Disappoint may be in store for him, just like in the July election for local councils which saw the erstwhile LTTE proxies putting up a good show in the Tamil dominated areas. What helped them was Rajapakse’s procrastination on the issue of devolution – 13th amendment – plus solution for close to 26-months and referring the issue just on the eve of the ballot to a Parliamentary Select Committee.
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One immediate goal of President Mahinda Rajapakse’s United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) is unfurling of its flag over the Colombo municipality which is the fiefdom of the opposition United National Party (UNP). As of now, Colombo’s civic body is managed by a government appointed special commissioner. The UNP-led civic council was slapped with a corruption charge-sheet and dismissed in 2008.
Being the country’s capital, Colombo is the home to hundreds of government employees, and they are not much enamoured of the ruling alliance and its plans. The government wants to transform the capital city into a commercial, financial and tourism hub for South Asia. Towards that goal, it has announced plan to make the city slum free.
Some 75,000 families are to be evicted from the slums to make way for property developers and investors. All these families are potential voters in the October election. In fact, one estimate says, majority of Colombo’s 3, 95,000 voters are slum dwellers and other low-income families. Their vote is crucial for victory.
The ruling alliance has not yet come up with any blueprint to win over them. It has only managed to persuade the Rajapakse brothers to delay most of its planned mass evictions, which were announced for the first time one year ago in May 2010.
The electorate is aware that the evictions are not on an indefinite hold and the police and army will make a big bid to evict the poor from slum settlements once the ballot is out of the way. The Urban Development Authority (UDA) has given notice to families in 2,500 houses in Slave Island and Wanathamulla, and along the Blumenthal-Kolonnawa railway line.
The UDA has since been placed under the defence ministry to execute its eviction campaign with sense of urgency and in a clockwork precision. The UDA’s first eviction drive under the new dispensation was a modest affair targeting just 150 families and 15 shops. But the anger the move invited was so big that the authorities found it prudent to summon police and army in aid of civic staff.
Naturally, these developments have for the first time infused some life into the opposition campaign. The UNP has been in disarray for over two years. First the presidential election and later the general election nearly pushed the opposition into oblivion. The simmering anger in downtown Colombo in particular gives hope of a vote swing in their favour.
Even if the vote goes against ruling alliance, it will not stall the grandiose plans for Colombo President Rajapakse has in the works.
One of the plans seeks the setting up of a new Metropolitan authority for Colombo. The Rajapakse Cabinet has approved the plan. The proposed Colombo Metropolitan City Corporation (CMCC) will cover central Colombo and the four local bodies in the suburbs -Kotte, Dehiwala-Mount Lavinia, Kolonnawa and Kotikawatte-Mulleriywa.
This is not a new idea per se. Many South Asian metros have such unified authorities. The latest Indian city to join the metro corps bandwagon is Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh. Its Greater Hyderabad municipal corporation is an elected body and so are the satellite municipalities that have come under the Greater Hyderabad tag.
The Colombo model will be different though. It will not be an elected body. It will be vested with overriding powers over the elected councils. In fact, head of the CMCC will be President’s nominee. To be styled as Governor, he will be the executive head of the civic body with all the power concentrated in his (her) hands and will thus be another instrument to further the crony democracy in the country.
Defence secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapakse, who is the key player in the ruling dispensation by virtue of his status as the brother of the President, see justification for Colombo’s re-development. He is on record saying that the city needed to be developed to ‘attract global investors and to make it a beautiful capital’. The 75,000 families, who are to be evicted, according to him, are ‘mainly occupying the most valuable land and strategically vital canals in Colombo’.
Already the government removed 6,000 street hawkers from the city centre. Protests resulted in partial relocation of some thousand hawkers close to the city centre.
United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) has fielded Milinda Moragoda, a former cabinet minister, the post of Colombo mayor. His main rival is A.J.M. Muzammil. His plank is also ‘New city plan’ for Colombo but he is promising that ‘Colombo residents will never be thrown out of the city’.
Moragoda is doing his best to win over the angry Colombo residents. He is telling them that houses would be rebuilt for the people evicted in the immediate environment, if not at the very same places. This plank doesn’t gel well with his assurance to the corporate sector that he would make Colombo ‘friendlier for the business investors’, and an ‘economic hub’.
Moragoda’s critics aver his very nomination for the Mayor post is a wrong signal to the poor. He hails from a wealthy family. His family owns a Merchant Bank and their business interests range from financial services to business logistics and property development.
The outcome of the election for 23 local government bodies, including 16 municipal councils besides Colombo, will also be determined to a large extent by the new age voters, who are hit by high cost of living index, and growing unemployment. At present about 18 percent of youth are groping for jobs. The few job openings that have come up in recent months have gone the Chinese way as the Chinese companies which have bagged the contracts have mostly brought their own workers for skilled and unskilled jobs alike.
