Sri Lanka ranks 99th out of 190 countries in the Global Ease of Doing Business Index, and 84 out of 144 countries in the Global Competitiveness Index.
This means simply that Sri Lanka is an over-regulated country that has bureaucrats acting as paid and retained overlords.
Overlords for whom? Other than bureaucrats serving their own cause, there is no apparent Master they serve, or obvious goal they pursue.
Sri Lanka was particularly unfortunate in that we inherited a culture of bureaucratic petty-fiefdoms that dotted the civil service apparatus, that was meticulously planned and installed by the British. Who was Leonard Woolf? A British civil servant stationed in Ceylon. The much ballyhooed novel “Village in the Jungle” doesn’t romanticise the mentality of the white man’s burden, the laughable idea of colonial benefactors civilising ignorant yokels in colonised lands. Maybe it was written as atonement.
conflict
The entire ethnic conflict that caused so much grief in this country — and an untold number of unnecessary deaths of the young and the able — can be traced back to the bad idea of the petty-fiefdom of the inglorious bureaucrat.
It is no secret that the British favoured the Tamils to fill civil service slots because divide and rule was the colonial mantra for success in the colonies.
Industrious Tamil students could not be faulted for eyeing these coveted civil service postings as a birthright, after having burned the midnight oil, of course, to pass arduous civil service examinations, something their Sinhala brethren were notoriously loathe to do.
But when the coloniser departed, this situation necessarily changed, as the Sinhalese started competing for these civil service placements, as that was soon seen as their ticket to the good life as well.
But ever since these bureaucratic petty-fiefdoms were created, paid Government regulators have been taking a wrecking ball to the lives of ordinary men and women in this country, whose only crime was that they wanted better their lot and emerge from constant and stifling economic anxiety that blighted their lives.
That was how over-regulation in this country was born. It doesn’t mean that bureaucratic red tape is the bane of colonised nations alone, and that over-regulation is absent in economies of various types with diverse histories. But we have a case of over-regulation as bad as or worse than some of the most over-regulated business environments in the world.
There can be no progress without obliterating this maze of red tape that stands in the way of all economic progress. But bureaucratic domination is perpetuated, needless to say of course, in the Government service. So, that’s another reason to prune down the bloated State sector, the first being the heavy burden that the taxpayer has to carry because of a bureaucratic structure that’s ridiculously over-crowded and inefficient.
The problem with over-regulation is that it’s couched in a holier than thou veneer. Those who make the regulations, and the panjandrums and petty despots at Government desks that implement them, think that their regulations are the mechanisms by which the State machinery is run so that the country survives.
In reality, over-regulation is a menace. Often rules and red tape are merely an excuse to retain redundant Government jobs, in a bloated Government service that is a bane on the taxpayer, and a major retardant applied to the economy.
But taking an axe to over-regulation is for these very reasons, difficult, as it is seen as an attack on the Government service which has been misrepresented as part of the ‘welfare state.’ Sometimes, pruning over-regulation means simply a matter of getting rid of Government jobs. But many Governments are loathe to do it for obvious reasons; i.e: the power of the State sector vote bank.
But an over-regulated business environment with a bloated Government service dooms a country — any country — to potential economic collapse, or continuing economic malaise at best. So deregulation has to be done with a vengeance, if any country entertains a hope to compete as a global player in export markets.
Short of drastically reducing numbers in the State service by way of retrenchment, how does a country such as Sri Lanka de-regulate? It is hoped that the digitisation program now being spearheaded by Hans Wijesuriya, formerly of Dialog, would speed up citizen interactions with officialdom.
But in countries such as Argentina and the US, a chainsaw has been taken to the State/federal administrations.
consternation
This, of course, has caused consternation in both countries. U.S. President Donald Trump has deployed Elon Musk, as the destroyer of the federal behemoth.
Left-wing activists and a lot of ordinary people, reportedly, are up in arms. Government staff has been let go without so much as a by your leave in areas of the administration deemed to constitute wasteful spending.
Of course, the primary objective of these job cuts, according to Musk, is to drastically reduce runaway spending, in an effort to balance the budget.
But Trump and Musk have always been fans of de-regulation. The kind of drastic slashing of the budget for State administration done in Argentina and the US will most likely not go down well, if emulated here in this country. These measures, according to reports, have not gone down quite well in the countries in which they were implemented either.
However, in some ways, there are no half measures. A bloated public service means the economy is forever under pressure from a constant retardant. On the other hand, more people deployed in redundant Government jobs means an odious excess of regulation, because a lot of these unnecessary folk in the Government service end up doing needless regulatory functions that have been set up for them simply because they fill job vacancies, and therefore, need something to do.
In a country such as Sri Lanka, it seems that sometimes there are no answers. Nobody will want to do a Donald Trump or a Javier Milei as in the U. S. and in Argentina, because of rather obvious reasons.
But sans drastic measures, there are always drastic repercussions. We simply cannot under any circumstances afford a bloated Government sector workforce, especially with the over-regulation that it brings.
Over-regulation also leads to corruption, because people tend to do anything to get past the myriad bureaucratic roadblocks that seem to be perennially in their way. Ironically, some policymakers think there will be more ‘corruption’ such as illegal activity, illegal constructions, for example, if there is no stringent (read ‘excessive’) regulation.
However, most times, it is the regulations that cause the corruption. The red tape always extends to areas that are wholly unnecessary, prompting people to bribe their way through the maze.
For countries such as Sri Lanka, if the Trump route is anathema, the only answer possibly is technology.
If almost all regulatory processes are made available online — in a user-friendly manner, of course — some of the most odious aspects of regulatory barriers could be countered.
Drones, for instance, can be used to monitor environmental compliance, obviating the need for entrepreneurs to subject themselves regularly, at a cost, to mandatory regulatory checks.
As for the most important aspect of de-regulation, it is plainly, a matter of transforming the political culture. The mass of people must come around to realising that a bloated Government service that comes with a large dose of over-regulation as a direct result of it, may be good for some people in terms of job security, but is disastrous for the country.
If we can’t wield the chainsaw as in the US or Argentina, we could create the conditions in which there would be no opposition to it by and large, when the chainsaw is finally wielded at least in the future.
People probably can be mentally prepared to accept that the Government service would one day be cut down to size. If the mass of people are made to accept the fact that this is a dire necessity, maybe someday, it could, and will be done.
