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A lesson to all hard-boiled spoilers, called Growth

There is eight percent economic growth forecast for 2006, and seven per cent growth registered in the first quarter of this year. These are Central Bank approved figures, not ours - and have the imprimatur of the Treasury's Secretary on them.

We take it that Time magazine may have to re-write its entire portfolio of Sri Lanka articles. We take it too that the New York Times will have to do a copy rehash, and that the Agencies would have to hire yuppie executives who see the glass as half full - when they keep parroting the incessant untruth that it's half empty.

There is a growth that has not been witnessed in this country in 28 years, according to the statistics - which would be enough to give coronaries to the several who have been portraying the current as the time of reversal, recession and economic stagflation.

But it's unlikely that the rhetoric of the expert naysayers will subside any time soon. We publish elsewhere in this paper an article by Professor Karthigesu Sivathamby which faults the press for the worsening of this country's conflict.

The press of several countries - - or at least of several countries and their media tycoons - could be blamed for the portrayal of this country, which is on a upward spiral, as one which has nothing going for it except a war.

This is a malady worse than any kind of economic malaise.

It's global media tunnel vision, that usually succeeds in crippling the economies of countries that are on veritable development overdrive.

But on this occasion, it appears that the pens of the agency boys, and the keyboards of the Cassandra-Corporation are jinxed. It's a commentary on the times we live in that a few under-trained boys and barely pubescent women with pens could hold entire nations hostage by despatching stories that could create a negative impact on finance and investment. Generally, when these young men and women unlearn their habits, and when the history is written on the times, it would be said definitively that the sceptical press got its calculations skewed. By then however, it will be a historically proved fact that the press always determines what are eventual historical facts.

But, in contemporary Sri Lanka, there is a germ of what looks like a challenge to this common media paradigm that's visible. Figures could be cooked, but a growth rate that's touted to be the best in 28 years, cannot be a statistic that's cooked beyond recognition. What's barley may not look like barley when its overdone - but certainly it cannot look like rubies. What's being said is that even considering that we need to approach statistics with caution when there are some rumblings of conflict on the horizon, there is still, a palpable current that is upsetting all prognostications of the sceptics? The economy has finally come into its own, as the forces that bargained to parley it into the hands of the robber barons were summarily trounced. If the statistics could lie even - there is a feeling that human emotions cannot hide the feeling of resilience.

The worm turned

Repeat assaults on the economy by mismanagement and by gauche commandeering of the economic apparatus by the rapacious rich came to a halt with the entrenching of anti UNP governments.

But, even so, the economy was moving at the momentum that was created by the robber barons and its pace was propelling it towards a sudden skid.

But things turned the corner, it seems, when the management of the economy was indigenised.

The engines of growth were left untrammelled and un-interfered with.

When the captains of the economy took over the politics of the nation and kept running the economy as well, there was an inevitable conflict of interests.

All that underwent metamorphosis.

The robber barons have now been shunted out to where they perform best - the fastness of their petty business fiefdoms, where they could go for each other's jugular. But that is the kind of cutthroat competitions in business, which keeps economies humming.

Such unglamorous competitiveness does not provide the right kind of impetus for turning the wheels of state, but it does, for turning the treadmills of commerce.

What we have now is an economy in which the bureaucrats manage the infrastructure, the politicians essentially keep their hands off, and the captains of business run the engines of growth. But in this scheme, the social fabric is not being vandalised by the vested interests of the capitalist neo-liberal cabals.

That's enough to rig the economy on to a wave that touches 8 p.c growth a once in 28-year phenomenon.

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