Sri Lanka’s newly appointed prime minister has disclosed that the cash-strapped island nation has run out of petrol stock, even as he pointed out that the country desperately needed to obtain $75m in foreign exchange over the next few days to pay for essential imports, including medicine.
Speaking on Monday in an address to the nation, as the country suffers from fuel and medicine shortages Ranil Wickremesinghe lamented; ‘We have run out of petrol … At the moment, we only have petrol stocks for a single day’.
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He disclosed that the government was also unable to raise dollars to pay for three shipments of oil, with the ships awaiting outside the Colombo harbour for payments before discharging their cargoes.
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‘The coming months are going to be the hardest this country has ever gone through’ said a reporter.
‘Obviously this affects all factors of life, not just the industrial sector and the manufacturing sector, but also day-to-day life, children going to school – every aspect you can think of, you name it’ he submitted.
‘So far the people did not have a clear picture of how bad things were. We kept getting reassured by successive politicians and that didn’t help as people had almost a false sense of optimism that things would be ok,’ he added.
Africa Daily News, New York reports that Wickremesinghe assumed office on Thursday after his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa was forced out after weeks of protests over the government’s handling of the economic crisis turned deadly.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa replaced Mahinda, his elder brother, with Wickremesinghe, an opposition parliamentarian who has held the post five times previously, in a desperate bid to placate protesters.
