The Island Editorial

Needed: Fulfilment of pledges, not invective

12 September 2016

 

The UNP’s 70th anniversary celebrations had all the trappings of an anti-Rajapaksa rally. Most of the speakers including President Maithripala Sirisena, who was a special invitee, and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe indulged in bashing the Rajapaksas to their heart’s content.

Leaders of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government let out streams of invective in such a way that one wondered whether they really believed in their own claim that President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s leadership campaign was dead in the water. If they do, there is no reason why they should go on venting their spleens on him so hysterically. Why can’t they totally ignore him and make him lose another election in a row by holding the much-delayed local government polls which they keep postponing on some flimsy pretext in the hope the politico-economic situation would improve for them to face another electoral contest?

That the Rajapaksas, in their heyday, treated Sirisena as a doormat is only too well known. The latter is now using the former as a carpet, under which he is apparently sweeping all the failures and malpractices of his government. Sirisena and the UNP-led government ought to be mindful of the fact that politicians’ habit of bashing a rival too much could be counterproductive. There comes a time when the public, rightly or wrongly, begin to think that the underdog is more sinned against than sinning.

The anti-incumbency factor also tends to favour the politicians in the Opposition. Those who were out of power for about ten years are now getting fattened like a colony of leeches enjoying a downpour after being in hibernation for a long period of time. They are helping themselves to public funds and feathering their nests through crooked deals as if there were no tomorrow. The sky is the limit for the ruling party worthies who are apparently making up for lost time. Several bond scams under the present government haven’t been probed properly. Only a change of government will create conditions for a thorough investigation into them. Those who lost power due to corruption are sure to seek a popular mandate at the next general election to bring the crooks responsible for the grand bond thefts to justice. People may decide to set a thief to catch a thief as they did last year for want of a better alternative.

It is not being argued that the Rajapaksas don’t deserve a bashing. They and their lackeys, intoxicated with power, disported themselves in harassing their opponents. Their rule became synonymous with corruption, abuse of power and interference with state institutions including the judiciary and the police.

The incumbent administration obtained two mandates last year to undo what the Rajapaksas had, done. Its leaders waxed eloquent towards the latter stages of the Rajapaksa government, that the country was stuck neck deep in debt and attributed most of its economic woes to corruption which they said had taken a heavy toll on the national economy. They undertook to lessen the national debt and set the economy on an even keel. They also promised the restoration of the rule of law and an immediate end to corruption.

More than one-and-a-half years have elapsed since the collapse of the last government, but the present-day messiahs have not yet been able to make good on their promises. Their battle against corruption has been reduced to a mere political slogan with the judiciary and the police being manipulated to target only its political rivals while the rogues of the previous government currently within its ranks are well protected.

The task of sweeping the government’s many wrongs under the Rajapaksa carpet, as it were, is as futile as that of squeezing Arnold Schwarzenegger into a toddler’s underwear.

So, the leaders of the incumbent dispensation may tear the Rajapaksas to shreds if they so wish, but they had better fulfil their promises to relieve the people of the unbearable economic burden, restore the rule of law and eliminate corruption. Their efforts to pull the wool over the eyes of the discerning people who know them for what they really are, by laying the blame for all their failures at the doorstep of their bête noire is bound to come a cropper.