If wishes were horses …

Thursday 24th August, 2023

It must have gladdened the hearts of all Sri Lankans, who are undergoing untold suffering owing to corruption, waste and economic mismanagement, to hear that the law had eventually caught up with two foreign political leaders. Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was arrested and taken to jail, on Tuesday, upon his return home, after 15 years, to a hero’s welcome by a large number of his supporters all clad in red. He was arrested while the Thai Parliament was meeting to install his party’s candidate, Srettha Thavisin, as the new Prime Minister amidst a great deal of horse-trading and legal wrangling. On the same day, in the UK, Nigeria’s ex-oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke, who was a prominent member of the Goodluck Jonathan administration, was charged with bribery. Her assets worth millions of dollars have been frozen as part of an investigation in the UK, where she has been living.

Interestingly, it was on the basis of evidence furnished by the International Corruption Unit of the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) that Alison-Madueke was arraigned on bribery charges, according to international media reports. The US Department of Justice has also recovered assets worth USD 53 million linked to her. Curiously, the western outfits that specialise in probing illegally-acquired wealth of foreign leaders, and recovering them, have failed to trace the ill-gotten foreign assets of Sri Lankan politicians whom they consider obstacles to the furtherance of their geopolitical agendas. Is it that the Sri Lankan crooks are smarter than the western investigators?

It may be recalled that during the early stages of the UNP-led Yahapalana administration, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and President Maithripala Sirisena declared that they would enlist the support of some western governments to recover Sri Lanka’s stolen assets, and set up the Financial Crimes Investigation Division (FCID) for that purpose. What enabled the Wickremesinghe-Sirisena duo to capture power, in 2015, was their effective anti-corruption drive coupled with solemn pledges to bring back the country’s stolen wealth and have the corrupt thrown behind bars. It is unthinkable that the western investigative outfits have failed in their endeavour, given their capabilities, influence and resources. One wonders whether they have gathered all necessary information about Sri Lanka’s stolen assets but chosen to use it to blackmail the culprits here instead of disclosing it to ensure that justice is served for the Sri Lankan public. Perhaps, this may explain why the self-proclaimed patriotic leaders who would roar, mouthing anti-western rhetoric, a few years ago, are cooing today.

Sirisena hitched his wagon to the Rajapaksas in 2018. Wickremesinghe, who vowed to ensure the incarceration of the Rajapaksas for bribery, corruption, abuse of power and various crimes, is now defending the Rajapaksa family to the hilt, having achieved his presidential dream with their help! Worse, he is heading a government, which some of its own ministers consider corrupt. State Minister Premalal Jayasekera, addressing the media briefing, on Tuesday, disclosed some mega rackets at the Colombo Port, including a questionable land deal which, he said, the JVP, too, had chosen to turn a blind eye to. Wickremesinghe also opened an escape route for Minister of Port and Shipping and Aviation Nimal Siripala de Silva, who had to resign from the Cabinet on President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s watch due to an allegation of bribery levelled by a Japanese diplomat. The JVP, the self-proclaimed crusader against bribery and corruption, had no qualms about propping up the corrupt Yahapalana regime despite the Treasury bond scams. Its former comrades have accused it of having invested a huge amount of undisclosed funds overseas!

Unhappy is the land that needs heroes, as a Brechtian aphorism goes. Sri Lankans tend to see a hero or heroine in every average yet glib politician with rhetoric rolling off his or her restless tongue, as we argued in a previous comment. Their despondency is such that they pin their hopes on the politicians they once rejected as worthless. It is only natural that they have become utterly disillusioned with the mainstream political parties. Some of them are even ready to repeat the disastrous experiment of entrusting the task of governing the country to neophytes. They elevated Gotabaya sans any experience in governance to the presidency, expecting him to perform economic miracles, but he bankrupted the country; now some of them are supporting a bunch of self-important radicals who are clinging on to some anachronistic communist shibboleths, claiming to be able to turn the national economy around although they have not even run a wayside suruttu kade (cigar kiosk). No wonder so many Sri Lankans are leaving the country, and their exodus is similar to the Masai Mara wildebeest migration in Kenya.

Sri Lankans must be hoping and praying that their corrupt leaders will face the same fate as Shinawatra and Alison-Madueke. It is said that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.