Editorial

7th March 1999

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Church state and public office

Readers have been treated to a the- sis of arguments and counter -ar- guments on the concerns expressed by the Catholic Church over the scheduled holding of elections one day before the holy event of Good Friday. Some political analysts have for example made thinly veiled insinuations about the bona fides of the Archbishop of Colombo, who is in the forefront of the campaign for the changing of the election date. Statements have been made about weighty matters such as the separation of church and state, and admonitions have been made about the "church having to respect the fact that fixing the poll-date is an act which falls within the ambit of Caesar.''

All this may be food for thought, but, the actions of the Commissioner in fact bring us to the realm of some other serious concerns that relate to the conduct, power, and ambit of authority of public officials .

This is an era in which public officials are seen to be appointed on the basis of the old school - tie or on the basis of the old buddy system, a method to which the present PA dispensation seems blissfully wedded.

Now, this is not to suggest for a moment that the Commissioner of Elections is a pet - poodle or a political appointee of the President or the government. In the case of the Polls Commissioner, he only brings into focus the cardinal point — pun definitely not intended — that he cannot act in supreme isolation and in blissful ignorance of the fact that there are considerations such as religious susceptibilities, which should merit his attention when important decisions are made.

The Elections Commissioner may certainly have been unaware that he was stepping on a religious minefield when he set that now notoriously known date for the elections — April the First. But, once he was made aware of the facts by the church it shouldn't have required the church ( and the state ) to light a fire under his hot-seat, (almost), for him to reconsider the date for the elections, and respond with some due courtesy to the concerns of the Archbishop and the church.

Time and again public officials have been seen to be acting as if the fact that they hold office entitles them to use their power and authority to do things as if they were running their own private estates. This has been especially true during the tenure of this government, partly because this dispensation has cultivated an administrative ethos in which some public officials have been actively encouraged to be partisan and biased. It is an open secret in society , that the office of the Attorney General for instance has been traduced and repeatedly belittled by successive governments which have actively encouraged the AG to be the puppet of the President.

This kind of "you scratch my back and we scratch yours'' mentality of appointing public officers and maintaining them in office, has again been brought into the public spotlight with the appointment of the Secretary General of Parliament recently, for example.

That appointment was not necessarily flawed; but appointments to public office, to borrow from a well-known legal dictum, should not only be completely untainted by political considerations, they should also appear to be untainted by political considerations. If the powers - that- be violate the basic conventions of propriety and rectitude in making appointments to public office, they would inevitably send out the message that public office is some sort of merry furlough granted to office - holders, so that they can enjoy the powers of office to indulge in their own peculiar whims and esoteric fantasies instead of serving the public cause.

Political Column

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