The Island Editorial

A show in poor taste

19 November 2016

 

Yesterday’s newspapers carried a handout picture, made available by the President’s Office, of President Maithripala Sirisena with a schoolboy who had hacked into the presidential website in August. One did not know whether to laugh or cry on seeing that photo. That propaganda stunt, in our book, did not yield the desired result; it was in bad taste.

Police arrested the teenage hacker in record time. We suggested in this space that in a country where even terrorists were being pardoned the schoolboy should not be treated like a criminal though he had been on the wrong side of the law. We pointed out that President Sirisena had even made a grand show of pardoning an LTTE cadre who plotted to kill him while he was a minister in the Rajapaksa government. The President, a caring father himself, to his credit, rightly showed clemency to the schoolboy. His action warmed the cockles of many a heart.

But, Thursday’s show of benevolence at the Presidential Secretariat sent out the wrong message to the youth. For, the other young cyber freaks with a bent for hacking may think the best way to receive gifts from the President is to hack into his website.

President Sirisena has unflinchingly rewarded political rejects who lost the last general election with National List slots and even cabinet posts. They are now doing political hack jobs for him as is evident from their tirades against his bêtes noires. So, the President may not have seen anything wrong in inviting the young hacker and presenting him with a gift besides posing for a picture with him. But, in so doing he has given that teenager the same treatment as the student who behave in an exemplary manner, excel at highly competitive examinations and are invited to the President’s House in recognition of their outstanding performance.

We hope the President’s website won’t attract more teenage hackers seeking publicity.

Brouhaha over a chair

An MP has made an issue of an engineer sitting on the Speaker’s chair while the House was being cleaned recently. Claiming that an affront has been caused not only to the Speaker but also the entire nation, the lawmaker has called for action against the ‘culprit’.

We thought it was the MPs misbehaving in the House who really insulted the Speaker and brought the national legislature as well as the country into disrepute. Once a group of MPs exchanged blows and removed some important documents from the Speaker’s table during a stormy session. W. J. M. Lokubandara, who was the Speaker at that time, minced no words when he said what he had witnessed in the House on that day was terrorism!

Incumbent Speaker Karu Jayasuriya is of excellent temperament, nay, he is amiability personified. But, he also saw red recently when some unruly MPs ignored his repeated calls for order during a commotion in the House; he urged them ‘not to do in a dining hall what they did in a toilet’.

In some western democracies, people are free to sit in lawmakers’ chairs when parliaments are not in session. But, in this country even an MP’s buttocks are covered by parliamentary privileges. So, the engineer concerned, being a member of the parliament staff, should have known better. Some people get into trouble because of their tongues, but here is a case of an educated, intelligent man having got into hot water because of his derriere!

Why the aforesaid engineer ever wanted to sit in Parliament defies comprehension. If he had really wanted to do so, he could have dropped out of school and taken to politics like most of the present-day MPs; many of them haven’t even passed the GCE O/L examination. Blessed with a mathematical mind, he could easily have become a calculating politician and gone places. Had he done so without taking the trouble of studying hard and completing his higher studies, he would have been able to amass a great deal of wealth through illegal means and become an MP or even the Prime Minister or the President.