Gotabaya Rajapaksa leaves on a jet plane to Maldives, Sri Lanka declares emergency

Rajapaksa is a surname no Sri Lankan wants to hear at this point. The tiny island nation is burning, protesters are camping inside the Presidential palace, diving into the lavish swimming pools, and living the life that the Rajapaksas denied them for more than 20 years.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the man at the centre of it all, has now fled the country to Maldives. He and his wife Ioma took an Air Force plane out as the rest of the country waited for answers from him.

Sri Lanka declared a state of emergency amid widespread protests in the island nation. Sri Lanka Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has declared a curfew in the country's western province and has ordered the arrest of rioters.

If Rajapaksa steps down as promised, Wickremesinghe will automatically become acting president until parliament elects an MP to serve out the presidential term, reported AFP.

Sri Lanka's main opposition leader Sajith Premadasa has told the BBC he intends to run for president. Country’s parliament will hold a vote on July 20 to elect a new president.

Anger against the leadership

• Protesters in Sri Lanka's Colombo have gathered around 200 metres away from the Parliament and are demanding the immediate resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
• Gotabaya Rajapaksa was stuck in his own country on Tuesday after a standoff with airport immigration staff. The immigration officials also prevented the president's brother and former finance minister Basil Rajapaksa from flying out of the country.
• Earlier, crowds of protesters stormed into Rajapaksa’s home, his seaside office and the official residence of Wickremesinghe on Saturday. They demanded the leaders to step down.

The situation is really bad

• Sri Lanka has never seen an economic crisis like this. And in the last one month the situation has gone from bad to worse. The country has run out of cash and is struggling to import basic items like food, fuel and medicines.
• The government owes $51 billion and is unable to make interest payments on its loans. The country's inflation rate reached a whopping 55% in June, and millions of people are struggling to make a living.
• The island nation's currency has collapsed by 80 per cent. Sri Lanka defaulted on its $51-billion foreign debt in April and is in talks with the IMF for a possible bailout.

What led to this crisis

• First the Covid-19 crisis hammered Sri Lanka's vital income from tourism. This starved the country of foreign currency needed to pay off its debt.The government was forced to ban many imports, which led to inflation, severe shortages and power blackouts. In April, the Sri Lanka government announced that it was defaulting on its USD 51 billion foreign debt, reported AFP.
• According to a report in Reuters, critics say that the roots of the crisis lie in economic mismanagement by successive governments that created and sustained a twin deficit - a budget shortfall alongside a current account deficit.
• After winning the elections in 2019, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced deep tax cuts. The sweeping tax cuts led to credit rating agencies downgrading Sri Lanka in 2020. This meant the country had no access to international financial markets.
• Sri Lanka started using its foreign reserves resulting in plummeting of foreign reserves. As of February 2022, the country was left with only USD 2.31 billion in its reserves but faced debt repayments of around USD 4 billion in 2022, reported Reuters.