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When President Ranil Wickremesinghe asked the nation a few days ago whether Sri Lankans would join with him or ‘align with those who still cannot grasp the issues and are grappling in the dark’, one counter question should be aimed sharply right back at him.

Gross corruptors and Presidential patronage

While not detracting from the acknowledgement due to the Government in steering bilateral debt restructuring agreements with the Paris Club, India and China announced jubilantly with fanfare and crackers in the corridors of power, the President needs to demonstrate the critical application of his much flaunted familiarity with Buddhist precepts to the ‘cause and effect’ of Sri Lanka’s bankruptcy in the first place. Accordingly the question that needs to be asked from him, perhaps in one of the numerous televised ‘question and answer’ sessions he has with the youth which his Secretariat has an unpleasant habit of constantly propagandizing, is fundamentally very basic.

How exactly can the country’s ‘faltering economy’ ‘recover’ when Sri Lanka continues to be at the mercy of gross corruptors who operate from within the patronage and the protection that he affords to them? The President cannot sublimely say that this is a Government and a Cabinet not of his ‘own choosing’ and leave it like that. Like the carcass of a dead animal being picked clean by vultures and despite one in every four Sri Lankans judged to be beneath the poverty line, endemic corruption from wind power deals to visa handling rackets by his administration continue with nary a pause.

This has been exposed by and objected to by vigilant citizens but the President scarcely blinks as it were. Worse, when the Court is resorted to as a last measure by those who are aggrieved, it has become the singular objective of the President and his Ministers to attack the judiciary with every weapon at their command, firing from within the comfortable safety afforded by the Parliamentary Privileges Act. The latest salvo were extraordinary allegations of ‘judicial cannibalism’ leveled at the apex court by the President on the floor of the House over the Court’s rejection of the Gender Equality Bill as unconstitutional.

Clash between the executive/legislature and the judiciary

That rejection was hardly a fitting reason to indulge in such scorn and opprobrium, one might think. Last week, the point was made in these column spaces that, the fault in the judicial rejection of the Gender Equality Bill lay with the Government and the Government alone in proposing a badly drafted Bill which, despite its laudable objectives, unwisely trespassed on constitutional propriety. The remedy for that was not to vilify the Court but to reform the constitutional framework and then bring a Bill which conformed accordingly.

Days later, the public became a fascinated if not frustrated witness to the President being rejected twice by the Constitutional Council in his attempt to extend the term of the now retired Attorney General. This was moreover in the backdrop of a nasty spat between the Judicial Service Association (JSA) and the Minister of Justice who the JSA accused of personally discrediting judges with an ulterior motive in the wake of decisions taken against him in pending court cases. This was following allegations of judicial corruption made by the Minister in Parliament.

The fracas has now led to the Justice Minister complaining to the Speaker regarding a breach of his parliamentary privilege amidst protests by the Bar that the disciplinary control of the minor judiciary should be left in the hands of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) free from ‘legislative interference.’  All these developments do not inspire much confidence in the President’s airy promise of a ‘stable and brighter future’ for Sri Lankans which he said was not ‘merely about Ranil Wickremesinghe (but about) our nation, your future, and the future of our children.’

Juvenile simplification of Sri Lanka’s problems

So we return to our fundamental question as to how the President aims to guarantee this when the actions of himself, his Government and his close political confidantes with severely tarnished records of ‘profiteers’ speak to the contrary?  Profiteering, rampant political corruption and the manifest idiocies of a Rajapaksa President who had neither the brains nor the ability to steer the nation were precisely the very compulsions that led to social, economic and monetary disaster. It was in consequence thereof that the previous Government announced its inability to meet debt obligations in April 2022 tipping Sri Lanka into the abyss.

In fact, it would have been funny if it was not so surreal during President Wickremesinghe’s speech to see images flashed of lines of people queuing up for gas, petrol and essential supplies interspersed with scenes of marauding protestors in 2022. This was contrasted with cheery post 2022 camera grabs of tourists visiting Sri Lanka and smiling citizens waiting for their ‘dansal’ free food during Vesak and Poson. But whoever was the bright spark who conjured up these juvenile ‘before and after’ images should be roundly reprimanded for the excessively simplistic fairy tales that these contrasts are supposed to make us fall for.

Essentially the sum and substance of the President’s speech in announcing his ‘glad tidings’ is a collective insult to the intelligence of the citizenry, to put it bluntly. Quite apart from his inordinate fondness for quoting from the Caucasian Chalk Circle to the effect that ‘the rightful claim to the child belongs to the true mother’ and quoting Grusha that, ‘ things should belong to those who do well by them, Wagons to good drivers that they may be well driven… ‘, is the President saying that because he gave ‘leadership’ during the ‘bad times’ that he now can lay claim to the country?

Taking steps backwards from good governance

This is like the Rajapaksas claiming that because they liberated the South from the clutches of the Wanni’s Sun God, they had the right to rape, murder and steal whatever they wanted. Essentially these arguments are equally both fallacious and ludicrous. They should be summarily dismissed with profound contempt. While it is certainly true that Sri Lanka has reached a ‘crucial milestone’ in its debt restructuring’, the commitment of the Government to governance reform remains as abysmal as before.

If so, without the latter, how can the former succeed? It is not enough for the President to reference ambitious new laws on ‘making the Central Bank independent’ and ‘enacting South Asia’s best law on anti-corruption.’ This is what is called grandmaster chess. That requires skill coupled with dexterity and amorality of the highest order to cripple institutions and oversight processes by deadly attacks while at the same time, pointing to those very same bodies as an answer to deep-seated governance ills.

What the President deliberately missed was the focus on governance reform which was the first demand of the ‘Aragalaya’ (protests) of 2022. Naturally so, as nothing has changed in the ‘political capture’ of the Rule of Law. In fact, we have taken several steps back in bringing new laws that dangerously imperil rights such as the Online Safety Act with questionable legislative passing.

Political corruption remains endemic under the Wickremesinghe Presidency with no will, ability or capacity to change. In turn, the Sri Lankan people are left with a crude ‘kicking of the bankruptcy can’ a few years down the line (ie 2028). That dark reality is recognised by the majority of Sri Lankans who experience lived realities of collapsed governance systems every day as opposed to those in the seats of power.

So in the final result, is it the President or the people who are left ‘grappling in the dark?’