Jumping the FUTA bandwagon!

October 3, 2012, 7:04 pm , The Island

Protest march by FUTA in Colombo,(file photo)

I wonder how many of those who joined the FUTA march from Galle to Colombo fully understood what the ‘6%’ printed on the back of the T-shirts some of them wore or the ‘6% of GDP’ displayed on boards they carried really meant, in terms of financial magnitudes or annual allocations from the national budget. I also doubt whether most of the politicians who jumped the FUTA bandwagon to gain some mileage for themselves or their parties as champions of free education and university autonomy had a clue.

In a short piece I wrote to The Island on 13th September, I asked as to why FUTA based its demand for additional resources for education on the GDP and not on the national budget which would have been more easily quantifiable and, therefore, more easily understood by the public whose support it is seeking. I pointed out therein that the GDP has different manifestations and that, in any case, it is a post facto computation as those who compute it will point out.

As for the march itself, it was interesting (if not amusing!), to see the JVP and the UNP joining it almost hand in hand, and making their presence felt at the Hyde Park rally. The JVP decision to jump the bandwagon did not come as a surprise as they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by joining in any campaign against the government, as a means of gaining some public support. The UNP doing so, however, mouthing slogans traditionally associated with the JVP and the so-called Antare (Inter-University Student Federation) came as a surprise. They seem to have forgotten how the SLFP, together with its allies, joined the JVP and organized mass protests and street demonstrations against the White Paper on Education placed for public discussion in 1981 by the then Education Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, and even got school children to come out of their class-rooms shouting slogans.

Together, they disrupted the schools and created such mayhem that the government was forced to roll back the White Paper which contained many useful proposals for improving education in this country. Very few of them knew what a White Paper meant, no different from most of those who are today clamoring for 6% of GDP to be allocated for education within the next couple of years. Adversity, no doubt, makes strange bed-fellows!

Eric J. de Silva