Elon Musk To Rescue Sri Lanka From IMF Debt Bondage?

By Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake –JUNE 5, 2022

Dr. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake

Wearing Jokers’ masks a group of ‘Aragalaya’ Protestors rooted for Elon Musk to buy strategic and scenic Sri Lanka, at the center of the Indian Ocean, for just 50 billion dollars last weekend. They were marking 50 days at Colombo’s Galle Face Green Marine Front amid real and staged food, fuel, fertilizer and medical supply shortages across the country.

Could Elon save Sri Lanka from Debt Bondage to the IMF and US based Sovereign Bond traders whose law firms are lined up to assets strip the strategic island nation?

Among the richest men in the world, Elon Musk had recently offered to buy Twitter for 44 billion, but this beautiful Indian Ocean Island that sits on major global Sea Lanes of Communication (SLOC), at a spaghetti junction of Undersea Data Cables routes would be a far better asset at 50 billion some of the protestors reckoned: Especially for a Big Data whiz kid who relishes challenge in an era of Cold War 2.0 and global cyberwars! Sri Lanka is perpetually in the cross-hairs of big power rivalry.

Fifty billion is the estimated cost of Sri Lanka’s debt. However, debt like Covid-19 is a numbers game in many Global South countries where data is provisional, expertise, and transparency scare, data security non-existent, and statistics easily gamed by external actors though “datafication”, Digital Colonialism and data hacking. For instance, in 2020 mysterious data wipes happened at the National Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA) during the World Health Organization (WHO) promoted Covid-19 panicdemic, lockdowns and militarized mass injection of the population in 2020 when huge sums of money were spent on “vaccines”[i].

Although the Data on which Sri Lanka’s debt calculation is based are contested as the Government Cloud and other databases have been hacked in the past, and now Debt Bondage to the Washington Consensus (World Bank-WB and International Monetary Fund-IMF), and Paris Club looms large over the strategic island after it defaulted on payments to US-based Sovereign Bond traders in April.

So too, what Canadian author, Naomi Klein has termed “Disaster capitalism” in her book “Shock Doctrine” is increasingly a lived reality in Sri Lanka at this time of coordinated food, fuel, fertilizer, and medicines shortages with miles of queues as IMF shock treatment unfolds with promises of ‘worse to come’.

The scepter of starvation, Famine and food riots as Sri Lanka is primed for asset stripping in the months come since the IMF and Paris Club do not differentiate between “illiquidity’ and ‘insolvency” has been raised by various talking heads, including the new Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Washington’s Manchurian Candidate for the job.

Famine is a Policy Choice

Nobel Prize-winning Economist, Amartya Sen, long ago showed that Famine is a political and policy choice rather than the result of a food production shortage. In his book Poverty and Famines (1981), Sen showed that although adequate food was harvested during periods of famine inadequate distribution and inequality in access to food were the proximate causes of famines in world history.

Sens’ historical studies of famine in Bengal and other Asian contexts challenged the assumption that total food-availability decline (FAD), was the main cause of starvation and famine and showed how political and governance factors affected access to food: Indeed, a slight imbalance in food production can lead to large increases or declines in price, while government policies can also cause entitlement failures.

Amartya Sen also argued that the availability of food can change for a number of reasons besides production shortfalls—for example, changes in the prices of goods and services, new rationing rules, transport blockages, infestations of farmer’s crops by pests, or the disruption of food-distribution channels by war.

To this list of causes of food insecurity may be added speculation by traders in commodities futures, globally and locally, the weaponization of food though sanctions and trade wars, systematic and coordinated (cyber) disruption of transport and supply chains and food security data bases.[ii] Jomo Sundaram former UN Under Secretary General recently wrote that the US led sanctions on Russia and war in Ukraine are now the main drivers of increased food insecurity globally.

In short, famine is a political and policy choice in a world where free markets are mythical; especially in the current era of food and fuel supply chain disruption due to trade and cyber war attacks, ‘Datafication’, and digital colonialism. Conversely, at this time of hyped shortages, global oil companies have never made more profits! So too Big Pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer made huge profits during Covid-19 lockdowns with hyped injection shortages.

Indeed, the current threat narrative of starvation, food riots and famine that are being liberally promoted to stoke fear and anxiety, rendering “food riots” in Sri Lanka a more or less self-full-filling prophesy appear to relate directly to what Canadian author Naomi Klein termed “Disaster Capitalism” in her book titled “The Shock Doctrine”: The term “disaster capitalism” was coined by Klein in 2007 to critique neoliberalism and its policy paradigm which she defined by three landmark demands: privatization, government deregulation and deep cuts to social spending.

Klein argued that global capitalism instrumentalizes man-made or natural disasters like Covid-19, military coups, terrorist incidents, economic crises, wars, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, for the sake of advancing its own agenda of renewal, reconstruction, and profit. Such disorienting disasters and shocks enable the production of debilitating cultures fear, help to suspend public debate and suppress democratic practices. This allows capitalists to exploit the window of opportunity opened by traumatic shocks (Klein, 2007).

Famine talks: A Manchurian Candidate and Cultures of fear

During two weeks of talks between the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and the IMF, May 9-24, the strategic island’s long-suffering citizens were hit by unprecedented and clearly coordinated food, fuel, energy, fertilizer and medicine shortages –purportedly due to an absence of exorbitantly privileged and increasingly weaponized US dollars. This had led the strategic island at the center of the Indian Ocean country to default on its debt payments to US based Sovereign Bond (ISB) traders for the first time in its history.

While everyone was distracted queuing for food or fuel, with protests spiraling into violent confrontations as IMF talks commenced, Washington’s Manchurian Candidate for Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, was sworn in on May 12 during an island-wide curfew with the military on the streets.

PM Wickremesinghe made many remarkable statements during his first week in office: He threated that ‘worse was to come’ with likely starvation and famine in the island– before things got better! The ‘next couple of months will be the most difficult ones of our lives’ he warned, with an IMF “Firesale” of strategic national assets pending to appease the ISB holders?! The country, faced its worst economic crisis in more than 70 years, and was down to its last day of petrol on Monday, he claimed.

The newly appointed Wickremesinge however used contested data and numbers to base his debt calculations. He also misled citizens claiming that there would be 15-hour electricity outages, although the hydro-power reservoirs had ample rain to keep hydro-power generation and electricity supply going. He painted a grim picture which seemed like a veiled threat.[iii] Would fear would enable rule by fiat and never mind that he had lost his seat in the last General Elections and lacks legitimacy?

A chorus of worse to come amid promises of starvation and food riots clearly intended to stoke fear, anxiety and anger reached a crescendo when talks between the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and the IMF ended on May 24. With the outcome of the talks far from transparent it was as if the IMF’s infamous Shock treatment which include austerity measures, sale of State Owned Enterprises (SOE), for debt restructuring etc. were already upon Sri Lanka’s hapless citizens, to simultaneously distract from and ease the proposed ‘firesale’ of strategic assets like Sri Lankan Airlines. But would not such a course of action inevitably deepen the National economic and Security crisis– as has been the case in debt trapped Greece and Argentina and numerous other counties.

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