Columns

• PRESIDENTIAL SPANNER IN THE WORKS MAY WRECK RANIL’S 21 AMENDMENT HOPES
• Basil resigns as MP but vows to stay active in politics to give morale to supporters

The President laid bare his self-confidence and belief in his own inherent prowess to reverse the tide of failure and surf the crest of success when he told foreign news agency Bloomberg on Monday, “I have been given a mandate for five years. I will not contest again. I cannot go as a failed president.”

This is not the first time that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has said he is determined to see through the whole nine yards of his presidential term but it is the first time he has given a reason why he will not quit halfway: the nearest he has come to admitting what an outright failure he had been in the first half of his five-year tenure.

This resilience to weather the failures of effort and still seek redemption by transcending errors may have been an admirable trait in one who tries his hand at pottery and botches the earthen vessel at the potter’s wheel a countless times but strives undeterred to master the art until he gets it right at the end.

THE LAST OF THE TITANS: With big brother Mahinda, on his right, stepping down as Prime Minister last month and kid brother Basil, on his left, exiting Parliament this Thursday, how much longer can the increasingly isolated President Gotabaya hold the crumbling Rajapaksa fort?

But the pot the President broke is the livelihoods of 22 million people of this nation and that is unforgivable. It’s a transgression for which there can be no atonement, no suspended sentence.

The earthen urn that held the tears and sweat-soaked hopes and dreams of Lanka’s people now lies dashed to smithereens for other nations to trample upon in scorn; and pick up the pieces if so inclined.

The nation cannot give a second chance to one who has spent a good two and a half years pottering with people’s lives and has nothing to show for his efforts but the debris of his ruinous work. To insist as of right he remains at the wheel for a further two years to redeem his promise and salvage the wreckage in the forlorn hope he can fashion it anew, is to demand the unreasonable and crave the nation’s indulgence too much.

Especially when he comes with a sackful of failures and demands as of right to remould the lives he had laid to waste. His own revelation as to why he wishes to remain in executive office since he doesn’t ‘want to go as a failed President,’ is a striking admission of his litany of man-made failures.

Consider just three:

n  His decision to abolish taxes when none demanded it beggared the Treasury coffers at the inception of his presidency.

n  His arbitrary decision, against all expert advice, to ban chemical fertiliser in April 2021 and go organic overnight, turned barren the fertile fields of Lanka and has led, as predicted, to an alarming threat of famine.  The food crisis is so acute that, for the first time since independence, the Government was forced to ask the United Nations last week to launch a worldwide food aid public appeal for funds.

n  In Monday’s interview, he admits, “We waited too long to seek help from the International Monetary Fund. If we had gone at least six months or a year earlier, it would not have come to this state.” Even after plunging the country into bankruptcy, his failure to seek immediate timely help from the IMF for a bailout has blockaded faint hopes of an early recovery and condemned the people to an uncertain future of untold anguish.

With such indelible black marks on his mid-term report, can he be given a reprieve, given another shot at the Presidency for the next two turbulent years? Especially when he has lost the mandate of the people, amply manifested throughout the country and continuously echoed on the Galle Face Green at Gotagogama, yards from his residence and secretariat, with the ‘Gota go home’ roar?

Does the live, full-blooded reverberating voice of the people, giving full throat to the ‘Gota go home’ mantra, deserve no reckoning? Must it fade hushed into silence, pale powerless into irrelevance merely because no constitutional right exists to evict a sitting president except by way of the cumbersome and time-consuming procedure of impeachment? Does failure unbecoming, no longer have moral force?

After the then Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s enforced exit, and the disappearance of the Rajapaksas from centre stage, it fell to the lone President to hold the crumbling Rajapaksa fort.

Denied the sole anchor of his power, his brother Mahinda, whose resignation as Prime Minister made the cabinet stand automatically dissolved, an isolated and driven-to-the-wall President addressed the nation on May 11 and declared his readiness to repeal his own 20th Amendment and embrace 19A. He said: “I will take steps to amend the Constitution to re-enact the contents of the 19th Amendment to empower Parliament.”

On May 12, the lone national list UNP MP Ranil Wickremesinghe was appointed as Prime Minister after the President had failed in his attempt to convince Opposition and Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) Leader Sajith Premadasa to accept the post without the precondition that the President must agree to a time frame for his resignation as demanded by the people.

Ranil Wickremesinghe accepted the President’s offer unconditionally, bringing with him to the post not the sparse Churchillian ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ as the only mite he had to give but the promise of providing the people three square meals a day, an end to queues, enough of dollars from international lending agencies and even the promise to build a nation of plenty where agriculture flourished and the future of youth was secure.

As a means of restoring political stability, his solution was to repeal the 20th Amendment, and have, in its stead, the President-blessed 19th Amendment as the basis for 21A. It was presented to the cabinet and then sent to the opposition for its views.

Though nearly two weeks have passed, no consensus seem to have emerged with some claiming it falls far short of the 19th Amendment and doesn’t clip the presidential wings short enough to stunt flight. Even if presented to Parliament, fears still lurk that Basil Rajapaksa, who, though out of Parliament, vowed to stay active in politics, might still scuttle its enactment by marshalling his SLPP troops in Parliament to vote against the Bill. It must also be borne in mind that Mahinda Rajapaksa’s stance on the new amendment still remains unknown.

