Dumbest Thing I Ever Heard. This Week (Bandula)

According to Bandula, Sri Lankans are balling too hard. They may even be eating fish.

Minister Bandula Gunawardena has said that a family can live on Rs. 7,500 a month if they don’t eat out so much. This is madness. He’s taken two random data points from his meanderings when there’s an actual Household Income And Expenditure Survey that tells you what the average family spends. It’s Rs. 13,000 a month on food, which isn’t even eating that well.

I’ve covered this in a post – How Sri Lankans Get Their Eat On. The average family does 42% of their spending on food. Those are actual data points, published by the government.

The Education Department runs student hostels in several schools where students have three square meals and two cups of tea a day for Rs.2500 a month. This is a clear indication that a family of three needs only Rs.7500 for a month if they manage their expenses properly. Many individuals are in the habit of wasting their hard earned money having meals at hotels and restaurants. Recently I was invited to a function at a hotel that charged Rs.6500 for lunch per head. We must avoid such wasteful expenditure and guard our expenses. (Daily Mirror)

So, he found a subsidized student canteen and then presumes that this is the base cost of food. Then he went to a posh hotel and concludes that this is the other option. This is deeply tarded. The government produces actual reports so that policy doesn’t have to be decided based on where Ministers have lunch.

Which brings us to another point. We are paying for Bandula’s lunch, and his cars, and he seems to reflect not a bit on this fact. Bandula goes on:

The number of cellular phone in use in the country exceeds the population. Many individuals are using super- luxury cars at tremendous costs. It is in doubt whether they really need such expensive vehicles (ibid)

Well, how many cell phones does the honorable Minister have? The few Parliamentarians I’ve met have a Blackberry, an iPhone they can’t use, perhaps an iPad and then a Nokia they actually understand. They also have a press secretary, and research assistants, and wives, and mistresses, etc. They all have phones and cars. I understand that the government has a cashflow problem, but before they ask people to cut back on dried fish, perhaps they could show a little good faith and cut back on spending and waste.

The average family isn’t driving super luxury cars or having Rs. 6500 buffets. That’s our Ministers. Before they tell working people to eat less, perhaps they should tighten their own belts.

Anyways, check out the actual spending and income report. It’s from the thinking part of the government. Too bad the brain seems to be disconnected from the mouth.

7 Comments

  1. Yeah, Sri Lanka’s politicians are a dim witted, hopeless lot but this is quite scary. This guy, with his his power probably believes this. Think of what insanity a politician like Mervyn Silva thinks of.
    What I can’t understand though is when election time comes along why won’t people remember these things and vote for someone else? Why will they continue to vote for these monkeys?

  2. dumbest should be replaced with ‘most insulting’!

  3. This kind of comedy, only from our parliament.

  4. If the quotes are accurate, then this man is not only a buffoon, but a dangerous one at that. If he’s the Minister for Education, pity the poor children. Other than the fact that three people cannot eat on only Rs7500 per month (as set out by Indi above), what about the other costs of living? His comments on people living in the year 3000 (yes… the year 3000) are the ramblings of a special kind of stupid:

    “.. people living in 3000 will say that the prices of goods were much less in the year 2000, just as we talk about the prices of goods in the 1960s”

    The true reason behind these retarded quips can be found in his other quotes in the Mirror. It’s the budget. Opposition politicians have been calling for huge wage increases, considering the massive increases in the cost of living. The govt cannot do this, or indeed substantially increase the prices for food produced in Sri Lanka. When salaries are the largest component of govt spending and the govt is having to borrow huge sums just to stay afloat, there’s no room for manoeuvre.

  6. Indi you are making a mistake.

    You see Bandula G. is basing his comparison on the basis of his own experience. Any parliamentarian’s family can live on 7500 a month. At the Parliament Canteen, where a bun is Rs.1 and breakfast is Rs.10 cost of living is the lowest in the land. He has also omitted transport and electricity, not because he is ignorant but because no parliamentarian ever pays for these, they are provided by the state.

    He is in fact a victim of a condition that plagued poor Marie Antoinette: that the rulers have become so distant and isolated from their subjects that they have no comprehension of the hardships and indignities heaped on them on a regular basis.

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