Columns

Over the years our politicians have taken a severe bashing mainly from the media and now, increasingly from the public. Not without cause.

Just the other day, I read that a three-road junction I had known from my early school days as “Jubilee Kanuwa/Post Handiya” has been renamed. Not, mind you, by the local authority of the Mirihana area or by some local politician wanting his name permanently etched there for posterity to remember him. Nor by any one person who could be named as the originator. Rather it was probably a sudden, collective effort by an irate public and some wags armed with nothing more than pithy Sinhala.

To be quite candid, Sri Lanka has many sound politicians. I mean politicians full of sound–and sometimes fury–signifying nothing of any significance. The problem is they seem to approach every subject with an open mouth large enough to accommodate both feet.

It would be unfair of course to tar every politician with the same brush. For one thing it would require far too much tar and, at today’s prices of everything, it would be foolhardy to waste more money on some of those Diyawanna Oya types on whom the public already wastes enough money.

Unless of course you were Nivard Cabraal with a Midas touch producing money from nowhere to pay the country’s debts and doesn’t even say whether he is robbing Peter to pay Paul. One thing we do know is that he is selling our gold, the government having sold the family silver, so to say,  to the Chinese including some kind of organic manure producer who collected a tidy $ 6.9 m or thereabouts ‘summa’ from us.

The trouble with most politicians is that they poke their mouths into matters that do not concern them or are not competent to speak about. In other practising democracies where the parliamentary system exists, ministers and their deputies are far more circumspect and generally speak only on issues that come under their portfolios or on subjects in which they are knowledgeable or professionally-qualified to express opinions.

Not in our resplendent isle, however, where anything, no matter how abstruse or complex, is grist to their ignorance. This intrusion into discussions and debates on subjects they are hardly equipped to intervene, is partly because of the belief that any kind of publicity is good publicity even if it only helps to display one’s ignorance.

So a minute or two on TV is free visual publicity even if one talks the hind legs off a donkey or sound like an ass. The other day Namal Rajapaksa, Minister of Sports, Youth Affairs and so many other things too numerous to mention without running out of space, admitted quite rightly that the popularity of the Rajapaksa clan had clearly dipped in public esteem though he expected it to recover before long.

Around the same time Johnston Fernando, the garrulous Minister of Highways who seems to think that belligerently wielding chairs in parliament is part of the job description of elected ( or even selected) MPs, told the media that the current government was more popular right now than it had ever been.

If Johnston Fernando seriously believes that anybody will buy that rubbish some might prefer him as a stand-up comedian than a highways minister trying to lead the public up the garden road. Scant wonder the public have taken to expressing their appreciation of the government in more vocal ways not heard of for a long time.

What prompted this column on political conduct at every level of the political structure is another comment made by the Sports Minister in a conversation with the sister publication of the Sunday Times. Namal Rajapaksa was quoted as saying that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s decision to ban chemical fertiliser was a “strong decision” but it was not successfully implemented by the officials in charge.

Rajapaksa (jnr) said that “the President had announced his decision to switch to non-chemical fertiliser as soon as he took office but officials had failed him as they had not proceeded with the matter”.

The Sports minister would have the public believe that the first announcement of switching to organic fertiliser was made soon after the president took office. No. The original announcement was in his election manifesto titled “Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour”—a rather pompous title some might add.

Had the Sports minister read the section headlined “A Revolution in use of Fertiliser” Gotabaya Rajapaksa mentions two important points. He proposes a new subsidy scheme under which both organic and inorganic fertiliser will be provided “free of charge to farmers” who will be promoted (sic!) to shift gradually to a system that totally uses carbonic fertiliser but over a “ten year period”.

So the “strong decision” set down in the manifesto envisages the use of both kinds of fertiliser–organic and inorganic–which were to be distributed free to farmers and the system shift from chemical to organic was to happen over a 10-year time frame.

Surely this does not indicate haste on the President’s part to rush through a sudden switch which Gotabaya Rajapaksa well knew cannot be done overnight like ordering a battalion to new positions.

Namal Rajapaksa would have us believe the failure in the government’s fertiliser policy was the failure of officials to implement it. The policy was clear enough up to the moment when some twits parading as advisers or know-alls had the president make an overnight policy change that began the rot–and not just Chinese fertiliser. And that began after the ban on chemical fertilier announced last April.

Rajapaksa junior does not state where the officials failed and over what and who they were. He also fails to mention that the secretary to the Agriculture Ministry, like to other ministries, is appointed by the president. Since the president’s election, the Agriculture Ministry has seen five ministry secretaries pass through its doors–surely an all-time record in two years.

Holding officials responsible for political failure is an easy blame game. But that will not pass muster before the people. If Namal Rajapaksa expects public confidence in the government to grow from its present dip there are other issues the public expect to be informed of. For instance, what happened to the investigation ordered by the President into the naming of Nirupama Rajapaksa and her husband Thiru Nadesan in the Pandora papers where the report was to be presented in one month? What of the inquiry into a gun-toting State Minister Lohan Ratwatte who played “Dirty Harry” at Bogambara prison allegedly threatening two prisoners with his pistol? One cannot bury such incidents forever without adverse consequences not without public indignation erupting at another Hoo Kiyana Handiya.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London)