And that is without reckoning the effect the President’s spanner, casually thrown on Monday by the President himself at the Bloomberg interview, will have in the works.

What he said on Monday at this interview is in marked contrast to what he told the nation on May 11 night. Then he was the prisoner of circumstances, a man driven to the wall and chained to it, willing to accept any condition, make any sacrifice, even to be stripped of his powers save for the covenant that he be left with a fig leaf of power that will entitle him to remain on the throne, even as an emasculated king denied his scepter.

It was in this state of mind, tottering on the cliff’s brink, when a nudge would have shoved him over, that he told the nation: “I will take steps to amend the Constitution to re-enact the contents of the 19th Amendment to empower Parliament.”

Now, a month later, he has come out of cold storage, out from his bunkered existence, sitting well in new comfortable zone that Ranil Wickremesinghe’s timely advent as Prime Minister secured for him, and is emboldened enough not merely to reiterate that he will not resign as President but to question the efficacy of an executive president without his full powers which the 19th Amendment’s avatar, the 21A, intends to impose.

This sudden change of heart with the sudden change of fortune was revealed when he told Bloomberg in reference to the proposed 21A based on the 19th Amendment: “What is this executive powers of the president? My personal opinion is that if you have a presidency he must have full powers. Otherwise abolish executive presidency and go for full Westminster-style parliament.”

He said: “Either the presidency should be abolished or the parliament must be kept out of governing. You can’t have a mixed system, I experienced this and now know. People may blame me when I tell this but that’s the truth.”

He now says the Presidency must be abolished, but, surely, he must know that it is impractical at this juncture, and, even if it wasn’t, will take a good two years by which time his Presidential tenure will have come to an end.

So what then is the President advocating? Now feeling more secure of his once shaky throne, after having outsourced a willing Prime Minister to prop it, is he indicating his preference for his own 20A, to retain the status quo, to remain in office with a little help from his new found friends and enjoy his powers to make good on his failures, to have the cake and eat it too?

If that is, indeed, the case, there is some logic in his argument, given his declared aim not to go as a failed president but as a success instead. But for him to exit with such honour, wouldn’t he need the power tools to do a successful job?

How on earth can he leave the Presidential stage as a nincompoop dressed in hermit garb branded a failure, when his egoistical ambition demands he takes his bows as a conquering hero, enrobed in the purple, who returned to the fray without running away, to end the ongoing battle, slayed the economic spectre and emerged triumphant to win his knightly spurs?

If that be his overpowering fantasy, then, of course, there is method in the madness. Without his presidential sword full-drawn, vain ambition’s full-blown hopes will be a dead duck.

Despite commanding a massive two-thirds majority in Parliament, with the 20th Amendment vesting in him a surfeit of near-dictatorial powers, if he still could not notch a singular success but only record a string of failures which has left the nation bankrupt, what hope is there for him to arrest the tide and wrest from despair a miraculous economic revival and go in glory as he wishes in 2024, if both his hands are tied, the tools denied and his 20A wand to wring the Gotabaya miracle within two years rendered impotent by the 19th Amendment?

Though voiced as his personal opinion, his negative view of the 19th Amendment, that it will reduce his presidency to a shell with the pearl usurped, may be taken as a signal by those still loyal to him in the SLPP to scupper the Bill at the voting stage and thereby leave untouched the 20th Amendment and the President’s powers intact. If so, and the Bill fails, it will result in another major political uproar. If not, and the Bill’s passed, it will undoubtedly strengthen Prime Minister Ranil’s position in Parliament; and power will have constitutionally slipped from one hand to another.

In this instance, from a 6.9 million directly elected President to a lone national list MP who, along with other defeated members of his party, had lost his own seat at the last general election. And this constitutional coup done regardless of what the people think, want and demand.

Either way, it is hard to see how this will improve the economic crisis or enhance political stability in the country within the next two years, for, whatever the outcome of the Bill maybe, a Rajapaksa will still remain at the helm of Government, and, even in a titular role, wield considerable influence in the affairs of State.

It will not meet the international demand for political stability as a vital necessity for economic revival and for aid to flow. Nor will it sate the struggle in the nation’s breast that the ‘Gota go home’ mantra is first appeased. Political stability isn’t found in Parliament but on the streets, when the masses repose their faith and confidence in those that govern them.

Perhaps, Gotabaya Rajapaksa should take the cue from his brother Basil, who resigned as an MP on Thursday, and step down now. At least now, he should realise that his ambition to retire as President to ringing applause and martial music, bathed in glory, two years hence, is but a pipe dream; that his aim to reach the unreachable star lies in the realm of fantasy; that the more he remains, cocooned in his make-believe world, the more he prolongs the nation’s anguish. He will go then not merely as a failed President but far worse.

Is it too much to ask of him to do the decent thing and, in the name of twenty-two million people’s household gods, to depart now, before all hell breaks loose and the rivers of blood begin to flow?

A starving people cannot wait for the President’s ambitious appetite for personal glory to be first sated, to find food on the table.