Kos kola kolam* of thoththa baba govt.
27 January 2017
Co-Cabinet Spokesman, Dr. Rajitha Senaratne addressing the media
on Wednesday, tore into a high-up in the Agricultural Department for
suggesting that the public eat croton and kos kola (jak leaves) as food
substitutes; he said if he had been the Minister of Agriculture he
would have got that official to consume kos kola without recommending
it to others. We believe that before shoving kos kola down anyone
else’s throat, the government ministers, Senaratne included, should
partake of it in sufficient quantities if they think they can ‘fool all
the people all the time’.
Senaratne had the audacity to
claim that Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe had attended a recent
tyre factory launching ceremony in Horana without any knowledge of the
background of its owner! And, in the same breath, he added, on being
questioned by a journalist, that the PM had got to know the businessman
for what he really was—a frontman for the Rajapaksas—only on the
morning of the day of the ceremony and a no-show at the event would have
amounted to an act of discourtesy! He blamed some ministers for having
misled the PM, but refused to name them. He seems to have taken people
for suckers.
One is intrigued. Even if the PM had been
informed of the track record of the entrepreneur concerned only one
hour before the event at issue, he should have decided against
attending it and told the public the reason for his decision.
It
is hard to believe that the PM had been in the dark about the
background of the Horana investor, who had been accused by his own
government of having purchased shares of foreign hotels for the former
ruling clan. President Maithripala Sirisena, also, claims from time to
time, that he is not aware of certain issues. Are we to gather from the
Cabinet Spokesman’s tall stories about the Horana factory that we are
being ruled by a bunch of thoththa babas or babes in arms?
The
dental surgeon turned Health Minister, pretending that what he was
telling the media was the ‘tooth’, the whole ‘tooth’ and nothing but the
‘tooth’, went on to claim the Horana entrepreneur was investing the
Rajapaksas’ money in his factory. If so, it is a blatant act of money
laundering. Why hasn’t the FCID arrested him? Who is shielding him? The
ministers who ‘misled the PM’ on behalf of Rajapaksas’ ‘frontman’ must
also be arrested for aiding and abetting the crime!
Asked
by a journalist why Arjun Aloysius of Perpetual Treasuries fame had not
been arrested for the Central Bank bond scams, Senaratne gave a
yanne-koheda-malle-pol (totally irrelevant) answer. Aloysius had been a
friend of Namal Rajapaksa, Senaratne claimed. If so, then that is all
the more reason why the incumbent regime antipathetic towards the
Rajapaksas should have him arrested forthwith. Does the government
think the masses are as stupid as kos kola-eating goats to buy into its
cock-and-bull stories?
If there are corrupt elements in the
garb of ministers as Senaratne has told the media then the entire
Cabinet must be made to pay for that. Sprint legend, Usain Bolt, will
lose one of his Olympic gold medals because a team mate in Jamaica’s
gold winning quartet has tested positive for a banned substance. That
is what collective responsibility is all about.
How can the government call itself a yahapalana administration while having corrupt ministers within its ranks?
If
the thoththa baba regime has no answers to media queries and/or lacks
ministers to defend it in a convincing manner, it had better cancel the
weekly post-Cabinet briefings without letting its spokesmen make
facetious remarks and cut pathetic figures in the process besides
wasting journalists’ valuable time.
Even the rib-ticklingly
hilarious Charlie Chaplin shows have more gravitas and send across
more meaningful messages than kos kola kolam aka the
Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government’s media briefings.
* Kolam is a form of non-ritualistic folk theatre in Sri Lanka.
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