Peace for the World

Peace for the World
First democratic leader of Justice the Godfather of the Sri Lankan Tamil Struggle: Honourable Samuel James Veluppillai Chelvanayakam

Saturday, February 24, 2018

Non-governance and non-opposition in Sri Lanka

To end on a slightly different but not unrelated note, if we could have learnt anything from our 40 years of presidential-parliamentary experience it is that the country is not served well by the two extremes of constitutional exuberance.

by Rajan Philips- 
( February 25, 2018, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) We can no longer blame the local government election results for the continuing paralysis of government and the consistently off-the mark criticisms of the Joint-Opposition. The much anticipated cabinet reshuffle (even though there is nothing to shuffle in a pack of jokers with no aces, as Pieter Keuneman once wisecracked) would have given something new to write about for the weekend column, but that did not happen at the time of writing. So we are back at the same topic of non-governance and non-opposition. Political gossip and rumours now are all about the UNP-SLFP haggling over cabinet portfolios in the expected new makeup. Of the two senior portfolios, who will take the foreign ministry – Sarath Amunugama for the SLFP? Will Managala Samaraweera leave finance and have another portfolio, if the banks are not brought back to finance where they belong? Will Kabir Hashim agree to part with the banking institutions after getting used to them for three years?
Lakshman Kiriella – is he going to be toppled from his twin high horses – highways and higher education, and brought down to something more earthly and less lucrative? Will John Amaratunga, that erect symbol of Christian morality and frequent flyer to see the Pope, continue his inflicting cabinet presence, or be relieved of serious perks as minister without portfolio? Nimal Siripala de Silva could be the SLFP counterpart and good company to John Amaratunga in the club of senior ministers without portfolio. Whatever will happen to the SLFP busybodies who tried to create an SLFP-SLPP government and remove the UNP from the government? Will the anxious Harsha de Silva and the poised Eran Wickremaratne finally break out of their prolonged internships and be promoted as fully-fledged cabinet ministers? If Harsha de Silva does not get a full cabinet position, it will only confirm the rumours that the decadent UNP leadership is going to punish him for calling for leadership change after the local elections.

The opposition then and now

On the other hand, the media and the Joint Opposition have been keeping up the pretence of a constitutional crisis and the illegality of government based on the status of an agreement between the UNP and the SLFP to collaborate in a national-unity government. If the agreement had lapsed, or been broken, it has been argued, there could be no government except illegally. Speaker Karu Jayasuriya apparently had to consult outside legal opinion to dismiss the opposition’s and the media’s vexatious claims. By this token, the LSSP could have argued in 1975 that the then government of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike was rendered illegal because she had broken up the United Front agreement by dismissing the three LSSP ministers – NM Perera, Colvin R de Silva and Leslie Goonewardena.
The LSSP leaders made no such claim because they were serious grownups and not the overgrown juvenile delinquents that many of our parliamentarians are today. What NM, Colvin and Leslie did after losing their ministerial portfolios was to take parliament and the government by storm from the opposition. They were not the official opposition, which was the UNP and JR Jayewardene was the official Leader of the Opposition. But that did not deter the LSSP trio from vigorously and relentlessly holding the government to account. Their energy and focus apparently prompted UNP’s Gamini Dissanayake to remark that if NM, Colvin and Leslie could be so irrepressible when they were old, how much more formidable they would have been when they were young. There are no such formidable figures in the Joint Opposition today.
The only opposition spark in parliament during the drab two weeks came from R. Sampanthan, the TNA Leader and the official Leader of the Opposition. His concluding salvo that any prospect for Eelam blooming rests not with the TNA but how the Rajapaksas use their Lotus Bud politics, created bit of a benign stir in political circles. GL Pieris, not known for general humour or political wit, took a rather puerile shot at Sampanthan that the TNA Leader was trying to take the shine away from the SLPP’s local elections victory. It is not Sampanthan but Mahinda Rajapaksa who takes the shine away from his victory by opportunistically tarnishing it with anti-Eelam rhetoric when the Tamil vote in the northern and eastern provinces, if not the rest of the country, was overwhelmingly for parties, including the TNA and the EPDP, who stand for a united and devolved Sri Lanka.
As well, the electoral shine of the SLPP’s February 10 victory has no matching substance or depth in terms of policy or direction for governing Sri Lanka, nationally or locally. The SLPP’s victory is by and large a negative victory, caused by a rejection of the present government’s corrupt practices and performance blunders. It is not a positive victory based on an endorsement of the Rajapaksas and their platform. In fact, the Rajapaksas offered nothing new or different at the February 10 elections from where they stood and were defeated in 2015. The Rajapaksas kept their numerical vote total and swept the board of local seats, while those who were united against them in 2015, foolishly went their separate ways in 2018, splintering their votes and losing badly in terms of local seats.

