Columns

Hang on a moment. Is the president of this “country like no other”, deadly serious or is this his idea of a joke? Having decided to hang convicted drug dealers who continue to do lucrative business from even their prison cells, President Sirisena, the great visionary, is prepared to expand his vision.

I have no idea whether he has seen an optometrist recently. He appears to believe that he is still endowed with 20-20 vision and is as far-sighted as Ozymandias. But reputedly the Egyptian king Rameses II who is depicted in Shelley’s poem by the same name, was famous for his statesmanship, architecture, military leadership, administrative abilities, and building activity.

Some say it would be rather ludicrous to attribute to Maithripala Sirisena one or more skills of Rameses. But our own leader seems to have a trait that Rameses apparently did not possess. That is a sense of humour. True, his oratorical ability does remind one of those dreary bana preachers we used to encounter in our school days (not to mention today) making the task of keeping the eyes open heavy duty work.

Somehow the president seems to have buried this trait so deep that few seem to have suspected it given his rather dour exterior. The president told a gathering last week that those who have abused state resources and stolen state funds and generally engaged in corrupt practices that have robbed the public of what belongs to them should also be considered for state-assisted liquidation. They too should be eligible for a good hanging.
As we know, a joke can be a serious thing. This time round the President’s remark was clearly no joke even if his original threat to hang some drug dealers whose names were supplied to him tended to be treated by some as a poor joke.

One English-language daily quoted the President as saying that he would like to see one or two persons who stole state assets suffer the maximum punishment before his term ends. One hopes he was accurately reported. Otherwise like that obnoxious and unpredictable US President Donald Trump there would be shouts of fake news from within the Presidential Secretariat or some other sanctum sanctorum of yahapalana governance.
Now if all this is true President Sirisena seems hell bent on dispatching a couple of corrupt citizenry on their continuing journey into samsara before his term is over. If so, he better get moving and use his madu-walge on those mandated to oil the wheels of our judicial system and politicians who he thinks are putting spanners in the works to delay justice and free the guilty.

If Sirisena sincerely thinks that hanging a couple of rogues in the next two years or so is going to cleanse this country of the corrupt, he is sorely mistaken. If one or two move on to afterlife with Sirisena’s helping hand, it will not be any skin off the living corrupt among our corporate worthies, corpulent politicians and sycophantic officialdom with dirty hands dipping into their ill-gotten earnings.

So there is little gain in hanging around to see a couple of corrupt given one-way tickets to the netherworld. That would leave hardly a scratch on the living corrupt. Moreover, Sirisena has invited all political parties to join hands and enact legislation for the purpose of quick dispatch of the corrupt among us. That surely is a non-starter. It is like calling for mass hara-kiri. One does not need to reiterate a commonly held view that there is a symbiotic relationship between the political parties (or more correctly some members of political parties) and the business community with politically- appointed bureaucrats providing oxygen to keep the nexus alive and thriving and pocketing their share of the loot in the process.

Furthermore the corrupt and the corruptible in all sectors crisscross in our political world that seems prefabricated, layer by layer, for conniving crooks to live in comfort. Sirisena and his mixed and mixed-up government had five years in which to act on the promises made on election platforms. They spent most of the years bickering and sniping at each other. Why little has happened to clamp down on corruption and do what Sirisena now wants to do is quite clear. Those who should be brought to justice are relatives and friends of those who once shared an egg hopper or two together, were school-mates or were in the same party before pole-vaulting to a more paying side.

If the leading lights of this Government had half the courage and sagacity of Pakistan’s new prime minister Imran Khan and laid down the law for clean governance early enough, Sri Lanka would not find itself in this political and ideological morass. Imran Khan’s efforts might well be sabotaged by conniving bureaucrats deprived of their privileges and disgruntled men of the armed forces. These things happen as we have seen and sighed déjà vu several times over.

But at least he is trying to clean up. We heap more dirt and mud on what has collected over the years.So now we have senior Buddhist monks from the Kandyan hills suggesting that former Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa pursue a Hitlerian approach to nationalistic politics aided and abetted by some black-uniformed Schutzstaffel-like jackbooted types. That, it is thought, is the answer to Sri Lankan’s present woes.

As though in appreciation of the support he received in yesteryear, the former defence secretary said last week the retired military-men posted as envoys to our missions abroad fared ‘immensely’ better in their positions than others, meaning probably the common or garden career diplomats.
As though not to be outdone by the Anunayake from Kandy, a “collective” of professionals and academics from Peradeniya pledged its support to Gotabaya’s “Viyath Maga” programme. At a meeting chaired by Nuwantha Kulathunga, said to be a lecturer but in what was not mentioned, said Gotabaya’s “maga” is the only road to paradise. It was hardly a conventicle of Socrates.

One’s mind goes back to the professionals and academics that rallied around common candidate Sirisena hoping for yahapalana governance. They, too, believed it was the path to salvation. But many of them seem disillusioned today because it has proved to no maga to clean government.

Not many days ago at some corporate caucus called a “Fireside Chat” which hopefully had fire metaphorically speaking, another dimension was added to the ongoing political chaos.

One corporate boss, Sumal Perera, suggested that Dhammika Perera should throw his hat into the ring as the country’s next presidential candidate. This idea from one Perera to another throwing the corporate world into the political arena, while the uniformed types are polishing their brass would be interesting to see, if the big businessman who seems to have answers to many of our problems, accepts the challenge.
I doubt he will. But those who push for military men on the one hand and those with the big bucks on the other might care to take a look at our own Asian continent.

It is a pity that those who push either side to the forefront have not stopped to think how both military leaders and their juntas and businessmen in politics have, at various times, ruined their nations, destroying institutions that protected democratic freedoms and upheld justice or robbed the countries of their wealth and transferred it for their own use and that of their families.

That history also shows how, in recently times, political leaders who once won world acclaim like Aung San Suu Kyi have today become international pariahs providing a post facto defence of silence for the killings of thousands of civilians who lived in her country Myanmar. One wonders what her father Aung San would have thought of his daughter if he was alive and her capitulations to the military junta that runs the country today.

An interesting case is Thailand — if our great advocates of Hitlerian despotism have the time and the intellectual capacity and interest to study what has happened in that Theravada Buddhist country in the last two decades.

Leaders and those who aspire to national leadership must be judged by their public record not by their public performance. Otherwise, Sri Lanka will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again misled and deceived by those who promise the moon but the people only see stars.
Is this country going to fatten the same old crooks, those who steal the nation’s wealth and leave those so-called professionals and academics misleading the people untouched without exposing them too?

In his list of policies Imran Khan had noted as the first the naming and shaming of officials who have misused the abused their positions. It will not be long before some misguided idiot proposes that a medicine man called Anuruddha Padeniya be a presidential candidate.

Judging by Padeniya’s hunger for power he might take it seriously. That is the day he will need to seek medical help from another branch of his profession.