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Some said he will. Some said he will not. Still others stood in numbed silence waiting for what they believed would be post-budget shell shock.

By the time this column appears, days after Finance Minister Anura Kumara Dissanayake, also the president of Sri Lanka among other portfolios, which has now become a habit of incoming heads of state, all his intentions, but not some carefully hidden ones, would have been released to the public and the world.

So now we know which of the soothsayers who attributed new tax, no tax and some tax and kept an already suffering sections of the population ready to head to the closest medical service with or without drugs to clear the shivers, if only by staying away from unending talk by those who have gained from the Anura Kumara Lottery, because before you could spell out JVP, there would be the lucky ones.

As we now know, there is a category who will gather their first winnings tomorrow when the doors to the appropriate places open. Until then they will continue with what they have been doing—sipping their favourite brew at some favourite waterhole.

I don’t know about those economic experts and others with much sagacity who missed out in their predictions. I have no idea how they will react. Whether they will disappear for the time like the astrologers of the past who took to the hills or wherever they felt relatively safe from hounding politicians misled by faulty predictions.

But not today. In this day and age there are other ways to make a getaway. Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s route and method was one. But then not many are presidents with a colony of siblings and close relatives who have the privilege to run away and return to postpartum political luxury. I mean, who will provide that kind of luxury, though short-lived—that is, until Anura Kumara entered the scene with his Marxist ideas, now gradually tempered by conservative Western thinking, and grabbed the cheque book.

But what intrigues those who sit by and watch the political gimmickry as politicians and nation builders pass, some of them carrying heavy loads of political chicanery, years of perpetuating petty ideas as the best thinking and buckets full of misdemeanours, which in countries near and far would have meant legal trial and punishment?

Now at least some are being rounded up after a rickety system gained some steam. But what is intriguing is the way politicians in Sri Lanka jump from party to party, from side to side, despite all the bellyaches, destructive, disgusting speeches and humiliating and damaging accusations, and survive within the party or are accepted by another.

Those who love to study and expose the other side of politics are hopeful that the new spring cleaner will wipe the slate, as one of them told me, as nobody else will do so and nobody else has the gumption to go ahead.

This might not be upstate economics out of Oxford and Cambridge or the Ivy League. But from the standpoint of this politically ‘nouveau riche’ political modernist, it’s best to clean the stable before washing the horses.

Personally it seems rather ghoulish to me. It appears more like a modern hara kiri turned out by a tempura chef, which would have been much appreciated if he practised his regular job. But this is the way among new thinkers. Just last Monday at a local wedding I had one young chap tell me – perhaps it was the whiskey – that our new chief, whom the western media and the right-wing Indian press keep calling AKD a Marxist president or an insurrection participant of the past, is as Marxist as Groucho Marx.

According to this wise chap pedalling his way through the Scottish Highlands in search of his PhD doctorate certificate, having spent quite some time preparing his thesis on multilateral lending institutions, our president is no leftist, though during his campaigning days he kicked the IMF on the posterior, saying it was another western plant – along with the World Bank – of which I had not heard before, and that our leftist will turn right, and this time not in secret.

His theory is that the budget speech was written for him in Washington, lest he forget his past and quite by chance lambast the IMF with the IMF representative and the US ambassador seated in the visitors’ gallery.

He parted, advising me to pick up the budget speech and compare it with some of the leader’s speeches.

Now that is a hell of a task he set me after I found a Sri Lankan TV that carried the speech that somebody told me ran longer than the ‘full serial’ matinee films of those post-independence years.

If somebody in the IMF drafted that speech in Sinhala, either they have a hidden spook or an unlicensed immigrant buried in the bowels of the IMF unknown to the world conqueror who is turning an Oval Office space into a dance floor.

To be quite frank, President AKD’s language was surely not understood by many of them who heard it. I mean, to obtuse linguists like such. As it sets us on a new adventure – going in search of the Sinhala scholar and leaking it to Messrs Putin and Xi and even one of our godfathers based in Dubai. The last of them appears to have a longer reach than many of the secret sleuths in the pay of the other state leaders.

Right now I think it’s better to take a rest while budget victors and losers go into a round of fisticuffs while waiting for the budget debate when the IMF will show its ugly demeanour.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later, he was Deputy Chief de Mission
in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner
in London.)