Thursday, February 13, 2025

What’s obvious about the Port?

by malinga
February 2, 2025 1:10 am 0 comment 968 views

Sri Lanka’s harbour woes surface from time to time. The latest bout is, however, more disconcerting than it was earlier. The Port facilities have been in demand latterly, but the harbour staff has not been able to handle demand.

Meanwhile, this writer saw some articles that offer the view that all this is making us lose out to ‘Singapore and Dubai.’ The writers of these opinion pieces seem not to care that much about the fact that Singapore handles ten times more shipping volume than Sri Lanka does.

But yet we are ‘losing competition to Singapore?.’ No we are not. We are trying to keep our harbour viable, which means that we have to think of entirely new strategies that have nothing to do with Singapore or Dubai.

Our harbour is just like our airport. We have had the opportunity, many times in the past, to make our airport the regional aviation hub. We had the same chances with the harbour, but made even less use of these opportunities, if you’d care to follow the development of the facility from the time there was talk of the harbour as our ultimate economic catalyst.

Singapore also had the same experience however, meaning the Singaporeans had the same expectations from their Port in the beginning. Their harbour was not exactly situated in a favoured location however.

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Ours was, but Singapore set itself up to be regional hub. It’s probably because they didn’t have any other export, trade or business that they could call their own. They had no produce such as coconut and rubber, and didn’t have acres of land for industry or agriculture.

But the Singaporeans made the harbour a mission, probably initially their only mission as a newly independent nation. Since the harbour was seen as a springboard for Singapore’s economic development, there were plans for it.

The plans focused attention of Singapore’s early visionaries, and there is the speech of Lee Kwan Yew, the founder premier of the city state, threatening strikers with the ‘sack’ in short order if they tried extended work stoppages.

What’s the difference between Singapore’s hub mentality and ours? Ours was for starters, a copycat hub mentality. We wanted to have that airport hub and the Port hub because Singapore had done it before us.

The Singaporeans had created that storyline much before us, however, and were much better than us at all of these pursuits. They knew they had little choice anyway, so they thought of Singapore in terms of a Hong Kong. But Hong Kong had already been a financial entrepôt for China, whereas Singapore did not have that advantage.

But that’s the whole point. While Sri Lanka has always tried to be a copy of Singapore or some other model, Singapore didn’t copy Hong Kong and try to make itself a replica of the then British-run state.

That’s where we go wrong, always. We think we can and we should imitate a success story. Now we are having harbour woes, because we never oriented our harbour to be anything other than one of many other run of the mill Ports in the region.

We thought we would call it a hub and conveniently hope for the traffic to come in. But we have never made the harbour an entrepôt for anything, and so we became the Port that had fluctuating fortunes.

It’s the same story with the airport. We didn’t offer anything special with the airport, and missed the chance as with the harbour. Today, the Port has become more of a problem-child than it previously was, because it has become a bit of a hotbed for labour union brinkmanship and slow-burn politics.

Why is this so? It’s because there isn’t enough of industry that’s invested in either the airport or the harbour to resist unionisation.

Make no mistake, unionisation would have been resisted if business was thriving. In Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew was a union man. Believe it or not, he began his political career championing worker rights as a unionist.

But when he rose to the helm of the nation, he made sure that the unionists understood business, and that they were made business stakeholders.

He was called the ‘Constant Gardner’ for making sure that all the parts fitted in a whole, so that unionists were not at cross purposes with his efforts at growing the economy.

The problem in Sri Lanka is that most times, the unionists have been the politicians, and these politicians had the politician hat on, all the time. They were not visionaries such as Lee who wanted to uplift the country, and wanted unionists to be stakeholders in that task.

The problems now with regard to the harbour in Colombo are concerned to some extent at least with Customs and revenue collection. Revenue collection through rigorous customs scrutiny cannot be made a priority, if there is plan to make the Port a hub.

Maybe everybody abandoned the plans to make the Port a regional hub. The priorities are now of a different kind. Perhaps we have to abandon making airports and Ports our own self-imagined regional hubs in competition with major hubs such as Singapore and Dubai.

Perhaps we need a different mission. Making airports hubs was a mission, but it was ill suited to us, especially when we were merely setting out to be copycats. Perhaps the digitisation campaign is a mission where we can embrace our own creativity, without trying to follow a hub concept as with the Port, where eventually revenue earning through Customs became our top priority.

We have not automated our harbour operations at least in comparison with other Ports. We can’t have it both ways. If we are to have the Ports operating at optimum levels of efficiency, we need to automate and make easy passage to shipping a top priority.

Equipment

But we don’t have the equipment to do quick scans of container loads, and we do not have enough Customs officers to follow up on the revenue-generation operation that focuses on detecting contraband.

In a way this approach is typical of policy working at cross purposes, starting with the various initiatives of previous administrations.

If we want to be great at anything, we have to be consumer-friendly and if the Port is to be a hub, the top priority is the users of the Port. Singapore didn’t prioritise its Customs revenue collection process.

If the Singaporeans did that, we wouldn’t be trying to copy them. The idea of successive Governments seems to have been to bilk the Port and the airport for all its revenue aspects, meaning payment for services and customs revenue. But attitudes matter.

If we are to set up ourselves as a unique service — a ‘hub’ in every sense — we need to trump up the service aspect and not be too scrupulous about Customs revenue. An efficient Port that’s dynamic keeps the traffic moving, and Customs revenue is a poor excuse not to keep vessels moving briskly.

So now that the Port hub concept is beyond our grasp, let the authorities tackle the harbour issue in any way they see fit. Not that it would matter much if we can resolve the immediate situation either way. The lesson we have already learnt is that we can’t copy Singapore or Dubai, when it comes to harbours. We are not anywhere in their league.

We aren’t choosing anything we can be unique at, in establishing our economy, and that’s not an advertisement for a country that promises to offer something novel.

Once we have settled on something we have to make sure the imagery is perfect. The problem seems to be that we are not interested in offering something dynamic and exciting. We only want to bilk all our innovations — if there are any — for all the taxes and surcharges, the image of whatever product or service we offer be damned. It is certainly the antithesis of a hub concept.

It is as if we pitch to trading partners with the slogan, ‘our doors are open, we are waiting to exploit you, be on your guard’. The current crisis in the Port is only a symptom of this attitude. The exact modus operandi of its resolution will not matter because the Port is apparently, try as we might, never our strong suit, just like our airport.

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