Queues, Quotations, and Questionable Optics: The Politics of Fuel in the Eastern Province
In the theatre of Sri Lankan politics, few props are as visually potent as a fuel queue. It evokes, almost instinctively, the economic trauma of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa era—an unignorable tableau of systemic collapse, public frustration, and administrative paralysis. It is therefore unsurprising that political actors, particularly those seeking relevance, reach for this imagery with theatrical urgency. Yet, when such portrayals drift from empirical reality into anecdotal exaggeration, they risk becoming less a critique of governance and more an exercise in political comedy.
Enter Athaullah Ahamed Zackie, former Mayor of Akkaraipattu, who this week offered a dramatic account of “four hours in a fuel queue,” painting a picture of a nation regressing into chaos under President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. It is a compelling narrative—if one is willing to suspend both context and fact. For what Zackie conspicuously omits is the operational framework currently governing fuel distribution: the QR-based rationing protocol (QRP), a system designed precisely to eliminate the arbitrary, unregulated queues that defined the 2022 crisis.
The QRP system, reintroduced under the stewardship of the National People’s Power (NPP) administration, is not merely a bureaucratic mechanism—it is a data-driven allocation model. By assigning vehicle-specific quotas through QR verification, it ensures temporal distribution, demand smoothing, and equitable access. In plain terms, it replaces chaotic queuing with scheduled entitlement. The system’s architecture is intended to prevent precisely the kind of congestion Mr Zackie now theatrically laments.
So how does one reconcile a “four-hour queue” within a system calibrated to avoid such occurrences? The answer lies less in policy failure and more in behavioural anomalies. Localised surges—often triggered by misinformation, hoarding tendencies, or non-compliance with allocated time windows—can produce temporary bottlenecks. These are operational deviations, not structural breakdowns. To extrapolate them into a national indictment is analytically unsound.
Indeed, officials within the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation and regional administrators have consistently reported that, under the QRP regime, average wait times have been reduced to under 30 minutes in most districts, including the Eastern Province. Where delays occur, they are typically linked to logistical hiccups—delivery lags, station-level inefficiencies, or public disregard for scheduling—not the absence of a system.
What Zackie’s statement ultimately represents is a familiar political manoeuvre: the elevation of an isolated inconvenience into a symbol of systemic failure. It is a tactic as old as politics itself, but one that sits uneasily in a post-crisis Sri Lanka striving for institutional credibility. The danger lies not in criticism—robust scrutiny is the lifeblood of democracy—but in the distortion of facts that undermines public confidence in functioning mechanisms.
There is, of course, a broader question at play. Can Sri Lanka, still navigating the aftershocks of economic collapse, realistically aspire to a frictionless fuel distribution network? The answer, as any serious policy analyst would concede, is no. What it can—and arguably has—achieved is a transition from disorder to managed scarcity. The QRP system does not promise abundance; it guarantees fairness.
To conflate fairness with failure is to misunderstand the very nature of crisis governance.
It is also worth noting that public memory, while powerful, is not always precise. The queues of 2022 were not merely long—they were existential. They represented a breakdown of state capacity, where fuel availability itself was uncertain. Today’s sporadic delays, inconvenient as they may be, occur within a fundamentally different paradigm: one where supply chains are stabilised, reserves are monitored, and distribution is regulated.
Against this backdrop, Zackie’s lament reads less like a policy critique and more like a political audition—an attempt to reclaim relevance by invoking a crisis that no longer exists in its original form.
The people of Akkaraipattu, and indeed the Eastern Province, deserve an honest conversation about governance. They deserve transparency on supply metrics, accountability for local inefficiencies, and continuous refinement of the QRP system. What they do not deserve is the recycling of crisis rhetoric for political theatre.
Fuel queues may once have symbolised national despair. Today, when selectively exaggerated, they risk becoming something else entirely: a punchline.