Sunday Times 2
Lessons from Dutch history
View(s):As May draws to a close, the brave folk at Gotagogama continue their struggle and the Aragalaya has passed its fiftieth day – our country is still in a mess.
In my column last month, I wrote, “While it is appropriate that the whole cabinet resigned last Monday, the people are not blind to the fact that the President is just hoodwinking us and allowing his catchers to play musical chairs by reshuffling some of these ex-ministers to make up a four-member cabinet.”
And nothing has changed. Helped by the tragic events that took place on the 9th of May, the president accepted the resignation of his once-popular elder brother – and then surprised all of us (except perhaps Ranil Wickremesinghe) by appointing Ranil Wickremesinghe as prime minister.
Perhaps Gotabaya thought that Ranil, who could pass off as a Westernised intellectual with a wide knowledge of the world outside Sri Lanka and a good command of English could communicate better with the aid-giving internationals of the West. Perhaps Gotabaya thought that Ranil would protect the Rajapaksas (as he did in 2015) from the long arm of the law and the pent-up fury of the mob. Perhaps Gotabaya did not think at all, and (in the usual manner in which he takes ill-considered knee-jerk decisions) he simply picked the one person in Parliament who did not have a parliamentary caucus with which to challenge him.
It is said that as animals ascended the evolutionary ladder, from invertebrates like amoebae, jellyfish, snails, worms and insects to vertebrates like fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, they evolved by developing backbones and brains. Acquiring vertebral columns and cerebral organs, so my zoologist friends used to tell me, are what allow the “higher forms of life” as we like to call ourselves, to succeed.
Sadly, we have in our country today a President who has a very strong backbone but who has not been blessed with cerebral prowess – and we have a prime minister who has a well-educated and very intelligent brain but who lacks both guts and vertebrae.
The President, after appointing a prime minister whom he thinks can put food on our tables, petrol in our vehicles and gas in our kitchens, has retreated to the safety of his bunker – while the prime minister, poor man, has to fashion a cabinet from the very poor material he has in parliament. I am sure my old friend Balapuwaduge Ginoris Mendis, one of the finest carpenters I have known, could have produced a better cabinet in his workshop in Moratuwa than our Fifth Lane intellectual from Royal College has done this month.
Chandrika Kumaratunga in a recent radio interview bemoaned the fact that the majority of our legislators do not have a tertiary education. In fact, many of them have not even passed the O levels! Some who claim to have done something after leaving school have had to sheepishly admit the falsity of their claims of qualifications – like Arundika Fernando who claimed to have been a Pilot only to have both the Air Force and the Pilots Guild shoot down his false claim.
Having to create a functioning cabinet out of raw materials that a respectable carpenter would reject, Ranil Wickremesinghe has to be careful about opportunists who will try to jump into the new government while plotting his downfall from the day they sneak in. He will have to manage a team that has questionable moral records – men who have been arrested (not merely questioned by the Police but actually taken into custody) by the FCID.
His priority will have to be to look after our citizens who need help – not just the dual citizens and others of the Rajapaksa family.
To be politically correct is easy — but to be ethically correct requires courage. To persuade parliamentarians to jump on to your side is easy — as Ranil’s canny father Esmond Wickremesinghe did in December 1964 when he convinced people like CP de Silva, Mahanama Samaraweera and others to desert Mrs Bandaranaike and vote against the Throne Speech. To govern a country while being morally upright and ethically correct is not as easy as inducing legislators to switch sides.
Ranil with his great knowledge of history would do well to remember the story of the Dutch Prime Minister Johan De Wit — who was born into a wealthy merchant family in Holland, educated at Leiden University and qualified as a lawyer. He was popular when first elected.
Sadly, in 1672 (known as the Raamjar or Year of Disaster) Holland fell on hard times. The people turned on De Wit — and both he and his brother were gruesomely killed by a carefully organised mob.
Like De Wit, Mahinda Rajapaksa was a much-loved politician, idolised perhaps, despite the many questions about his family’s extensive personal wealth that was acquired after they achieved uncurbed political power.
Closer to home, I remember the fate that befell the Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu in 1963. While Diem was president, Nhu (who was himself a member of the National Assembly) amassed a fortune by running lottery rackets, manipulating currency and extorting money from Saigon businesses. Both brothers were unceremoniously killed during a coup.
There is probably a moral and a message in the story of the De Wit brothers and the Ngo brothers that both our new prime minister and our old prime minister would do well to heed.