Columns

In a few days time the world will know who has crept into the White House in what must surely be a Hobson’s choice that even Hobson would not have contemplated. The two candidates provide as stark a contrast as American history can offer and both count for smells numbers 1 and 2 in the civic nostril.

When the people of the United States are asked to choose between an impudent and temerarious candidate and another whose trustworthiness and judgment are sullied, then we must pity the citizens of the most powerful nation in today’s world just as Sri Lankans pity themselves at the choices they are saddled within their own small political world.

If millions of voters in the US are left with two candidates of dubious character and have to leave their country in the hands of one of them- one an unpredictable maverick and a seeming misogynist and the other an aggressive and dangerous woman whose past performance has shown so-what have they left but to fall back on hopeful incantations.

If such is the plight of the sole super power whose president will have his or her finger on the nuclear button, as it were, what chance will a country such as Sri Lanka have as greater numbers of political Trumps and devious Clintons tramp across the country flying their flags of false promises.
In the last year the world has watched and listened to the tragicomedy being played out on the American stage as the country searched for a successor to the incumbent Barack Obama. Millions of TV viewers were glued to the box as the two candidates slugged it out during three separate debates. But the American electorate has been none the wiser for it. All one saw was the splattering of mud that has stuck to both and hardly improved their images.

Chandrika Kumaratunga

So after more than 600 days of campaigning the two will meet for the last shoot out at the O.K. Corral on Tuesday. But the curtain will not come down on this disgraceful episode in American democracy for the show must go on as it must in our relatively tiny Sri Lanka.

In our own little world there have been plots and sub-plots – some tragic, some comic – in the last 20 months or more as politicians, their business cronies, relatives, friends, political discards and other riff-raff jostled for power, influence and means to fiddle the state and the people.
Sri Lanka may not be much bigger than some states in the US. But that does not mean that our politicians and their hangers-on cannot out do their American counterparts when it comes to putting self before country while oozing patriotism from every pore.

While our attention has remained focused all these months on the comic interludes and scatter-brained campaigns that have gone on in the name of democracy- at- work in the US with such a massive spread of media available to us here, the happenings in Sri Lanka have somehow not received the attention they should have.

Not that we are incapable of turning on our own pantomime. It is just that the timing of the big event across the Atlantic or Pacific depending from which direction one approaches the US of A, has been so distractive that they have gone unnoticed. So entertaining has been the election drama with even the FBI stepping into add some colour as if it did not have colour enough, that I almost missed the remarkable comment of one of our own presidents of not too long ago.

As though Sri Lanka’s own political canvass was monochromatic and dull, out steps Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga to add a colourful splash of political gossip. At an event in Gampaha former president Chandrika Kumaratunga is reported to have said that J.R.Jayewardene, the first executive president, tried to split the SLFP by offering inducements to the then No.2 of the SLFP Maithripala Senanayake and Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Maithripala Senanayake of course has passed away but Mahinda Rajapaksa has laughed off the whole thing.

What intrigues me-like all the stories that are now being told of Donald Trump – is why this story has not been told before. I do not, of course, put it beyond Junius Richard to want to divide the SLFP. He once tried to have Anura Bandaranaike fill a vacant seat by not putting forward a candidate against him at a by-election. It is not surprising that he was called Junius the genius.

Mahinda Rajapaksa

The more disturbing question is why this story seemed to have been buried in the recesses of the Kumaratunga mind or wherever and not been told before. Why is it being resurrected now? Is it because SLFP Mac 2 is in the offing? If JR made a move as Chandrika Kumaratunga says he did with inducements it would have happened in the 1980s. She says she has proof.

One would have thought that she should have done a ‘Wikileak’ many years ago especially when her relations with Mahinda Rajapaksa had reached rock bottom. But yet she seems to have kept silent about it – at least it was not made public, as far as I remember- until a week or so ago.
Surely this is not the kind of political drama that remains closeted when so much capital could be made out of it, if that is the intention in disclosing it now. It seems like an FBI act in A minor.

But when it comes to comedy the best this government appears to be able to produce is a kind of Manappuwa- Josie Baba scenario from the earliest days of Sinhala cinema. Remember the fiasco about the VAT proposal? There was the original 11% VAT. Then the wise guys in government wanted to raise it to 15% but made such as hash of trying to get it through that it ended up in court. It was held that the procedure was wrong. These chaps who had spent years in parliament, possibly twiddling their thumbs and collecting duty-free vehicle permits, did not even know how it should be done.

So then what happens! The traders did not know whether it was 11% as it stood or 15% as it was intended to be. In the confusion the unscrupulous businessmen and traders made a tidy profit selling goods at 15% VAT when it should not have been so. As usual it was the poor citizens who paid while the rich could not care less.

Now handing over a country to a set of people who cannot get even simple procedures straight is like putting Trump in the White House with a couple of boxes of jigsaws and telling him to run the US of A.

See what an absolute mess has been made of the issue of treasury bonds. This has been dragging on since February last year and still not seen a resolution. When the term of the acting governor of the Central Bank Arjuna Mahendran was not extended largely because of the bond controversy the unexpected happened. The man who the President refuses to have as head of the Central Bank ends up in the Prime Minister’s office as an adviser. Not an adviser on treasury bonds, surely.

When COPE, the parliamentary watchdog on state enterprises resurrects the investigation into the bond issue, the previous inquiry by the then COPE having been aborted with the dissolution of parliament, it is claimed that some UNP members in it acted in a manner that was not in the best interest of COPE and its investigation.

Why, the wise guys of the UNP in COPE even tried to submit a minority report. Like the lack of understanding displayed over procedures on the VAT issue, the UNP’s COPE group that included lawyers did not seem to know that Parliament’s Standing Orders did not allow for ‘minority reports’ to be submitted.

One can quite understand why, spurred on by the Minister of Provincial Councils and Local Government Faizer Musthapha, the government is concerned with getting rid of our rubbish.

The other day President Sirisena officially launched the new rubbish collection scheme from his Paget Road residence. Armed with bags and coloured rubbish bins adorning the background, President Sirisena was given a lesson in separating one lot of rubbish from the recyclable.
Politically such a lesson should come in handy especially when some day he has to separate the sheep from the goats in the cabinet. Some would wish it happens sooner. But then one cannot have all one’s wishes granted especially when it comes to the idiosyncracies and the lunatic-fringe behaviour of politicians.

Now that Minister Musthapha seems so concerned with making sure that rubbish is properly collected and disposed of, he would be wise to have a whole array of coloured bins lined up near that house by the Diyawanna Oya.

There is so much rubbish emanating from that sanctum sanctorum, that repository of the peoples’ sovereignty, Faizer Musthapha would need to arrange for garbage trucks to turn up several times a day.

If I might contribute a thought or two to the over-worked mind of Minister Musthapha still grappling with the problem of local government elections, perhaps he could have bins in the hue of each political party.

That would help see whether any of thoughts of the individual parties can be recycled though I doubt it.