Sunday Island Editorial

What has Independence brought us?

05 February 2017

The 69th Independence Day celebrations yesterday were no different to the previous such events Lankans have been treated to over the years. There was the spit and polish of the Galle Face march past with the President, Prime Minister, other VIPs and the diplomatic corps in attendance, the various statements traditionally issued on these occasions and the thunder of the big guns firing a salute to the nation. We do not know at the time of writing whether the usual illumination of government buildings have been dispensed with owing to the impending power shortage. Since television came to Sri Lanka post-1977, it was possible for the cameras to bring what is undoubtedly a visual treat to the homes of increasingly larger numbers obviating the need for people to trudge to Colombo’s popular seafront in the blazing sun to take in the show. In the pre-television era, fairly large crowds, many of them families and friends of servicemen participating in the parade, braved the heat to be present at Galle Face. Today TV signals are received almost island wide and most homes, however humble, are equipped with a television receiver so viewing the spectacle has become much easier.

The statements, of course, are as platitudinous as they have always been. It is not difficult to predict what our leaders will say on these occasions. There is a lot of distance between the saying and the doing and Lankans have good reason to be disappointed about what Independence has delivered to the people as a whole. No doubt the political class then and now have benefited from self-government. Home has never been so good for those anointed with elected office particularly in the later post-Independence era. Politicians of an earlier vintage were less inclined to ladle the gravy on to their own plates than their successors have been to the disgust of their electors. But there is no doubt that, notwithstanding nostalgic longing for the more spacious times of yesteryear, the standard of living of the vast majority of the people have improved by leaps and bounds post-Independence even though the country’s population has grown more than threefold from the 6.6 million it stood at in 1948. This has, of course, come at a price with the rupee losing its value with galloping inflation accompanied by exponential growth of money supply and urban land prices hitting unimaginable levels. But incomes too have grown with the president’s chauffeur today probably earning more than the Governor-General did when the British left our shores!

The feeling of exhilaration at the time of Independence that we had finally shed the colonial yoke has long since evaporated. There are those who like to think that life under British rule was superior to what it is under self-rule. Vested interests that were well served by colonial masters, preening themselves in top hats and tails and jostling for Imperial honors, may well have had their reasons for preference of the old order. But the new order, despite its admitted infirmities less evident during the early post-Independent years, had the advantage of the elected representatives of the people calling the shots for the betterment of the nation. It is self-evident that the rationale of colonialism was exploitation, sometimes rapacious, sometimes less so. The British certainly left us the excellent legacy of the English language, a sound public service, a judiciary widely perceived as impartial even though it took many years after Independence for people to be tried, sometimes for their lives, in the courts in a language they understood. Infrastructure here at Independence was far superior to what prevailed in most colonial territories; the virtue of democratic governance was well understood here. Our people have benefited from a welfare state better than our economic condition merited.

The first government of Independent Ceylon, as we were then, led by Prime Minister D. S. Senanayake, continued with fresh vigor the work that had already begun reclaiming the largely jungle-girt dry zone and reviving the hydraulic civilization created by our ancient kings. The various colonization schemes he set up were conceptualized to move people from over-crowded wet zone villages, hemmed in by plantations owned by British and domestic capital, to new lives in areas once plagued by malaria "with mosquitoes big as crows" as presented by DS’s opponents in those early days. The ‘old man’ understood the folly of transplanting poverty from the wet zone to the dry zone and the unit of allotment in the early colonization schemes was as high as five acres with three acres of irrigated paddy and two acres of highland. But the pressure for land, as evidenced by the more recent Mahaweli project and fragmentation of the original allotments, has taken their toll.

The truth of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew’s assertion that democracy in Sri Lanka "is the auctioning of non-existent resources" was proved most recently by the election promise of a Rs. 10,000 per month pay increase to the country’s heavily bloated public service. During his early years, Lee aspired to make Singapore a country like Ceylon was in those days. There is no disputing the fact that Sri Lanka has squandered resources and opportunities with contending forces making unrealistic promises to the electorate to get elected. ‘Jobs for the boys’ (and girls) have been a pervading disease that has bloated the public sector to obscene proportions to the detriment of the economy and the nation. Corruption, both at political and bureaucratic level, fuelled by profit-seeking businessmen has assumed frightening proportion. The yahapalana promise has fallen far short of expectation and people who cheered the 2015 regime change are cynically wondering whether the successor is any better than the predecessor.

The big question now is: Are we capable of breaking out of the rut? Can we as a people push our leaders to do better? People are no doubt expressing their dissatisfaction about a lot that is happening around them and it is to the credit of the government that it does not attempt to stifle criticism. But sadly the criticism is not yielding the desired self-correction.