Ranil’s Honeymoon With The ‘Inglorious Illegitimates’
By Vishwamithra –
“Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.” ~ Joseph Conrad
The ‘super rich’ class in Colombo may be still enjoying their misguided honeymoon with Ranil Wickremesinghe. His flirtation with those who have made enormous amounts of money while being in the Rajapaksa regime still seems to be continuing with unbroken symmetry. No-confidence motions in Parliament do not have any validity nor act as an impediment for those men and women whose sole occupancy is pathological indulgence in corrupt practices; their seeking after esoteric bodily pleasures and extra-curricular activities which even Vātsyāyana, the author of of Kama Sutra, has opted to leave out have not come to a rest. While hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have sacrificed their daily quota of meals from three to one or two to one a day, these members who belong to that exclusive club of ‘super rich’ keep dancing in their own caravans of ‘evening delights’ and mid-day slumber.
An absolutely despicable way of political life which had been the order of the day during the Rajapaksa time now has assumed a different character, which is more treacherous in its intrinsic measure than the one that claimed the country’s solvency. A leader who does not have a mandate from the electors has become the ‘darling’ of the West and the ‘pet-boy’ of the international lending agencies has begun his exotic wandering in the woods of financial chaos and sociopolitical confusion. Along the way, instead of exploring new paths and overcoming insurmountable hurdles, he has opted to play and experiment with the land’s unsteady and irregular contours and steeply climbs.
When the country is deeply entrenched in desperation in search of answers and solutions to corruption, the most telling issue of the day next to the near economic calamity, Ranil Wickremesinghe failed to lay down his conditions for accepting support for the the falling Rajapaksa regime. One of those conditions should have been doing away with those Pohottuwa politicians whose garb and inner characters were unalterably stained with blatant corruption and financial dishonesty. His rush to enwrap himself with cosmetically appealing Prime Minister-ship canceled all his honesty and objectivity; his greed for power and desperation to cling on to anything alluring towards closeness to the ultimate prize of throne overwhelmed the real and dire need of the hour.
Aragalaya-22 opened the eyes of the country. It showed the country that her youth is no more interested in greed, cover-ups of misdoings, ethnic and religious divisions, fleeting luxuries; theirs was a cause larger than life: laser-focused commitment to a cause larger than power and self-indulgence, unity amongst all strata of our men, women and children, outright rejection of seventy five years of inefficiency, lack of genuine patriotism and undiluted and dark corruption were amongst the aims and goals of the new generation. Our educated youth had no time and space for any accommodation of casual and politician-backed party loyalties. A cause that has led many generations all over the world in the story of man, seemed to have been motivating our youth too.
The 2011 Egyptian revolution, also widely known as ‘Arab Spring’, in which the Egyptian protesters’ grievances focused on political and legal issues including high unemployment, rising cost of living, corruption at all layers of politicians and bureaucrats, lack of political freedom, civil liberty. Within three weeks of the protests, Hosni Mubarak resigned form power, an inglorious event somewhat similar to the unceremonious exit of Gotabaya Rajapaksa from Presidency.
But what followed Mubarak’s exit was no better. Egypt is no democracy. Being governed by strong men of dictatorial tendencies such as Gamal Abdul Nasser, who presided over the country that bragged about a pseudo-democracy then is still being governed by dictators, especially of the military genre, Egyptians today are no closer to genuine democratic way of life and corruption-free social architecture.
Between Aragalaya-22 and Arab-Spring, the sociocultural contexts are as wide and unbridgeable as one could imagine. Yet the fundamentals that dictate human advancement remain as constant and consistent as history has told us many a time. Brutal suppression of youth, rising costs of living for the ordinary men, oppressive legislation on basic human rights and freedoms would cause uprising anywhere in the world where the conditions have matured to ignite such issues that have remained dormant up to the time that suppression is no more bearable.
