Columns

President Rajapaksa is more a technocrat than a politician and has proved himself in some areas where a firm hand is necessary.

There was a time when our public service was a respected ‘institution’ manned by highly-skilled officials performing public duties for the benefit of the people.

Today that seems like eons ago. That golden era when officials were not afraid to take independent administrative decisions without running behind every two-bit politician to earn some merit points has crumbled into dust. One would now need the assistance of the Archeology Department to dig up that past.

Our public service of the distant past was not just respected by a grateful populace but had earned a reputation abroad. It might be recalled that Lee Kuan Yew, the visionary founder of modern Singapore, had in its pre-independence days wanted to build the island state in the fashion of the then Ceylon.

Among the features that drew Lee to see Ceylon as a model for the future Singapore was the country’s public service built by British colonial administrators was clean, efficient and largely untouched by corruption.

I do not know how many would recall that selection to the Civil Service and Foreign Service followed a highly competitive and tough written examination and interview.

The first four to six persons were absorbed into the Civil Service and the next lot into the Foreign Service depending on the number of vacancies in each service. It was the domestic administration that was considered superior and more important in nation building.

While the Ceylon Civil Service (CCS as it was called) attracted the best and brightest other than those who preferred the professions like medicine, the law and engineering, the Ceylon Administrative Service (CAS) that succeeded the CCS in May 1963 somehow lost its grip on administration as it became more and more politicised.

During my early years as a journalist from 1962, I was in constant touch with those in the CCS, some of whom were my contemporaries at Peradeniya University and in the CAS.

Up to the point I left Sri Lanka in September 1989, I was in almost daily contact with officials who helped run the administration.  One was already beginning to see the rot setting in with politics intruding into decision-making, politicians with no knowledge and little education dictating policies that were driven more by self-interest and self-aggrandizement than national interest viewed in the long term.

By that time bribery and corruption were gradually being entrenched in the body politic in insidious and invidious ways. This was spreading from the political to the administrative structures where even the highest levels of the public service were not free of corruption and where the biblical saying that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” had been advantageously reversed.

I well remember the days when Anil Moonesinghe was chairman of the CTB (and Leslie Goonewardene Minister of Transport in Sirima Bandaranaike’s 1970 coalition government), chairman Moonesinghe would visit bus depots at 4 o’clock in the morning to see whether transport functioned properly and workers turned up on time.

Nor can one forget Prime Minister Ranasinghe Premadasa, head well-covered to avoid recognition, joining long queues of frustrated people waiting to buy a bag or two of cement, to see how the public was served, corruption free.

Several years before that, I was covering Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake’s ‘food drive’ for the Daily News. On one occasion during discussions at the Batticaloa Kachcheri, the prime minister spotted some fudged statistics which were highly misleading and which the then GA tried to cover up.

One could see it coming. A couple of days later the GA was transferred out of the post.

The lesson to be learnt is that there were politicians then who were determined to root out evil practices in the system and instil honesty and integrity. In later years, others too tried their hand at spring-cleaning but to little avail. Some politicians have fallen prey to the very practices such as bribery and corruption they set out to eliminate.

Ultimately the problem has turned worse to the point that corruption has spread to the lowest levels and it appears that those who are nabbed by the authorities are those at the bottom of the ladder. Some claim, perhaps rightly, those are persons more in need of the extra buck, than politicians and upper-crust officials who have well settled in life.

It was with much interest that I read a recent news report of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa addressing this very same subject at a meeting with State ministers and officials of State institutions.

The new president had emphasised the need for an efficient and corruption-free public service. If nothing can be done without money changing hands then each time that happens one ends up with a disgruntled — and even worse an antagonistic — public who turn its wrath on the rulers.

Some months after he was elected president in 2015, Maithripala Sirisena turned up in London to attend an anti-corruption and money laundering summit convened by the then British Prime Minster David Cameron.

At that meeting, Sirisena was boasting about the steps he had already taken in this regard and what more he was planning to do to eliminate corruption. Alas we all know how that endeavor — if actually intended — floundered, how few big time launderers and the corrupt ever paid the price.

President Rajapaksa has one advantage that traditional healers of corruption did not have. He is more a technocrat than a politician and has proved himself in some areas where a firm hand is necessary.

For years now the public service has been going down the drain up to the point that it has now reached the sewer. About two months ago, I met a chap in London I had not seen for several years. He had returned from Colombo a couple of months earlier. During his stay, he had transacted some business at the Immigration Department. Whether he realised it or not “transacted business” proved to be an apposite phrase. It had cost him a hundred thousand rupees and the bribe had to be delivered at the official’s residence many miles to the north of Colombo. It was a substantial sum for those living in Sri Lanka but she had claimed it had to be shared with other staffers.

Somewhere in the nation’s vast bureaucracy such, ‘transactions’ happen almost every working and even non-working days. If one is able to collect all these happenings and line them up one behind the other, it should a bigger danger to our planet than climate change seeing how many times it would traverse the globe.

It happens not only in state institutions such as Immigration, Inland Revenue, RMV and Customs departments. Some who have visited the Colombo Municipal Council to have some documents signed, sealed and delivered have interesting stories to tell which might make one’s hair stand on end.

If President Rajapaksa who seems to have set his mind on cleaning this Augean stable that has eluded the efforts of the some honest dry cleaners, could catch the crooked and recalcitrant and deal with them as a lesson to others, he will find a thankful public behind him.