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Friday, 28 April 2017 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
By Susil Sirivardana
Very clearly, President Premadasa had a distinct vision for Sri Lanka. It was, a vision of a transformed Sri Lanka. The transformational process was, for the first time after independence, to be an integrative one, in a sense we had not known before. It integrated human development, economic growth, equity and national unity into a holistic, mobilisational process of incremental and rapid change with a distinctive national identity.
The depth and quality of its grounding among all her people, led by the poor majorities, invested it with a potent cultural content. Internal factors were in command and strengthened by the mediation of external factors. New forces of regional productivity and policy were being unleashed. Devolution, a new and unfamiliar word, both entered our doorsteps [genuine decision making by householders] and the portals of local governance. While the sources for study and analysis of this vision are scattered throughout the whole system, they are concentrated in two particular areas. First housing; second, poverty alleviation.
During an unbroken 11-year spell from 1978-1988, President Premadasa’s vision and praxis were concentrated in and around housing, in its broadest sense. Throughout this period, he was the Minister of Local Government, Housing and Construction. He was also the Prime Minister. It was during this second stewardship as a minister, that this vision for Sri Lanka began to unfold in both depth and breadth. True, it had emerged during his first period in office, from 1968 to 1970, in Local Government, with the Precast Bridges Program. However, it was through housing that he built up a national, regional and international image of stature. Most importantly it was here that he saw the enormity of the poverty issue, and its dehumanising violence. He saw; he empathised; and responded immediately and in-depth. The literature calls it political commitment. The people call it trust or credibility.
The changes wrought in housing policy and practice were revolutionary, and nothing less. It was a total transformation of a given, colonially-derived, post-colonially sustained system. It was a paradigm and structural change. The essence of this change was political and perceptual for it involved nothing less than a value factor, namely the role and capacity of poor people to solve their housing problems. Only a President Premadasa had the intuitive conviction and impassioned faith in the Poor-their capacities, their creativity, their energies – to restructure a whole system, involving nothing less than an empowering of the householders and house builders and a disempowering of an entrenched technocracy. It was a far-reaching reversal and a fundamentally community process.
This is what the Million Houses Programme [1984-89] embodied and symbolised. Starting with an ambitious Hundred Thousand Houses Programme [1978-83] based on conventional parameters, he did intensive analytical homework on the contradictions, problems and experiences thrown up by it. Through this process of successful critiquing and questioning, complemented by a parallel experience of Housing by People on the ground, he drew the right lessons and set himself and the country the daring challenge of the Million Houses Programme. He set a new reinterpreted agenda. Housing was integrated with Local Government, Rural Development and Urban Development. Provision of basic needs and community infrastructure received high priority. Devolution of decision-making and doing to house-hold communities became normative. Housing finance systems were re-formed and refocused. The scale of the Programme was enlarged exponentially. People came into the centre of the process. The base or grassroots became the central arena of action.
The results were instant and far reaching. Participation involving actual decision-making and full management responsibility by the builder-householders became generalised throughout the system. Politicians, technocracy, local government, thrift and credit cooperatives, etc. became active supporters of the initiatives of the poor. The transformations in the internal housing system were picked up and debated abroad by the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Development Planning Unit of University College, London. With this achievement on the ground, the parallel effort to get the U.N to declare 1987 as the International Year of Shelter was reinforced. It received strong backing from the Third World and Scandinavian countries. President Premadasa had successfully captured the global imagination with his authentic vision of participatory housing development. The housing constituency of the world, led by its rural and urban Poor, owed him and his people, a big thank you.
The transition of his priority focus from housing to poverty alleviation took place during the period 1987-88. To a participant and learner as avid as President Premadasa, it was a very natural transition. Housing for the Poor was very poverty oriented directionally. But housing was at the core and poverty alleviation at the periphery. In the methodology of housing used, the fragile organisations of the Poor tended to dissolve after the housing goal was fulfilled. This period also saw the emanation of a counter-development process in the form of worsening income distribution, over-politicisation of recruitment into public service and such commonplace procedures, as increasing malnutrition among children, rising school drop-outs, a perceived sense of social inequity and injustice etc. The cumulative expression of this counter process lay in the unmistakable symptoms of a second youth insurgency. The J.V.P. was proscribed during this period. President Premadasa’s characteristic and systemic search convinced him that the root cause of the anomie and disharmony was, poverty.