The humble beginnings of Aragalaya-22 and its partial success seem to be fading away; installation of Ranil Wickremesinghe on throne has diminished all possibilities of a real change that the youth were clamoring for. The latest Pandora Papers have allegedly revealed that one of the Ministers who happens to the man in charge of maintaining law and order in the country has broken a fundamental covenant that each and every politician is supposed to have sworn to uphold.
As per Scilla Alleci’s article appearing in International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ blog, ‘Sri Lanka’s public security minister, Tiran Alles, is the first sitting Sri Lankan minister to be identified in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Pandora Papers data trove as having offshore holdings. An ICIJ analysis of the leaked records and U.K.’s public property register shows that Alles, a media tycoon and politician, owns two British Virgin Islands companies that hold properties in London’.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Inc. (ICIJ), is an independent global network of 280 investigative journalists and over 140 media organizations spanning more than 100 countries. It is based in Washington D.C., with personnel in Australia, France, Spain, Hungary, Serbia, Belgium and Ireland.
The ICIJ was launched in 1997 by American journalist Charles Lewis as an initiative of the Center for Public Integrity, with the aim of exposing international crime and corruption. In 2017, it became a fully independent organization and was later granted nonprofit (501 C3) status.
Ranil Wickremesinghe, the so-called ‘Mr Clean’ has asked the ‘fox’ to guard the henhouse. The IMF may have overlooked these wild incongruities when they examined the credentials of those who are charged with spending the loans they lent. It is true that the mission of the IMF is not a political one; nor is it anyway related to the sociocultural journey of the country. Yet its economic and financial governance should be linked to honesty, integrity and very credibility of those who matter. The IMF, as any other international agencies, has no heart or soul when examining the real status of the country they are supposed to help and support. Mere numbers of the economy, the varied indices and their relation to mindless behavior of society have not really told us the unmitigated truth; not any time in our short post-independent history.
In addition to Tiran Alles, Prasanna Ranatunga is another Sri Lankan politician from whose arm the badge of corruption is hanging and he wears it without any shame or disgrace. A member of Parliament and current Minister of Urban Development and Housing who was also appointed as Chief Government Whip on April 18, 2022. On 6 June, 2022 Ranatunga was sentenced to two years of rigorous imprisonment suspended for five years, after he was found guilty of threatening a businessman from whom he solicited a bribe of Rs. 64 million to evict unauthorized occupants of a parcel of land.
Ranil’s Cabinet of Ministers is a den of wolves and hyenas who begin salivating when they behold a prospective prey. Predators of national coffers, these scavengers have chosen to ransack the country which they swore to serve, protect and defend when they assumed office. They have made our coffers empty, land barren, the legislature a mockery, the judiciary a laughing stock and Executive a lethal arm of a warped-thinking ruler.
Crushed in between the clutches engaged by a government consisting of cruel and incompetent politicians and apathetic bureaucracy, the country’s wheels of progress and advancement have come to a dead halt. Our youth’s dreams and aspirations are being shattered and their only way out seems to be a way out of the land they were born in. Such a pathetic fate awaits generations yet unborn. Farmers are without fertilizer, laborers are without work, clerks and peons are without a pay rise, teachers and principals are without tangible growth in their schoolchildren’s thirsty minds, mid-level executives have no money to pump petrol of diesel for their motorbikes and cars. A brewing class difference is threatening to explode if and when conditions ripen.
Ranil Wickremesinghe cannot be forgiven nor go unpunished if he fails to go before the people when the time comes for elections. He cannot resort to the tactics of his uncle JR and call for referenda and postponement of the people’s choice. It is true that there are no permanent solutions for a country’s problems and issues. Yet each country, every now and then, comes in contact with a situation and a challenge that confronts its very existence as one with conscientious men and women; their courage is challenged and their honesty questioned; their raison d’etre is scrutinized. As one single nation, one single fraternity and community among the family of nations, Sri Lanka has to justify her stance and her very fitness as an equal partner. Do we have the strength to withstand all that inquiry and still stand firm? If then, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, ‘you’ll be a nation, my Mother’!
*The writer can be contacted at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com
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