Lanka opposition rejects unity govt offer

FE Team | Published: April 05, 2022 00:04:20

COLOMBO, April 4 (Agencies): Sri Lanka's opposition on Monday dismissed the president's invitation to join a unity government as "nonsensical" and instead demanded he resign over the country's worsening shortages of food, fuel and medicines.
Earlier President Gotabaya Rajapaksa dropped his brother as finance minister on Monday after disbanding the government and calling for a unity administration, as protests over the country's economic crisis focused on the role of the ruling family.
Every member of Sri Lanka's cabinet except the president and his elder brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, resigned late Sunday.
The country's central bank governor Ajith Cabraal -- who has long opposed the International Monetary Fund bailout now being sought by the country -- also stepped down on Monday.
The departures cleared the way for the country's ruling political clan to seek to shore up its weakening position and attempt to stem growing public protests.
But the president has already reappointed four of the outgoing ministers -- three of them to their old jobs -- while replacing brother Basil Rajapaksa as finance minister with the previous justice chief.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's overture came as armed troops looked to quell more demonstrations over what the government acknowledges is the country's most severe economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1948.
Police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse thousands of protesters trying to storm the private home of the prime minister -- the president's elder brother and the head of the family political clan -- in Tangalle, once a bastion of support for the Rajapaksas in the island's south.
The president asked opposition parties represented in parliament to "join the effort to seek solutions to the national crisis," after the late-night resignation of nearly all cabinet ministers to pave the way for a revamped administration.
But the leftist People's Liberation Front (JVP) responded by urging Gotabaya Rakapaksa and his once popular and powerful family to immediately step down.
"He really must be a lunatic to think that opposition MPs will prop up a government that is crumbling," JVP lawmaker Anura Dissanayake told reporters in Colombo.