Failed messiahs

Wednesday 25th November 2020

The UNP has not yet been able to appoint its National List MP. There are many contenders for the post, but the UNP old guard wants party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe appointed; he, however, seems to be in two minds.

Former Minister Arjuna Ranatunga has said the country will gain if Wickremesinghe enters Parliament via the National List because the latter will be able to help the government save the economy. The immediate task before Wickremesinghe is to save the party and not anything else. Charity, they say, begins at home. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Wickremesinghe is an experienced politician, and, therefore, better qualified than anyone else to represent the UNP in Parliament.

Even if Ranil were to be brought back to Parliament as the Opposition Leader, he would not be able to influence the government’s economic policy. The current regime, intoxicated with power, is obdurate and impervious to reason; and not even Sakra will be able to knock any sense into its grandees who are full of themselves.

The Opposition, however, may benefit if Ranil returns to Parliament, for it is short of good debaters to take on the government. The Opposition is apparently all at sea; it could have scored heavily in the ongoing parliamentary debate on Budget 2021, which has some gaping holes, which need to be highlighted. Most of its MPs have been barking up the wrong tree; it is doubtful whether they have even read and understood the budget properly. They, save one or two, confine their remarks to generalities instead of addressing specifics, and the vital aspects of the budget have, therefore, gone unaddressed. What really matters in parliamentary debates is not the numerical strength of a party, but the quality of arguments its members put forth. How legends like Sarath Muttetuwegama held out against the mighty JRJ government, which had a five-sixths majority in Parliament, comes to mind.

Is Ranil capable of helping the government save the economy, as Ranatunga has claimed? If so, why couldn’t he straighten up the economy when he was the Prime Minister and de facto head of state? If he had developed the economy in keeping with his pre-2015 promises, the UNP would not have been in the current predicament. The blame for the failure of the yahapalana government cannot be laid entirely at the feet of former President Maithripala Sirisena.

True, Sirisena, as the President, sought to settle political scores with the UNP and threw a monkey wrench in the works towards the latter part of the yahapalana government, but the UNP had time from January 2015 to mid-2018, to develop the economy. Instead of doing so, it got embroiled in various frauds such as the Treasury bond scams, which led to its undoing.

All politicians look capable when they are in the Opposition. They tell governments what to do and how to do it, but when given mandates to govern the country, they fail miserably. The leaders of the current dispensation, during their Opposition days, ridiculed the yahapalana government for its failure to tackle the country’s burning problems, which are legion, and undertook to magic them away immediately after capturing power. People gave them three huge mandates at the local government, presidential and parliamentary elections in 2018, 2019 and 2020 respectively. They are now ensconced in power, living high on the hog, but the country’s problems are far from over. They cannot even ensure that the gazettes they put out at a rate are implemented. It looks as if we had another NATO (No-Action-Talk-Only) government.

Governance in this country has been a process of self-proclaimed messiahs becoming failures and vice versa. Regrettably, people have had to replace one set of failed messiahs with another, hoping for deliverance. Madness has been defined as doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.