Sri Lanka Crisis: Sri Lanka is facing its worst economic crisis since gaining independence.
Ahead of Wednesday's presidential election, Sri Lanka's acting President Ranil Wickremesinghe has distanced himself from the disgraced Rajapaksa government, saying he was not in the "same administration" and was appointed to "handle the economy" of the bankrupt country.
Wickremesinghe, 73, on Tuesday was among three candidates proposed by lawmakers for Wednesday's presidential election to pick Rajapaksa's successor.
The 225-member Parliament will elect the next president who will complete the remaining tenure of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who resigned last week.
There's growing discontent brewing amongst the public over Wickremesinghe's presidential nomination, who many consider to be “more of the same,” since he was part of the previous Rajapaksa administration.
“I'm not the same, people know that…I came here to handle the economy,” Wickremesinghe told CNN in an interview on Monday, as he sought to distance himself from Rajapaksa, the person under whom he had worked for the past two months torescue the crisis-hit Sri Lankan economy.
Wickremesinghe said the erstwhile Rajapaksa regime was “covering up facts” about the country's crippling financial crisis, and assured the island nation's beleaguered economy would stabilise by the end of next year.
He was sworn-in as the acting President on Friday after Rajapaksa fled to the Maldives and then to Singapore from where he resigned in the face of public revolt against his government's mishandling of the country's economy.
“The previous government was lying…covering up facts about the fact that Sri Lanka was bankrupt and we need to go to the IMF (for a bailout package),” Wickremesinghe said during the interview.
In March 2022, Sri Lanka had to pay USD 7 billion in debts, when it had a little over USD 1 billion in foreign exchange reserves.
On April 12, the island nation defaulted on loan repayments and sought restructuring its debt.
Worried by the International Monetary Fund's stringent conditions, the Rajapaksa administration continued to defer on appealing to the international lender for a bailout package, surviving on the lifeline of close to USD 4 billion handed out by India.
The IMF, which has been in talks with the previous Rajapaksa government for a possible USD 3 billion bailout package, said it was monitoring events in Sri Lanka closely.
In the interview, Wickremesinghe said “he would like to tell the people that he knew what they are suffering,” and exuded confidence that the cash-strapped economy would begin to stabilise by the end of next year.
"We have gone back. We have to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. We don't need five years or 10 years. By the end of next year let's start stabilising, and certainly by 2024 let's have a functioning economy which will start growing,” he said.
Petrol has been severely rationed and long, serpentine queues were a common sight in front of filling stations leading to frequent clashes.
The government has asked people to work from home and closed schools in an effort to conserve fuel.
Headline inflation in the country of 22 million hit 54.6 per cent last month, with the country's central bank warning that it could surge to 70 per cent in the near future.
Wickremesinghe said he had spoken to Rajapaksa since he fled to the Maldives, and then travelled to Singapore, but denied having knowledge about the former leader's current whereabouts.