Sunday Times 2
Sri Lanka’s sorry state of affairs: A question of ‘Whom to tell?’
View(s):There are some thoughts that can only be expressed in pithy home-spun Sinhala — because if you try saying it in English you just cannot say what you want to say as effectively.
When a situation becomes so bad that one cannot see any solution, when it is not just a situation of there being no light visible at the end of the tunnel but when one starts wondering whether the tunnel even has an end to it, to whom can one complain?
As they say in our rural neck of the woods, “Kaata kiyannada?”
As I started my musings this month, I reflected on the fact that May in the northern hemisphere is the month when Spring comes round again — a month of change when the cold dark days of winter give way to the promise of summer with its longer, warmer and brighter days.
Here in Sri Lanka we were all looking forward to May 2018 being a month of change — when those that we had elected to govern us would make a fresh start and put behind us all the winter of our discontent. We thought that the much awaited Cabinet reshuffle would allow fresh and talented Honourable Members of Parliament to be brought in to replace the tired and tainted folk occupying posts in our hyper-inflated cabinet.
What we have now realised after this reshuffle is that the only difference between a standard pack of cards and the Sri Lankan cabinet is that the standard 54-card pack is smaller — and has only two jokers in it.
Just as in John Steinbeck’s novel ‘The Winter of Our Discontent’ provided a commentary on the moral degeneration of American culture at the time, what the winter of the past few months of 2018 made evident to all of us here the moral degeneration of Sri Lankan political culture.
We have a president who is being hoist by his own petard – a leader who, instead of bringing to book the corrupt members of the previous regime as he loudly promised to do soon after he was elected, is now reduced to defending corruption within his own regime — not just his own political supporters but also his chief of staff and his own appointees as corporation chairpersons.
We have a prime minister who maintains a guilty silence about the arrest warrant issued on his family friend Arjuna Mahendran, the man he head-hunted from Dubai to head our Central Bank. Mahendran is now the subject of a red notice from the International Criminal Police Organisation INTERPOL. Such a ‘Red Notice’ is the closest instrument we have today to an international arrest warrant — intended to give international visibility to cases, allowing criminals and suspects to be flagged to border officials and local police for consideration of extradition.
We had ministers in the cabinet that is supposed to run our country voting against the prime minister — a matter analogous to the members of the national cricket team publicly stating and boldly publicising the fact that they have no confidence in their captain. How could they continue to remain in the team led by a captain they had no confidence in?
When Maithripala Sirisena became president he needed all the troops he could get to protect his position against the forces that he suspected would try to attack him — so through the national list he gave positions in Parliament and the cabinet to several SLFP politicians who had contested the 2015 elections and lost, expecting them to support him instead of his former leader Mahinda Rajapakse. He has learned to his cost that it is only a matter of time before such folk who betrayed their previous master would in turn betray him. They have now crossed over to the opposition, where they will no doubt offer support to others – support that can be relied on only until they get a better offer from someone else!
As the people struggle in a situation of rising prices they see those who are supposed to govern the country and look after the welfare of its citizens simply “playing politics” and looking after themselves.
Just try explaining to people who live from day to day and have lost faith in their politicians that petrol prices have gone up because the countries which produce petrol have decided to increase the prices at which they sell oil to us.
To most folk, rising prices are the fault of the Government. When they see the members of the ruling party (or as we have today, the ruling hotch potch of various parties) focusing on horse trading and shoring up shifting alliances instead of prioritising governing, how can they be blamed for feeling frustrated? Kaata kiyannada?