There was a time, many moons ago, when the Mother State - in the shape and form of a previous regime that harvested paddy from a lunar environment - took everybody's business into her warm embrace. It was an era when everything from education to the most niggardly enterprise was nationalized in the name of a special brand of Sri Lankan socialism. It was also an age characterized by bread queues, coupons, and necessities on ration.
The present proposals of our paternalistic government vis-à-vis loss-making private businesses and public-quoted companies smack of that epoch of luxury for an elite class that appeared to be above the law of the land, while the hoi polloi suffered unprecedented hardship. Plus, there is now the odour of opportunism, carpet-bagging, and beggar-my-neighbour in the air that was not there in the old days. The very air today is acrid with cupidity of the worst sort, and the stench is not all emanating from the camp of the powers that be.
That the opposition has raised a hue and cry about the whole project is as commendable as it is surprising. In a strange sort of way, it is comforting to know that the people's voice, which is supposed to act as a safeguard against crooked, corrupt, and criminal regimes, still has some teeth left in it. Even if its outspokenness in this instance is compromised by vested interests more than it is driven by republican virtues and impartial principles.
But it is too much to expect the one party capable of understanding business, and pushing the national interest agenda over and above its partisan commercial stake-holdings, not to look out for its own in the matter of defending the rest of the targeted weak against the robber barons. That much has become par for the course.
A case may be made, however, for not only the state intervening bail out sinking ships of trade and commerce, but also owning the very pond in which those argosies sail. An excellent example of how government owns, manages, and executes all business under its own aegis stares at us across the Bay of Bengal and through the Strait of Malacca. It is a city-state that stared at us in envy more than a forgotten generation ago. Singapore is its name, and minding the store - lock, stock, and smoking gun-barrel - is its game.
But the Lion City is probably an extreme case study of a nation that took the risk at a critical juncture in its past; did not hesitate to sacrifice nobler and loftier ideals such as transparency, accountability, and democracy for a season; and reaped rich dividends in less decades than it took for Ceylon to go from crown colony to fully fledged country in its own right.
So, you are probably asking at this stage of your Sunday morning read, "What has this to do with the price of eggs?" Just this, gentle reader. The time has come when no good citizen and true can say that the writing is not on the wall. For those in the authoritarian camp, it seems to urge that seizing the day - to say nothing of underperforming assets which do not rightly come under their purview - is the way to go. For the rare and increasingly diminishing minority who still hold by what is pure and fair, the suggestion seems to be that what is not good in law, common decency, and established business practice is not good in general for the state of the nation and very bad in particular for three of the businesses (at least, according to the opposition leader) whose necks are on the chopping block.
That man who cried his eyes out at the injustice of it all probably expressed it best when he said that nothing worse could happen to those who stood silently by in a time like this and let what is wrong and unlawful and not in the public interest happen than to have it happen to them…
Which is why, this day, all Sri Lankans everywhere are being called to wake up and smell the burning sugar and realize that it is not eating of the caramel that is the proof of the pudding. In a state and place and condition of the mind in which what happens to someone else is none of my business, nothing that happens to me soon becomes nobody else's business. It's a matter of the mind, dears: if you don't mind, it doesn't matter. So don't come crying to me when they decide by law, or by hook or by crook, or by any means expedient, that what is mine and what is thine is so mixed up that it becomes everybody's. And therefore nobody's. And therefore somebody's. Somebody very special's indeed. |
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