Government’s cooked-up crisis

While the responsibility for the election debacle should fall squarely on the shoulders of President Sirisena and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, the responsibility for the post-election paralysis is entirely the President’s making. The government’s crisis is a cooked up crisis, with President Sirisena as the principal chef. His ingredients have been primarily ineptitude and indecisiveness. The main stock apparently is man’s ambition to be in office beyond the first term that will be over by the end of 2019. There are hardly any Machiavellian spices in his political stew although there seems to be some attempt to suggest a clever design behind his incoherent chess moves. The Machiavellian explanation for the President’s inept inconsistency is that he deliberately confused the UNP and the SLPP by cajoling and rejecting both in order to re-establish his authority after the damage it suffered at the local elections. Anyone who believes this is qualified to join the President’s unimpressive team of advisers.
The more plausible explanation is that the President has become a captive in the hands of a handful of SLFP ministers who have been allegedly working in collusion with the SLPP and the joint opposition. Their apparent advice to the President is for him to wield the stick at Ranil and the UNP to the point of getting rid of them from government, and they (SLPP and JO) will then get him the carrot of a second term in office. This explanation is plausible for if anyone could be duped into this stick-and-carrot promise it would be Maithripala Sirisena. A complementary explanation is the President’s tendency to agree with everyone who meets with him in spite of their inconsistent positions, and the tendency of almost all the people who meet with him is to rush to the media to announce the President’s agreement(s) with them. And the media has developed its own tendency to broadcast everything that is reported to it by the so called political insiders without checking for their inconsistencies, let alone their inaccuracies. This is fake news but different from the Trumpian use of the term.
In the midst of all this, the Prime Minister seems to have gone quiet and withdrawn. He emerged briefly to announce in parliament that the UNP-SLFP agreement is intact and that the national-unity government is continuing – whatever that means. But the basis for unity would appear to be an agreement over the spoils of office – i.e. cabinet positions and portfolios, rather than an agreed upon program for government action for the next two years – at the most. We will have a better picture if and when a cabinet reshuffle actually takes place. Until then non-governance and non-opposition will be the order of the day.
A taste of things to come seems to be building up in the apparent contradiction between UNP ministries, on the one hand, and the Central Bank, on the other, over the ministry proposal to establish a new agency (National Payment Platform) for the clearing of retail payments. Newspapers have reported the fundamentally different positions but no one in the Joint Opposition has picked up on the issue. They are still basking in the shine of their local election victory. It will be instructive to see how the location of the Central Bank is addressed along with the anticipated cabinet reshuffle. If the Central Bank and other banking institutions are not reverted to the Ministry of Finance, it will only mean that Ranil Wickremesinghe and the UNP have learnt nothing and forgotten everything after the bond scam disaster and the local elections debacle. It will also mean that for all his public flaying against corruption, the President is unable to restore the Central Bank to its traditional and legal location. Nothing would have changed, but we will have a great deal to write about.
To end on a slightly different but not unrelated note, if we could have learnt anything from our 40 years of presidential-parliamentary experience it is that the country is not served well by the two extremes of constitutional exuberance. One is the tendency to extend terms in office or postpone elections: to wit, the 1982 referendum; the 18th Amendment; and the recent delays in local and provincial elections. The other is to orchestrate elections – as another way to extend terms, to exercise executive overreach, and to enforce authoritarian control at all levels of government: examples include, the notoriously self-serving timing of presidential elections, the 2004 dissolution of parliament, and the holding of staggered local and provincial elections to ensure victories at the peripheries for the governing party at the centre.
The 2015 January presidential election and the 19th Amendment thereafter, despite its publicly jested 19 defects, have admirably pushed back on both extremes. The real benefit of 19A in the current circumstance is in its forcing on our parliamentarians the hard work of making our institutions function as they are supposed to and not rushing to the people for a new mandate at the drop of every political hat. After the local election public thrashing and almost two weeks of much constitutional ado about nothing, the prematurely tired and tottering Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government seems set to sworn itself a new lease for governing. The expectations are for a new cabinet makeup and new assurances to govern differently and for the better in the two years that are left for Messrs Sirisena and Wickremesinghe to do something worthwhile before their respective political sunsets. Neither man deserves this reprieve as a reward. The reprieve is really a punishment to both men: a sentence to two years of good behaviour and good governance. No more, no less.