Runaway train –runaway nation
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It has all the makings of a blockbuster action movie. A railway yard after midnight. The hiss of exhausts, the silhouettes of sinister engines. Then a stealthy hand – human or ghoulish – trips the clutch on a stationary locomotive. The metal beast bestirs itself, nudges forward, slips over points and crossings, and lumbers out of the marshalling yard into the mainstream of tracks and ties. Soon, it is gaining traction, skipping nimbly past abandoned platforms, and heading into the night. There is no engineer at the controls. It’s a runaway train: a recipe for tragedy; a trick of some saboteur somewhere, skulking about and then slinking furtively back into the stygian darkness. Perhaps! Or maybe the miscreant is not from the world as we know it?
The rogue loco gathers momentum, rounding the bend at breakneck speed (well, somebody could have had their neck broken). No hands work the levers; no heavy foot is on the dead man’s handle. Thundering down the lines, the lumbering beast is a threat to drowsy cattle, sundry prowling beasts of the night, solitary pedestrians, and sorry trespassers on the tracks caught unawares at this ungodly hour (the ghost train was first reported at a hundred minutes past midnight). No arc of light from the head lamps sends a beam of warning out into the approaching gloom, no klaxons warn, no engineer is hauling on the emergency cord.
Then a sliver of reality breaks through the cinematic moment. A controller notices an unusual blip on the monitoring system. The runaway is detected, and identified. A guard-dog loco is mooted to be despatched to catch up to the runaway (but will it start up in time and reach the rebel?).
Meanwhile, miles down the line, a bold member of the railway field staff prepares to board the renegade as it slows down marginally in rounding a bend prior to negotiating an incline which is bound to slow the runaway down… somewhat; or so someone, somewhere, hopes. A brave worker makes the daring leap and clambers aboard. Forty five minutes, nine railway stations, and some fifteen kilometres later, the so-called unstoppable has been shepherded back into its makeshift corral at the repair workshops. Unstoppable it isn’t.
There above was one take on a true incident that was reported last week. The runaway locomotive was not a powerful M-class diesel-electric or even a weaker W-class diesel-hydraulic. It was a lowly Y-class Hunslet, a shunter that has nevertheless rendered yeoman service in Sri Lanka Railway’s marshalling and despatching yards. Despite being fitted with a Rolls Royce engine, the 0-6-0 configured shunter managed to get up to only 10km/h. Far from being unstoppable, it was relatively easily – if boldly – apprehended before it had gone too far and done any serious damage. With its driver and assistant being interdicted pending an inquiry, the only casualty was a small loss of confidence in the safety and security mechanisms of locomotives supposedly asleep at the Maradana-Dematagoda railway yards.
If this isn’t a metaphor for the state of our nation, I’ll ask you what is. Not only in the way that so many important events transpire with – apparently – no one at the helm… But also in the way that at least one very insidious phenomenon transpires with – evidently – no one in control.
The powers that be probably know very well who drives this engineer-less locomotive. Our captains of commerce and industry know very well who directs the points and crossings of this driverless engine. Most bureaucrats, civil servants, and employees of state know very well who lets the clutch slip on this mean machine, waiting to be let loose to wander where it may. Every ordinary citizen will cross its tracks at least once in their own journey from point A to point B to the point of no return. It is the ghost train of graft that we are talking about; the shunter of bribery to which we allude; the Rolls-Royce-engined corruption that characterises our state.
The Chief Justice noticed it just the other day. A former Chief Executive confessed from a public platform sometime ago that she had once had an up-close and personal encounter with it. Lots of international ink has been spilled over it – the latest instalment being the discovery by Transparency International that Sri Lanka ranks 91st out of 177 nations on the Global Corruption Barometer, on a corruption-perceptions index. It is our shameful public secret; one which we have grown complacent or cynical about (last year we were in 79th place). It has been slicked over us like a lick of paint over a corroding engine of growth.
It’s a runaway train that is going nowhere, slowly. No one knows who loosed the mechanical beast. Not many may care that behind the monster there must be human (or ghoulish) hands letting out the clutch so that the gravy train can roll. Now all we need are a few good men and true (and women and children) to give chase to, corral the beast without fear or favour, and derail its destructive ambitions in some abandoned yard or siding. COPE can’t do it. The Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption are embroiled, ironically enough, in a case that has come home to roost. Cabinet won’t. Chief executives don’t seem to want to. Could you? Can you? Will you? Whether we stay on track as a nation may depend on it.