Sri Lanka crisis: President Rajapaksa to resign today? What we know so far

As protests grew louder over the devastating economic crisis in Sri Lanka, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who is due to offer his resignation today, flew out of the country and landed in Maldives in the wee hours today. Earlier this week, Rajapaksa had fled his residence to shift to a safe location as demonstrators stormed his official residence in Colombo.

1) Pressure on Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa grew as the economic meltdown set off acute shortages of essential items, leaving people struggling to buy food, fuel and other necessities.

2) President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, his wife and two bodyguards left aboard a Sri Lankan Air Force plane bound for the city of Male, the capital of the Maldives, according to an immigration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

3) Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said he would leave once a new government was in place.

4)Don’t fall ill or get into accidents: That’s the advice doctors in Sri Lanka are giving patients. “Don’t get ill, don’t get injured, don’t do anything that will make you go to a hospital for treatment unnecessarily,” said Samath Dharmaratne, president of the Sri Lanka Medical Association. “That is how I can explain it; this is a serious situation.”

5) Protests against the economic crisis have simmered for months and came to a head last weekend when hundreds of thousands of people took over key government buildings in Colombo.

6) Rajapaksa offered to step down on July 13, parliamentary speaker Mahinda Abeywardana said in a televised statement, news agency AFP reported.

7) Sri Lankan lawmakers agreed to elect a new president. The new president will serve the remainder of Rajapaksa’s term, which ends in 2024, and could potentially appoint a new prime minister, who would then have to be approved by Parliament. 

8) Protesters accuse the president and his relatives of siphoning money from government coffers for years and Rajapaksa’s administration of hastening the country’s collapse by mismanaging the economy.

9) The country is relying on aid from India and other nations as leaders try to negotiate a bailout with the International Monetary Fund. Wickremesinghe said recently that negotiations with the IMF were complex because Sri Lanka was now a bankrupt state.

10) Sri Lanka announced in April that it was suspending repayment of foreign loans due to a foreign currency shortage. Its total foreign debt amounts to $51 billion, of which it must repay $28 billion by the end of 2027.

-With agency inputs