Sri Lanka LIVE: Dinesh Gunawardena appointed Prime Minister
Efforts are being made by all parties to reach a consensus on resolving the economic and political crisis in Sri Lanka, as President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe were revealed to be still in the country after having fled the protesters who hit their homes in Colombo.
Dinesh Gunawardena, a veteran politician and a close ally of the Rajapaksa family, was appointed on Friday as Sri Lanka’s prime minister by President Ranil Wickremesinghe, a day after he was himself sworn in to the top post. This is the first appointment made by President Wickremesinghe on his first day in office.
A stalwart of Sri Lankan politics, Gunawardena, 73, earlier served as the foreign minister and education minister. He was appointed as Home Minister in April by then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
The prime minister’s post fell vacant after Wickremesinghe, 73, was on Thursday sworn in as the countrys eighth president after Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country and then resigned as president.Ranil Wickremesinghe on Wednesday, July 20, was elected as the new President of Sri Lanka. He was earlier its Acting President.
For the first time in 44 years, Sri Lanka’s Parliament directly elected a President.
Sri Lankan security forces on Friday removed a group of anti-government protesters which continued to occupy the Presidents Secretariat. Police and special task force personnel forced them out on Friday when less than 100 of them were present. The protesters had vacated the President and Prime Minister’s residences and the Prime Minister’s office earlier after capturing them on July 9.
Sri Lanka is facing its worst economic crisis since independence in 1948. The country is unable to pay for its essential imports, fuel, food and medicine due to an acute forex crisis. The public have been languishing in serpentine queues for fuel, cooking gas and suffering with multiple hours of power outages.
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