The week that passed saw Sri Lankans marking the National New Year including the nonagathe period when one is not supposed to be engaged in any activity.
For a nation besotted with politics, this is possibly the only time when there is a semblance of a break from the year-round activity on the political front. Politicians themselves either escape to their constituencies or holiday abroad; the luckier ones being those who go abroad on the pretext of official business while the taxpayers foot the bill for their vacation. Not this year though.
For one thing, there is no Cabinet functioning, and ministers - while illegally keeping their cars and houses, couldn't avail themselves of the opportunity of flying from the maddening April heat claiming to be slogging away on behalf of the people.
For another, a general election has been just concluded and politicians are jostling for slots and places either in the National List or in the Cabinet. The people who elected these politicians have one eye and one ear open for any news; even if they know that, by and large, this is just a reshuffling of the same deck of cards.
The onus has shifted now from the sovereign people back to the leadership of the main political parties in the country. The people's sovereignty now is limited to paper and the real sovereignty has been transferred to these political leaders, both in Government and the Opposition.
Our political commentaries deal with the goings on within the two camps - the jockeying for seats on the National List to Parliament. Defeated candidates and other wannabes are displaying their advocacy skills by arguing their own case on why they should be nominated. Many of them go on the basis that no one else is going to blow your trumpet for you.
And often, the one who makes the biggest noise has a better chance of having his or her leader's ear. An exasperated President seems to have had an earful already, while the main Opposition Leader seems to be in no enviable position either.
The President has a doubly onerous task before him, i.e. not just to pick his National List MPs but also a Cabinet of ministers who can deliver the goods for him and the country. His choice is limited in that he has to choose from those elected by the people, but he could have included the people he wanted in the National List. A hard look at the ruling coalition's National List and it is clear that he seems to have blown this opportunity of picking the technocrats who could blend with the rest in developing this country from the very helm of affairs.
That the candidates offered at the election were poor fare was common knowledge. Political leaders complain that the proportional representation system kept away many because of the sheer weight of financial resources required to contest an election. Thus, they relied on those who already had a degree of popularity among the voters. This explains the high degree of entertainers who were fielded and who won at the hustings. The end result has been that a Parliament meant to legislate and control the public purse, is increasingly dominated by "unqualified" persons.
In a previous editorial we mentioned the decreasing number of professionals, be they lawyers, carpenters or craftsmen who entered Parliament. We referred to the vanishing breed of "amateur legislator" in place of the "full-time politician". In the last Parliament of the 225 members, as many as 77 (a quarter of the Legislature) had been unable to mention a profession or vocation in the form they had to fill leaving the cage blank. Some others stated "businessman", whatever that meant. Parliament is supposed to contain a blend of persons, representing a microcosm of the general population. Do we have that representative mix?
There is general consensus that the last Parliament failed the people -- the Government in not introducing progressive legislation and controlling the finances of this country through it, and the Opposition by its deafening silence on a number of public issues that merited a hue and cry in the House. This, along with the lacklustre choices before them have been widely attributed as one of the reasons for the shockingly low voter turn-out at the April 8 elections; an indictment on both the Government and the Opposition. The trend towards this decline began from the Provincial Council elections where the parties put forward candidates who had the best chance of winning. If the Provincial Council was the nursery for Parliament, what we have now is hardly startling.
Sri Lanka, however, is not alone in this general decline in the calibre of persons entering public life. In Britain, often quoted by those who yearn for the 'good old days', a London Sunday Times poll this month showed that the British people voted the last Parliament as the "worst ever". For the last two decades, public morality and standards have been on the decline. Sleaze has been an issue that has stuck to Westminster like glue; and retiring MPs - even Ministers -- are accused of defrauding the public purse on housing claims and expenses while others are offering themselves "like cabs for hire" to big business houses to lobby for contracts.
India too inherited a corrupt political system with rural strongmen ruling the roost, but to the credit of the government of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, they have slowly, but surely, tried to make a difference by blooding young professionals into mainstream government and giving law enforcement agencies the required independence and autonomy to enforce the rule of law. That is why India is being looked up to in the modern world today.
As we stated last week, the President has, once again, a golden opportunity to set this country on the right path. The chance he had last May after the defeat of the LTTE and the end to three decades of terrorism in this country unfortunately turned into a nightmare. Instead of uniting this badly fractured nation, the events that unfolded later only served to divide it further. Playing the blame-game is a futile exercise; for what has happened, has happened.
It is clearly time for new beginnings and it behoves the newly-elected representatives to honour the trust the people have placed in them. That, surely, cannot be asking for too much from them. |
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