Sunday Times 2
Patronage, privilege – and principles
View(s):“You know, Silva” said my friend Perera, as we sat chatting over a drink at our usual watering hole, where we less than affluent journalists have been meeting ever since I can remember “on this very day last year we were all thinking that the regime change that we voters had effected would ensure that we would have a leader who would do what is best for us citizens and treat our welfare as his priority.”
“And now, just twelve months later, we voters are having second thoughts. We are all getting disillusioned by the way these politicians who we elect to govern the country just use their positions to only help themselves and their pandan-kaarayas.”
Unfortunately, the way the President and his “honourable” members of parliament are behaving these days, more and more of us are beginning to feel like my friend Perera – and rue our gullibility. What many of us are thinking is that we naive citizens have once more been taken for a ride by the politicians, those worthies who came to us asking for our votes, promising Yahapalanaya and an end to corruption.
Now although my name is Silva and I am just an ordinary Silva, I am confident that I can speak for all the Silvas and Sylvas, the De Silvas, the De Zilvas, the De Zylwas and the D’Silvas, the Selvas, the Selvadurais and the Selladorais – as well as the Silahudeens, the Saalys and the Saleems of this country. We Sri Lankans seem to have united last year to vote out one set of corrupt politicians – only to find that those who replaced the old order are proving themselves
no better now that they are in office!
Take for example, our President.
Quite apart from the fact that he and his Prime Minister are slowly tilting our country towards the United States of America, Maithripala Sirisena as President is managing to show us that he can combine the qualities of both Barack Obama and John Kennedy.
While campaigning for the presidency, Barack Obama called the notorious American prison in Guantanamo “a sad chapter in American history” and promised that he would by the end of 2010 close down and release all the prisoners who were being held there illegally, subjected to torture and held for years without any charge laid against them. After being voted into the White House, he reiterated this promise in a television interview with the ABC. This year, Obama will have finished his eight years as President – and his promise to close Guantanamo is still unfulfilled. Guantanamo Prison continues to function, with (as of November 2015) over a hundred detainees still being held there.
Maithripala Sirisena campaigned on the premise that he would bring to book all the wrong doers in Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government and usher in an era of just government. Today, one year after we elected him to office, not a single one of those against whom fingers were pointed has been brought to book. In fact, some of those who were accused of corruption in the last government have been sanctified by the President and are now functioning as ministers in his “Yahapalana” government! “Kaata kiyannada?”
As for Sirisena’s similarity to John Kennedy, let us just consider the subject of patronage of pandan-kaarayas and the extension of privilege to family. After Kennedy was elected President, his family did quite well in public life – he appointed his brother Robert Kennedy as Attorney General and his brother in law Sargent Shriver as the head of the Peace Corps.
President Sirisena (perhaps because he believes that American presidents are now the idols that one must emulate and whose examples one should follow) has appointed his brother P.G.Kumarasinghe as Chairman of Sri Lanka Telecom, his son-in-law to a governmental post and his son Daham as an unofficial member of Sri Lanka’s delegation to the United Nations.
And because he became president by famously (after sharing that well known meal of egg hoppers with Mahinda Rajapakse the previous night), Sirisena is constantly guarding his back — lest one of his “loyal” supporters decides in turn to undercut him as he did to Mahinda. And so, to keep these potential rivals loyal, he doles out perks (paid for out of government funds) to keep all would be challengers under control.
After all, as Sir John Kotelawala is reputed to have said “As long as the spoon is in your hand, why should you stop serving yourself?”