COLOMBO (News 1st) – Sri Lanka's Foreign Minister Ali Sabry,PC says Sri Lanka must start promoting itself and go beyond speaking about the country's strategic location."We have been talking about the strategic location for too long and everybody knows about it.
I think there is nothing more to dwell on that. Location is probably one of the critical important thing, but beyond that there are a lot of other things to be done.
That is how do you promote yourself? What are the laws in place? How do you invite the people?," he told the Colombo International Maritime & Logistics Conference on Tuesday (1).He said the issue Sri Lanka has is the absence of a team and a mechanism that can blend together with the government officials and the private sector to implement programs. "The government should take their hands off of doing business.
Gone are the days the government doing business, the government should be a facilitator, a regulator and a provider of logistics and allow the private sector to compete," said the Minister.Noting the fact on how major the countries have developed, the Minister said that the more Sri Lanka hold on to the present status, the more difficult it becomes get this transformations done. "But in our country minister changes, elections come, you need to give jobs and they pack the public service from 600,000 in 1994 to 1.5 Million now.