Editorial

The labour pains are over; the proposed no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has finally been delivered.
A few Government ministers and loads of Joint Opposition (JO) MPs had been straining every sinew to collect sufficient signatures to file the motion. On Wednesday, some of them trooped into the Speaker’s chamber and handed over the document with 55 signatures.

The Prime Minister’s side had met the challenge with some gusto, calling for an early debate and collecting more signatures than the motion has on record — an upbeat indication that something’s up their sleeve. In this game of political poker you can never tell on which side the numbers game is tipped with conspicuous conspirators ever present. The knives are out, and so are the money bags. MPs jumping like frogs is now commonplace.

The impetus for the no-confidence motion is, no doubt, to destabilise the coalition Government in the run-up to the 2020 Presidential election, the campaign for which, has already begun. To split the UNP and what is left of the SLFP and to drive a deeper wedge between the coalition partners of the National Unity Government is the legitimate business of the JO in its ultimate quest for political power. But there is also a hidden motive in the exercise, and that is to stem the mounting cases of corruption against those in the JO by playing the President against the PM.

The fact that the President himself made a putsch against his Prime Minister is now a public secret. Unable to remove his PM, he is now on overdrive to clip the PM’s wings further. This week, the President proposed the dismantling of the CCEM (Cabinet Committee on Economic Management) headed by the PM. It spearheaded the country’s economic policy since January 2015 (see details in the political column on this page). It is a power struggle within the Government itself. The PM is faced with an enemy outside, and within.

All the charges in the no-confidence motion, as our Political Editor showed last week, stem from the conduct of the PM in relation to the Central Bank bond scams of 2015 and 2016. Just one charge on the recent Kandy riots seems an afterthought.

The PM himself must surely rue the ill-advised decisions he took following the outbreak of the bond scandal. He sacrificed his carefully cultivated long standing reputation as an incorruptible politician in a cesspit of sleaze trying to protect one man and his family that had let him, and his party down. To say that he personally gained from the scam is sheer nonsense. But he must carry the cross for the sins of others because it happened under his watch – by his chosen men, and then came the fluffed cover-up.

Those who have brought forth the no-confidence motion are themselves bathed in sludge. It is the pot calling the kettle black — that is so humorous, if it is not so tragic. What is the President’s role in this exercise? Is he in some confused state, still to recover from the electoral body blow he received at the February 10 local government elections? His party was able to muster only single digit percentage of the total vote, just topping to double digits thanks entirely to the votes from the plantation union, the CWC.

Is he still opting to ditch the UNP which brought him to the high office he holds and rejoin the SLFPers who ditched him (after he ditched them). That seems to be his strategy now that the February 10 results have given his opponents in the JO the political leverage. But then, surely in 2020 the JO is not going to propose him as its Presidential candidate.

The incumbent President has publicly shot himself in the foot. He has abandoned the PM, and thereby, to a large extent, the UNP, hoping that the party crying out for reforms will remain with him in 2020. That is an unlikely scenario. The UNP will want to field its own Presidential candidate fancying it will have an outside chance of winning if it can improve its high 30 per cent block vote to the mid-40s and win the votes of the minorities. Whether they will trust this President again is as good a chance as a snowball has in hell.

Then, if the President comes forward on his own accord, his chances will be as good as were his chances of winning the February 10 elections. Is he going to be stranded between two stools in the process?

The JVP has now thrown the cat among the canaries proposing a 20th Amendment to the Constitution calling for the abolition of the Executive Presidency. This was, after all, a solemn pledge of the ‘common (UNP-Sirisena faction-TNA-SLMC-JVP) candidate’ at the 2015 Presidential election, though some of the parties remain adherents to the Executive Presidency under cover. So if President Sirisena is officially non-committal but privately favouring the system, he may want to rethink his position and weigh his options given where he is, politically today. On the other hand, considering his ranking in the polls, he can turn out to be the ‘good guy’ who kept his promise to abolish the Executive Presidency. He can be the President, the Head of State, but not the Executive President, not the Head of Government.

As is customary with political leaders, the continuation or the abolition of the Executive Presidency is looked at as what is most advantageous to them at any given time, certainly not in the long-term interest of the nation. In such a context, the JO that is sniffing a 2020 victory will oppose such a 20th Amendment. And so, despite the pious promises to the electorate from time to time, and especially at election time, by all political parties, the widely unpopular Executive Presidency will continue and the country will have a Presidential election in 2020.

Thus, with the strategy of the JO being two-fold; i.e. to cause disarray in the ranks of the Government, and stall prosecutions against its leaders, it is clear that it does not want the job of the PM against whom it has sponsored the no-confidence motion. Though the President can act unilaterally to oust the PM by virtue of the 19th Amendment which states that he needs to pick the MP he thinks “most likely” has the command of Parliament, it will give him some legitimacy if a motion is passed in Parliament however much it may run counter to the same 19th Amendment which states that the PM can only be removed if he resigns or is not an MP.

On the other hand, a defeat of the motion will bring the high-flying JO down to earth and fritter away the moral high ground it now enjoys. Win or lose, for either side of the political divide, the post-Avurudu months are bound to be gamesmanship and back-stabbing at its best, or worst, as the case may be. The country is going to be consumed with these power plays of the politicians, as it meanders rudderless in rough seas and global gale winds.

One can say ‘bye bye’ to political stability, common goals and genuine foreign investments with an economy waiting to ‘take off’ — grounded for a while longer with a National Disunity Government in office.