The Cabraal tapes and fuss about GSP Plus

By Neville de Silva

So now we have this case of the ‘missing’ tapes. In case readers have missed the developing saga and the accompanying spin and spin offs, the story goes like this. The Governor of the Central Bank Nivard Cabraal was interviewed by the BBC for its “Hard Talk” programme in connection with our 60th independence anniversary. It is said he flew to London for this.

The interview was by the BBC’s Zeinab Badawi and it was expected that the programme would be aired shortly after it was recorded in London. When it was not telecast, Bell Pottinger, the London PR firm hired by Sri Lanka to advice it on Sri Lanka’s image and to prepare top Sri Lankans for interviews, is said to have inquired from the BBC about the delay. According to media reports the BBC had said that due to a “technical glitch” the tape had been accidentally erased and therefore it could not be telecast. Now, those who like to see a mountain in a grain of sand argue that this is a poor excuse, that these things don’t happen, that the BBC is saying so because Cabraal fared so well in the interview that the BBC lost its cool and usual panache and decided not to air it.

While I have no particular love for the BBC as my previous writings have shown, this seems to me hyperbolic and grandstanding. I have seen and heard BBC programmes on which those like Lakshman Kadirgamar have been more than equal to the task of talking hard himself. I have also seen and heard others like the former President Chandrika Kumaratunga come a cropper despite being put through her paces by Bell Pottinger who was paid a tidy sum for that effort that brought Sri Lanka no credit.

If the BBC did not want to air programmes because it has turned out second best then it would have never aired the David Frost show when the notorious Emile Soundranayagam was audacious enough to call the British “peasants” and really stood up to the famous David Frost when Soundranayagam was confronted over what the British authorities considered was a serious fraud.

True that was many years ago. Yet, in more recent times I have watched “Hard Talk” from the time Tim Sebastian hosted it and there were several times when the BBC got a taste of its own medicine from those like Lee Kuan Yew. As far as I know nobody has ever complained that their interviews were not aired for talking back to the interviewer and giving the host a difficult time.

Sometimes recordings do get erased accidentally as I discovered when I worked as a consultant at Rupavahini. Media reports have said that Cabraal fared very well in the now lamented first interview.

Who has said so? Was it an assessment of his performance by independent persons or one provided by a Bell Pottinger representative or a Sri Lankan official, perhaps from the High Commission? The viewing public should be the arbiters of performance. Unfortunately the public had no opportunity of making a judgement on that first interview because it was never aired.

It could however make an assessment of the one that was telecast recently. I watched it twice over. Space constraints don’t allow me to make a detailed comment on it. Anyway I am more concerned with the content than with Cabraal’s screen performance.

Before that one need to ask a couple of questions that I feel are relevant. Were the questions fired at him by Stephen Sackur very different from the ones posed by Badawi or were they only marginally different? I have little doubt that some of the questions would have been virtually the same, though the words and their tenor might have been somewhat different. But the themes would have been the same, broadly speaking.

If that surmise is correct-and there is no reason to think that it is wildly wrong- then Cabraal should have been all the more prepared to answer them. He had already had a rehearsal of sorts. If it is claimed that Cabraal fared well in that first interview and that is why it got ‘lost’, then surely one should expect him to have fared even better the second time round because he has already had an idea about the line of questioning and the tenor.

My personal assessment of the second interview is not entirely complimentary of Cabraal, Bell Pottinger or not. He tended to waffle and he was not articulate enough in pressing home the points he had. I do not want to take up some of the answers he gave, like his splitting hairs over an IMF staff report and how to measure inflation. My concern is more with regard to his position on GSP Plus, the trade concession by the European Union enjoyed by Sri Lanka and which is up for renewal at the end of this year.

It is rather difficult to understand where the government stands on this, what its policy is because it seems to be running on two tracks. Sackur pressed Cabraal on GSP Plus by saying this: “You are suggesting to me that you don’t care whether the EU reviews its special trade deal with Sri Lanka which allows you to export hundreds of millions of Euros worth of clothes to the EU every year?”

Cabraal’s response, to paraphrase, was that since there will come a time when the EU will withdraw it and we will have to stand on our own we must learn to do without it now.He also said that he had advised the government on this.

What I cannot understand, and there must be many people like me, is why President Rajapaksa set up a committee of three ministers- GL Peiris, Rohitha Bogollagama and Sarath Amunugama to study the problem and lobby for it and also sent GL Peiris off to the EU as recently as March to campaign for the continuance of GSP Plus facility. It is not only garments that are covered by this facility.

There are some 7200 export items that enjoy this concession. The garment industry lobbied President Rajapaksa, appealing to the government to take steps to ensure that the facility is continued, pointing out that some 100,000 workers would otherwise be jobless. Last October in an interview with a state newspaper GL Peiris said “If we do anything to deprive the people of our country of these very substantial benefits, if these innocent girls working in these factories are to be thrown out on the roads because GSP Plus is not available, it is not the government that is going to be hurt.”

This is precisely what the European Union must also understand. The government will continue, Cabraal will have his job until the government lasts. But what of the 100,000 workers directly employed and others in ancillary industries who will have no jobs? Moreover, the apparel sector has contributed nearly half of the US$2.9 earned from our exports. How much of that will be lost to our depleting coffers?

If the EU is going to extend the facility for another three years as has been indicated, we should of course turn it down, thumbing our noses at it on the basis of the Cabraal advice. Who then is going to feed the jobless, Cabraal’s collaborators?