Sri Lanka PM appeals for ‘patience’ from protesters amid crisis

Mahinda Rajapaksa urges protesters to end mass demonstrations calling for the government to resign over the island’s worst economic crisis in decades.

Sri Lanka’s embattled Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa has pleaded for “patience” as thousands continue to take to the streets to protest against his family’s rule, with public anger at a fever pitch over the country’s worsening economic crisis.

Sri Lanka’s 22 million residents have seen weeks of power blackouts and severe shortages of food, fuel and even life-saving medicine in the country’s worst downturn since independence in 1948.

Rajapaksa and his younger brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, have become a focus of the protests that started over shortages of fuel, food and other essentials and daily power outages.

Most of those items are paid in hard currency, but Sri Lanka is on the brink of bankruptcy, saddled with dwindling foreign reserves and $25bn in foreign debt. Nearly $7bn is due this year.

Protesters have rallied daily since Saturday against the president in the capital Colombo and across the island nation, chanting “Gota go home” and calling for his government’s removal.

In his first address since the crisis, Mahinda – the patriarch of the powerful Rajapaksa family omnipresent in Sri Lanka’s politics for two decades – said he needed more time to pull the nation out of the deep end.

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