President Mahinda Rajapakse used his speech to the ruling UPFA’s May Day rally to announce a partial revocation of the massive electricity price hike that was announced a couple of weeks earlier. The details of the presidential largess and indeed the revised tariff structure itself will only be clear once consumers receive their April electricity bills in May.

It was however a reasonably satisfying political week or two for the government. Read the rest of this entry »

President Mahinda Rajapakse has been publicly reiterating and recommitting to finally holding the long delayed and often postponed Northern Provincial Council (NPC) elections in September this year, almost four and half years after the war ended in May 2009. Thereafter despite presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections, in 2010 and 2011, various excuses were contrived and trotted out to postpone the holding of the Northern Provincial Council elections, an election the regime is almost guaranteed to lose to the TNA, if even a semblance of a reasonably fair and free election was held.  Read the rest of this entry »