.” Right now they’re $51 billion in the red.
Using the Joe Biden method of spending their way out of bankruptcy, “money was printed in record amounts and the government was blamed for a number of questionable financial decisions, such as the ban on fertilizers, decimating crops and hampering exports of rice and tea.”
That ban on fertilizer is what put the farmers out of business in the Netherlands. Whichever president gets stuffed into the hot seat will have to scrounge a fast $6 Billion just to keep the lights on.