Ceylon Today Editorial

THE ABDICATION OF LEADERSHIP

02 April 2017

The GMOA's membership has apparently been extremely busy getting in touch with 'more than 100 trade unions including the Joint Trade Union Federation,' to exert pressure on the government to shut down SAITM's medical degree awarding programme.

We've been having the Joint Opposition, the JVP as well as the Inter-University Students Federation taking turns to turn the heat on the government to force it to cave into their demand to disqualify SAITM from its right to award a medical degree.

Not too long ago the GMOA and others were abandoning patients to walk out on strike in support of the Joint Opposition's demand for the government to withdraw the Value Added Tax, introduced to raise urgently needed revenue for the government. They, of course felt it alright for them to demand special cars and other perks for themselves.

The government needs to be warned that it simply cannot afford to continue to be submitting to this kind of outrageous sabotage masquerading behind a disguise of medical ethics. From revenue, to education and now to the higher education medical sector, this sabotage has been invading almost every step taken by the government to usher in the sorely needed development and attract foreign investments which alone can create the desperately needed jobs for over 200,000 school leavers every year.

This is not legitimate demand for redress of a just grievance but a vulgar exhibition of political sabotage. They create every dystopian condition, stand in the way of development, harass government at every turn and through them imbue in the masses a sense of discontent with the government and then challenge the government to call LG elections knowing too well that ignorant and impressionable voters could be persuaded to vote against it. Most reprehensible has been the exploitation of maimed soldiers to gate crash the Presidential residence, egging them on to demand pensions which should have been ordered...and paid...by the government that recruited them and sent them to the frontlines where they were sitting ducks for enemy fire and land mines, while those taunting them on were the leaders then, safely ensconced in their luxurious homes and offices in Colombo. But yet, after having visited these same disabled soldiers in hospitals to extract maximum media mileage even from their pathetic states of intense pain from decapitated limbs, the then leaders of government walked away from the cameras without a thought about ordering compensation and pensions to these maimed soldiers, then. They just basked in the victory won by these "war heroes" to whom they failed to pay pensions.

What hypocritically empty humbugs, one and all! And they then stoop to the incredibly unscrupulous level of taunting these self-same maimed soldiers to stage threatening protest demonstrations demanding the pensions which should have been paid to them when their role in the war ended long before the war ended.

Why were the pensions not paid to them back then? When their war ended long before the war ended? When the ugly public chest-thumping went on endlessly while these wounded soldiers lay recuperating in hospitals and in their thatched village homes, why were they then not given pensions and the peace of mind that would have come of it? Poor, ignorant soldiers...how they are being callously duped by ruthless political cunning.

All of this does not augur well for the government's stability. It's time the President and Prime Minister took a firm stand against this vulgar sabotage and made its legitimacy a tangible thing. It's time the government started backing its Judiciary and wielded the big stick against those who for ten years abused the Judiciary and now attempt to undermine it in its rightful exercise of the law and Constitution.

If an Appellate Court ruling can be allowed to be trampled into the dirt the government has then begun to abdicate its power, renege on its commitments to uphold law, order and justice.

The University Grants Commission granted approval and registered SAITM on 30 August 2011 to conduct the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) programme, yet hundreds of medical students of SAITM were deprived registration by SLMC, citing inadequate clinical training.

Then all that has to be done is to give them that training, let their adequacy be ascertained on that basis and then allowed to begin their medical practice.

The Health Ministry must arrange this immediately. Medical students at State universities pass out supposedly as fit and able practitioners. How is it then that we have an endless list of medical misadventures in State hospitals, the last of which was a female Law student's hand being amputated in a hospital down south?

The political mafia of the GMOA and its 100 Trade Unions, have been allowed to hold the nation and government to ransom for too long.