The Island Editorial

 Cost of doing little

23rd October 2015

Speaker Karu Jayasuriya may be wondering whether someone got him appointed to that post by way of punishment. During the past several weeks, he must have grown several years older than his chronological age. It would have been far easier for him to run a preschool than to control a bunch of infantile grown-ups.

Not even mild-mannered Speakers have been able to prevent their tempers from fraying in the House. In the mid 1990s, during a stormy parliamentary session where JVP MP Nihal Galappatti (elected on the Sri Lanka Progressive Front ticket) was running riot, an exasperated Speaker K. B. Ratnayake happened to make an unusual aside. He murmured under his breath that the MP should have been shot some time back (during the second JVP uprising)—mekata ekalema vedi thiyala daana thibune. It was only when the MPs and media persons burst out laughing that the Speaker realised that his microphone was on! The incumbent Speaker, good-tempered as he is, must be muttering similar remarks when misbehaving MPs throw the House into turmoil.

There have been numerous instances where the Speakers sought to use religion and ethics in a bid to knock some sense into unruly MPs. Speaker W. J. M. Lokubandara was famous for pontificating on religious values and warning those who misused public funds that they would be reborn as buffaloes. Speaker Jayasuriya has perhaps realised the futility of giving misbehaving MPs who are obviously beyond redemption, religious and moral lessons. On Wednesday, he sought to use economics in a bid to bring order out of chaos in Parliament.

Speaker Jayasuriya told the warring MPs that a single parliamentary sitting cost the taxpayers as much as Rs. 4.6 mn. Parliament usually meets eight days a month at a cost of about Rs. 36.8 mn. A sitting usually lasts six hours. That is sittings cost the taxpayers Rs. 12,777 per minute.

If sittings are suspended for ten minutes about Rs. 127,770 goes down the gurgler. This is something the lawmakers who kick up shindies and resort to fisticuffs at the drop of a hat ought to bear in mind.

Meanwhile, a government panjandrum has claimed that it costs about Rs. 150 mn a month to maintain the President’s House in Colombo Fort and that is why the incumbent President has decided against occupying it. (The place has to be maintained anyway with or without him living there.) Curiously, the cost of having a 225-member Parliament in session continuously for one month is less than that of maintaining the official residence of the President! Isn’t this an eloquent argument for abolishing the executive presidency?

Parliament is synonymous with waste. An oft-heard complaint is that its sittings are, more often than not, inquorate though its members are paid an allowance for attendance. An audit inquiry revealed a few years ago that food sufficient for 2,000 persons or more went to waste every month at parliamentary canteens. More than 25 percent of children are malnourished in this country.

Parliamentarians are also state employees, to all intents and purposes, drawing salaries and enjoying perks of office. But, they are ‘more equal’ than other public sector workers; they are entitled to pensions after five years of (dis)service, duty free vehicles and soft loans to be paid back in ridiculously low installments among other things. They call one another crooks, gigolos, pimps, buffaloes and even drug dealers, and the people neither doubt nor dispute the veracity of such claims, knowing their representative for what they really are.

The least the MPs can do to be seen to be earning their keep is to attend Parliament regularly and behave without bringing the national legislature into disrepute and aggravating the erosion of public faith therein.

Unless parliamentarians mend their ways and make an effort to live up to the expectations of their electors, the country can easily save about Rs. 36.8 mn a month. Guess how!