Sunday Times 2
Glass half full – or half empty?
View(s):In a couple of years, reluctant as I am to acknowledge it, I will be eighty years old. And I recognise that these days the years and months seem to pass so much faster than when I was younger. One of my friends, a knowledgeable scientist, explained this phenomenon to me by pointing out that when one is, for example, ten years old, each year constitutes only a tenth of one’s existence on earth. When one is 80 years old, however, one year makes up only an eightieth of one’s life – and so a year, which is only a small fraction of one’s existence, seems to pass so much faster than a year in the life of a ten year old.
This month marks the half way mark of President Maithripala Sirisena’s term.
Be that as it may, I wonder whether time moves in the same manner for our politicians as it does for us ordinary people. When they are first elected to office, our politicians will pat themselves on the back and feel pleased with themselves that they have succeeded at the hustings. They now have a whole five years – in other words sixty months or one thousand eight hundred and twenty five days – ahead of them. They probably pride themselves on the premise that they have all the time in the world to implement the many promises and pledges which they made to convince the people to vote for them.
President Sirisena was elected president of our country in January 2015. This month marks the precise half way mark of his term – and I wonder whether we citizens should view this milestone from the “glass half full” or the “glass half empty” perspective. What has the president accomplished during his term of office so far? Or should we consider what he has not succeeded in implementing of the pledges and promises he made to us gullible voters when he sought our votes to defeat Mahinda Rajapaksa?
The English version of Sirisena’s election manifesto had the catchy title A Compassionate Maithri Governance — A Stable Country. One of his pledges in this manifesto was to abolish the executive presidency within a hundred days of being elected, another was to make Ranil Wickremesinghe prime minister – while he also pledged to stop ‘mega corruption and wastage’. In his first speech since taking office, he also pledged that he would be (I quote) “a single term president and will not seek re-election”
With half his presidency now over (or only half his presidency left to run), it would appear the only pledge that Maithripala Sirisena has kept is his promise to make Ranil Wickremesinghe prime minister!
The executive presidency is alive and well – and the Mahanayakes of Malwatte and Asgiriya (who in November last year stressed the need to abolish the Executive Presidency) appear this month to be adopting the view that the powers of the executive presidency should not be scrapped. I wonder who will be the fortunate beneficiary of this resolution of the Asgiriya Chapter’s Karaka Sangha Sabawa?
I remain sceptical about the president’s much vaunted
pledge in his manifesto of stopping ‘mega corruption and wastage’. For mega corruption we need look no further than Arjuna Mahendran’s bond scam – and as for wastage, my mind boggles at the more than one hundred million dollars (not even rupees but dollars!) of taxpayers’ money that SriLankan Airlines had to pay to cancel its Airbus orders during this president’s term of office.
Just the other day I was re-reading one of my favourite books by Yasmine Gooneratne. Entitled The Sweet and Simple Kind, it was published in 2006 and is a story set in Ceylon/Sri Lanka in the middle of the last century, a period I myself can well remember.
Reading it again, I found a quotation in that book which struck me as particularly significant, not just for those days but also for modern times: “It did not take him many years of observation to convince him that the cream of his country’s liars and lapdogs, its crooks and con-men, its time-servers, turncoats, thieves and traitors were to be found in its Houses of Parliament.”
The president it must be acknowledged has to work with the material he has in parliament.
I wish him well – and hope that in the “half-term” he has left of his presidency, he will accomplish at least a few of the things he promised us when he came campaigning to us at the end of 2014.