by Garvin Karunaratne

Sri Lanka, a sovereign country that did not owe a penny to anyone in 1977 has built up a foreign debt by following the dictates of the International Monetary Fund since 1977.

In September 2022 the foreign debt was at $ 47.7 billion and by September 2024 the foreign debt was stated as $ 56.6 billion. (My books: How the IMF Ruined SriLanka & Alternative Programmes of Success(Godages:2006), How the IMF Sabotaged Third World Development(2017) and How the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Destroyed Sri Lanka(2022) detail the saga)

According to Professor Charitha Herath, the foreign debt was at $ 91 billion in February 2024(‘tatu nodena nayata kaa satutu vima: Lankadeepa of 9/2/24). His statement is very important for our country. This is because our Central Bank is silent today and the task of finding our foreign debt falls on interested individuals.

It is sad that we do not have a Central Bank. Our Central Bank was privatized and now works independent of the country. I think our Central Bank now looks after the interests of the IMF and not our interests.

It may be wise for our President to name his Secretary or another leading official to personally calculate and report our foreign debt. This is required because we do not now have a Central Bank to look after the interests of our country.

This is very important because we are now in the process of importing vehicles and that will take our country down the drain to a foreign debt- to a magnitude which we cannot imagine. We can easily manage with our present strength of vehicles. It is a well known fact that the import of vehicles will enable our rich to enjoy travel in comfort in new vehicles. What of the foreign debt of the country.

It will not augur well for our President and his Political Party to have been a party to get our foreign debt increased to a phenomenal amount. Evidently they are being misled

Our country sadly has no development programmes to make items that we import and thereby achieve both employment to our unemployed and also save dollars spent to import our needs.

Let sanity prevail to save our Motherland

Garvin Karunaratne

former GA Matara,

05022025, garvin _karunaratne@ hotmail.com