Sunday Times 2
Filling up the Cabinet
View(s):Being now in my late seventies, the memories of my childhood go way back to the late nineteen forties.
As a child, I remember being taken to visit my Aunt Sudharma – a gentle lady who lived with her husband in an old house just outside Colombo. What I remember most about those visits was her beautiful early 20th century Dutch marquetry display cabinet.
It was an elaborate piece of furniture – the glazed panelled doors enclosing an interior with three shelves on which she had some beautiful blue and white Delftware plates. Whenever we used to visit my aunt and uncle, I used to be drawn to this prize Dutch cabinet. Over the years I used to observe that she would add more and more pieces of crockery and pottery to the original collection of lovely chinaware she had.
On my last visit to her house, a few years before she died, I remember standing in front of her once beautiful cabinet and looking at all the crockery that now cluttered the shelves of the once posh-looking cabinet. Some of the beautiful original pieces of Delftware were still there, but now they shared the shelves with cheap cups and saucers – some chipped, some cheap and many from unmatched sets. Far from being the aesthetically appealing cabinet with contents of value that I used to admire, Auntie’s cabinet had now become just a repository of junk.
I don’t know why I thought of Auntie Sudharma’s cabinet today – but perhaps my memory was triggered by my reading of the latest addition to President Maithripala Sirisena’s cabinet. When he took office on January 10th 2015, having made a pre-election poise of limiting the Cabinet to thirty ministers, he told us that he would have a Cabinet of “not more than 25 members”.
Today, he has no less than 44 members in his Cabinet in addition to himself and the Prime Minister – and as many as 13 state ministers and 23 deputy ministers.
Grand total = eighty people who call themselves Amathivaru!!
It is quite possible of course that these numbers may have increased since I wrote this, because for our President, appointing Ministers to fill his Cabinet seems to be as random a task as my Aunty Sudharma adding junk into her Dutch cabinet.
It seems to us citizens and voters that these Minister are appointed, not to be of benefit to the country and our people, but simply to be of benefit to the President’s political life – chuck golayas and pandan kaarayas who he believes will support him in the petty party politics that he now appears to prioritise.
What a far cry from the newly appointed Cabinet of Canada.
I was just studying the composition of the Cabinet appointed by Canada’s new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who was elected to office in October 2015.
Trudeau’s Minister of Health Dr. Jane Philpott is a medical doctor, a family physician who is also an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. What a contrast to the loquacious dentist who has been made a cabinet minister to oversee the health of our nation!
Canada’s Minister of Transport is Dr. Marc Garneau – a retired Navy officer, engineer and one of the first Canadian astronauts. What a contrast to our own briefless lawyer who is now the Minister of Transport!
Canada has its Minister of National Defence Mr.Harjit Singh Sajjan, a former Army Lieutenant Colonel and the first Sikh to command a regiment of the Canadian Army. The Minister of Justice is Mrs. Jody Wilson-Raybould, a lawyer who has served as a Crown Prosecutor and is also a descendant of Canada’s first nations indigenous peoples – the people who used to be disparagingly referred to a “red indians’ in American folklore.
The Minister of International Trade is Mrs. Chrystia Freeland, a Rhodes Scholar, author and former journalist who speaks Ukrainian, French, Russian and Italian – while Trudeau’s Minister of Foreign Affairs is Stephane Dion, a former academic whose doctorate and postgraduate studies were done in the prestigious Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris in France.
While studying the background and qualifications of Canada’s Cabinet (which numbers just thirty Ministers) I was struck by the fact that all these Ministers were actually elected to parliament by the Canadian voters. These were no “back door” Ministers who had contested the elections, been rejected by the voters – and then been surreptitiously smuggled into parliament and then the cabinet through a farcical national list.
Highly educated and well experienced – these Canadian Ministers evoke the people’s respect and could be expected to work for the benefit of the Canadian people.
How different to our own cabinet, where Ministers are given Ministries as a sop to keep them politically loyal – allowing our cabinet to keep filling up, just like my Aunty Sudharma’s repository of junk.