It is our culture !

You hit the nail on the head with your Editorial (The Island) of Tuesday, April 26th: “Sinners stoning sinners “.

You ask:

Why do principals take bribes and teachers don’t teach?

How can the health workers who get paid for the work they do not do, and resort to their trade union power to scare the authorities into submission?

Do Lawyers issue receipts for the money they receive from their clients to make the taxman’s job easy?

What action have the public sector trade unions that are out for politicians’ scalps taken to improve the productivity of the state service and make it people-friendly?

Can we cleanse the CEB and other vital state institutions of corrupt elements by getting rid of only rogues in the garb of politicians?

I am very sorry,  my answer is: It is our culture ! As someone wisely said, in our culture, it starts at grade one when parents teach their almost infant children to lie through their little teeth about their residence to get entrance to better schools.  Should I say more ?

The bitter truth is that nepotism and corruption have become a part of our culture, and it is not just a few people, it is society-wide. Pick a number, 80%, 90%, 99%, 99.9%?  That would be a nice post-graduate thesis for an honest post-graduate student. The strangest (or maybe I should say the most natural) thing is that a person who laments bitterly and angrily about somebody else’s corruption just turns around and gives a bribe to get a penalty revoked or reduced (for a speeding ticket or anything else) or calls an uncle who is an ASP ; or the person did not plan well ahead and wants to jump the queue to get a police report for a visa application in a hurry and bribes, etc,  and the list goes on and the fish get bigger.

The final and the bitterest truth is that even those protesting people at the GFG are corrupt and practice nepotism to a greater or lesser extent compared to the rest of our society, and some other post-graduate student has to tell us that magic percentage.

Then you may ask what the solution is.  There are three:

1. As some say, we need a “Lee Kuan Yew  or a “China” or a “Vietnam”  or similar (i.e. a stable government, a benevolent dictator with a big vision for the country for the longer term, not just for five years)  or

2. If we want to preserve our “precious”  “democracy”, I would say, slowly privatise as many government institutes as appropriately possible (we have to keep certain institutions public including regulatory bodies).  This is the only way we could get rid of those shameless, parasitic freeloaders in our society (the type who fraudulently claim colossal amounts of public tax money as overtime) who plunder with no shame the taxes paid by those parents who can not afford to feed their children even a single meal day.  How sick is that?

When the country develops, society will become less corrupt, and we will have fewer corrupt politicians as well.

3. Last but not least, this is probably the best solution. It is also the easiest to implement: just promise yourself that from this day on, you will not ever, directly or indirectly, in or outside Sri Lanka, engage in any corrupt activity or practice nepotism of any shape or form or support, espouse, promote, finance, encourage or advocate any corrupt activity or practice of nepotism.  Then the country will become corruption-free automatically.

Dear fellow citizens, be an example to the rest. If you can do that, you may not need to do anything else for the country.

L.S.