Actor-turned activist alleges Parliament seeking to steal Aragalaya triumph!

‘Executive presidency must GO along with Prez and PM’

By Shamindra Ferdinando

Actor and civil society activist Peter D’ Almeida has called for the abolition of the executive presidency.

Addressing the media at the President’s House, Almeida declared that doing away with the constitutionally dictatorial executive presidency should be an immediate priority against the backdrop of the public triumph over the government.

Almeida represented the Artistes for the People’s Movement that had campaigned for the resignation of Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Entrepreneur Almeida lashed out at Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena and Members of Parliament representing all political parties for seeking the credit for the removal of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Referring to hastily arranged meetings, attended by party leaders,that had been chaired by the Speaker, to work out plans to replace the Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s administration, Almeida questioned the role played by current Members of Parliament in the run-up to what he called the July 09 revolution.

The activist declared that having conveniently failed the public and done absolutely nothing to get rid of the President, the members of Parliament now wanted to steal an unprecedented public victory over the Rajapaksa dictatorship. Almeida repeatedly called lawmakers members of a failed Parliament that never addressed concerns of those struggling to make ends meet.

An angry looking activist declared that interventions made by the parliament meant to sustain an utterly corrupt political party system were not acceptable to them under any circumstances.

Almeida said that a genuine democracy couldn’t be re-established as long as the executive presidency, introduced by JRJ in 1978, remained. Therefore, removal of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe should be followed by the abolition of the executive presidency which was nothing but a curse. Late JRJ, wherever he was, must be happy the executive presidency still remained, Almeida said.

In a brief but hard hitting address to the media, Almeida said that those who brought the President’s House, Presidential Secretariat and Temple Trees under their control didn’t care how constitutional experts addressed the issues at hand. Constitutional experts would explain the difficulty in doing away with the executive presidency, Almeida said, calling for a sustained campaign to pressure the Parliament to take tangible measures to abolish executive presidency.