A landmark of the transition to the new poverty focus was the Report of the High Level Committee of Officials on Poverty Alleviation Through People-Based Development-Sessional Paper No. XII of 1988, which was chaired by Dr. Warnasena Rasaputra, the then Governor of the Central Bank. The report was submitted to the Cabinet in January 1988. It was almost wholly the result of an initiative by President Premadasa. Within a space of eight weeks, the Committee prepared an Action Programme containing The Approach, The Problem, The Strategy, The Short Term Programme, The Training Programme, The Resources, The Saragam Programme, The Organisation and The Medium Term Programme. Though it was not implemented, its analysis and conceptualisations directly catalysed the poverty alleviation policy and programmes which were gestating. Or, to put this another way, without the analysis of the Report, it would not have been possible to formulate the Janasaviya policy and programme.
The next important signpost in the prioritising of poverty alleviation was President Premadasa’s New Vision – New Deal manifesto put out in October 1988. The first explicit and written formulation of the policy and programme is there. The whole manifesto, read in its entirety, contains perhaps the clearest and most concrete written expression of the Premadasa vision.
Janasaviya itself is an attempt at putting in place a major structural corrective to a societal system in deep crisis. It is just not ‘another’ policy and ‘another’ programme. It is a fundamental paradigm shift in development theory and practice. The new premise says the Poor are rich in hidden creativity and resources; they are capable of creating wealth; they can directly contribute to growth; they must however be conscientised, enabled to understand why and how they are poor and recognise their Janashakthiya; they must build up their own organisations to negotiate and assert; finally, the whole support system must be reoriented to invest itself with pro-poor values and attitudes.
This is a basic policy compulsion for developing countries; why? Because this process of mobilisation and organisation of the Poor represents, at a macro level, a separate but complementary process of wealth creation and accumulation to the parallel open economic liberalisation process. There is no choice; we must do it if we want to develop. There is an added reason. Without such a major macro process for mobilising the Poor majorities, our valued democratic structure will come under threat from internal crises. This the whole SAARC region only knows too well.
In the main, the corrective has paid off. It has won the credibility and trust of the Poor. Those who have not yet accessed to the Programme, live with real hope of doing so. A plethora of initiatives, both government and non-government, oriented towards poor-first poor-centred bottom up development, have found a legitimacy and space that was absent before. Prior to 1989, poverty alleviation was at best a marginal and highly fragmented effort. Today, it is contending for hegemony and attempting to mainstream.
President Premadasa successfully sustained and strengthened this commitment to poverty alleviation. This he did, amidst other competing issues in his agenda. The evolution of this commitment saw the progressive unfolding of the Janasaviya Trust Fund [a special kind of ‘bank’ for the Poor], the independent South Asian Commission for Poverty Alleviation and its Report titled Meeting the Challenge, the 200 Garment Factories Programme targeted on the daughters and sons of the Poor, the Presidential Land Task Force attempt at raising small and landless farmers’ productivity and incomes, the Dhaka consensus on Eradicating Poverty in the SAARC Region, and finally, the 15,000 Production Projects Programme. Each of these initiatives taken in isolation does not reveal its true importance. The moment they are seen as integral components of a much larger vision of poverty alleviation, they form an impressive political and perceptual breakthrough. Don’t they decisively measure up as a valid response to the needed structural corrective to a society in crisis? It’s much more, for the SAARC poverty initiatives is also a tangible regional breakthrough.
To reflectively sum up the essence of the brief overview comments made above, the Premadasa vision for Sri Lanka is systemic, innovative and revolutionary in its implications. His very special contribution was as a leader. He led politically. He led the act of translating the vision into operational policies, programmes and procedures. Thousands and thousands of people from all strata of society, who shared these values, were given a kind of space they never had before. These stirrings and hopes are often invisible and inaudible, the more so for the majority of them being at the base of our society.
As a thinker, he was a doer. As a doer, he was a thinker. He brought to this praxis qualities of morality, creativity, daring, accountability and scale, which are unique and rare. In the legacy that he left for us of his integrative vision of human development, economic growth, equity and national unity with cultural identity, he has offered us a gift of long lasting value.
(The writer could be reached via email [email protected].)
