Opinion: For the first time, an idea that needs several ministries has the right place to go—the NBFC

By Lalith Kahatapitiya

The Cabinet’s announcement of 24 August carried more than an administrative decision. Read carefully, it has the power to become the turning point of Sri Lanka’s economy, if what it promises is built into the Centre from the start.

What the Centre is for

The Cabinet decision of 24 August creates a Centre under the Presidential Secretariat to coordinate State agencies, remove administrative barriers and improve policymaking for industry. Those are its functions. Its purpose is something the paper does not need to spell out: a Sri Lanka that earns its way forward instead of borrowing its way forward. Heavy dollar repayments begin in 2028, and only foreign exchange that the country earns or keeps can meet them. Every question about the Centre’s structure, staffing and powers has the same answer: whatever helps the country earn.

Why this is a first

In the whole of Sri Lanka’s post-independence history, no institution has ever been mandated to take charge of an idea that falls outside every ministry’s remit. That is not an exaggeration. The country has never lacked people with ideas for earning. What it has lacked is an address for the ones that cut across Government. Many of the most valuable proposals are not requests from any sector and not complaints about any rule. They are concepts that need four or five agencies to act together, and because each agency can speak only for its own part, no one has ever been responsible for the whole. Such proposals have been admired, referred, and lost.

Three are ready today. Enterprises in our export zones could buy and sell goods across the region from Sri Lanka, the trade on which Singapore and Hong Kong have built much of their income, if Customs, the BOI and the Treasury agreed on one set of controls. Our accredited private hospitals could serve foreign surgical patients as a recognised destination if Health, Immigration and Tourism ran one patient pathway together. Our exporters could buy from local industry instead of importing billions of dollars of inputs if Inland Revenue, Customs and the BOI applied one principle: no greater burden on the local purchase than on the import. In each case the capacity exists. What was missing was an owner.

The Centre is the first institution in Sri Lanka’s history placed to be that owner. It carries the standing of the Presidential Secretariat, the authority to bring every department a proposal requires to one table, and a mandate to improve policy rather than merely administer it. Ownership is the part that has always been missing. Coordination brings people to a meeting; ownership keeps the proposal alive until it is launched or properly declined. That combination did not exist before 24 August.

Where the largest return lies

The Centre will be measured, at first, by how quickly it clears approvals. That matters, and it will be done. But the larger return lies elsewhere. A cleared approval helps the businesses already waiting. A launched pathway brings into being enterprises that do not exist today, and it keeps producing them for as long as Sri Lanka remains competitive, because its customers are the world. This is where the Centre can change the country’s earning capacity, and it is where a turning point in the economy becomes possible. It is also the part of its work most at risk of being lost in the daily press of cases.

It would be a great loss if the design did not protect it from the start. A proposal that needs several agencies should be received as a proposal, not redirected to one of them. It should be assessed on the foreign exchange it would earn or keep for the country, net of what it costs in imports. It should be owned at the level of the Centre until it is launched or declined with reasons, within a stated time. And the results, pathways opened and earnings that followed, should be published so that success is visible and repeatable.

An invitation that runs both ways

Businesses held back by a rule or a procedure finally have a place where the obstacle can be examined once and removed for everyone, and they should bring those obstacles clearly stated. Equally, anyone holding a viable idea for a new foreign exchange pathway should bring it, setting out the existing capacity it builds on, the departments that must act, the change each must make, and the earnings the country can expect once it runs. What the Centre cannot absorb is a flood of individual grievances that belong with a licensing authority.

There is a reason this matters to every one of us. No industry can thrive in an economy that is not thriving. The foreign exchange the country earns decides whether our factories get their raw materials, whether our hospitals get their equipment, and whether the rupee holds. Contributing to the national economy is no longer someone else’s work. It is part and parcel of everyone’s responsibility, and for the first time there is a place to take that contribution to.

The opportunity

Government has chosen to listen, and to place the listening at the highest office in the land. What was announced on 24 August already contains everything a turning point needs: national standing, authority across agencies and a mandate to improve policy. When those three are built into the Centre from its first day, it will be remembered as the moment Sri Lanka began the journey to earn its way forward, opening new, non-traditional foreign exchange pathways.

(The writer, Eng. Lalith Kahatapitiya CEng FIMechE FIET (UK) CEng FIE (SL), is Founder and Chairman of the KIK Group of Companies, an export-oriented engineering and switchgear manufacturer and a Presidential Export Award winner, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Free Trade Zone Manufacturers’ Association of Sri Lanka. The views expressed are his own. He can be reached at lalith@kik.lk.)