Govt. alone cannot solve all problems

By Jehan Perera

The sudden spread of the coronavirus has caught both the government and larger society by surprise and much to our alarm. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has been chiding the people for failing to be more careful about their safety and taking the necessary precautions. Until the recent outbreak took on serious proportions, people felt obliged to wear face masks to avoid being questioned by the police rather than for their own personal safety and that of those around them. Participants at social gatherings frequently put aside their masks after they got inside the venue. The belief that was propagated by the government that Sri Lanka was the second most successful country in the world in terms of containing COVID-19 took a firm grip on the popular imagination.

The lax attitude towards the coronavirus pandemic on the part of the general population was due, for the most part, due to lack of adequate knowledge. The responsibility for this needs to be shared by the government and not simply on the lack of studiousness of the people. Even after the coronavirus statistics had surged, large political gatherings were to be seen in which those in attendance demonstrated a cavalier attitude to such safety concepts as social distancing and the wearing of face masks. The tragedy is that the government was caught by surprise as much as the rest of the population because they did not know of, or foresee, the spread of the invisible enemy.

The failure in knowledge gathering and sharing could have been avoided if there had been more participation of those from outside the government, including the political opposition, independent professional associations and civil society organisations such as the Sarvodaya Movement with its vision of the wellbeing of all in working with communities at the grassroots level. President Rajapaksa is reported to have said that if this was a real war, like the one he fought against the LTTE, he would know what to do. However, a fatal trend of non-transparent decision making was set early on in the Covid crisis. At the root of the problem was the political desire to hold elections early and so the truth of the situation was confined to only a few.

SOCIAL MEDIA

In leading the war with the LTTE as Defence Secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his team of top military commanders looked at the lessons of the past and the known behaviours of the enemy and designed effective counter-strategies. Making the point that wisdom comes late in the day, too late to make a new beginning, the philosopher Hegel said “The Owl of Minerva sets flight when the shades of twilight are already falling.” But it is human ingenuity and leadership that dares to rectify the mistakes that have been made by learning from the past and not repeating them. This applies as much to peacetime problems as to wartime ones.

The COVID-spread has now reached the level of the community. More and more of Colombo is being shut down as a desperate measure. Where there is community spread, the problem cannot be solved by decisions made at the top without reference to what is happening at the ground level. Those who are working on health issues at the community level, including both medical personnel and civil society organisations, need to be brought into the campaign. Sociology Professor Kalinga Tudor Silva has written that “In order to address these challenges effectively, we need to have a broader community participation at all levels, inclusive decision making and a two-way flow of information in place of a purely top down communication pattern.”

There is a concerted campaign in the social media that is focusing on the government’s failures. Its inability to halt the spread of the coronavirus is the main theme of this anti-government propaganda that seeks to especially target the president. There are invidious comparisons made between the indecisiveness of the present government and previous one. There are several examples of decisions being made and changed with regard to the extension of lockdowns and withdrawal of subsidies given to the consumer and producer items. There is a parallel to the initial period of the previous government where it was opposed from the very beginning and not given the time and space to settle down and figure out what needed to be done.

VISIONARY LEADERSHIP

In times of crisis and economic scarcity it is easy to scapegoat and target minorities which can then spread into violence. There is also hate news that focuses on ethnic and religious minorities with the allegation that the government is not doing enough to put them in their place. Starting with the Easter bombing last year and continuing to the presidential and general elections, government politicians destroyed the political reputations of their opponents for their failures. They pledged to ensure national security and to secure the position of the majority community whose vote they campaigned for and obtained in an unprecedented manner.

However, social media posts indicate that the manner in which the government secured its 2/3 majority in parliament by obtaining the support of Muslim parliamentarians who crossed over from the opposition to vote for it has eroded confidence in the government leadership’s commitment to the pledges they made. The question is how the government will seek to ensure the continuing confidence of the people in its governance and decisions it takes. President Rajapaksa is best positioned to make the decisions that call for sacrifice but which are fair by all. In Opposition, leaders such as Sajith Premadasa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake have the capacity to help the government do what is right without being politically partisan.

The virulent coronavirus is not the only destructive problem the country faces. There is also the deeply felt disaffection of the Muslim community, and also sections of the Christian community, at the practice of compulsory cremation of COVID victims. This is practised nowhere else in the world and contrary to World Health Organisation’s guidelines; it has brought a black mark to the country internationally. There are also the deep wounds of the 26-year war and missing persons and those detained for over a decade and they are a black cloud hanging over the country. It is to be hoped that President Rajapaksa can give the enlightened leadership that unites the country to face these challenges and overcome them all with the vision of the wellbeing of all.