Misnomers, nostrums and waste

Monday 15th February, 2021

The Pivithuru Hela Urumaya (PHU) reportedly seeks to have the official name of the state of Sri Lanka stripped of the adjectives, ‘democratic’ and ‘socialist’; it also wants the new Constitution being drafted to call the country the Republic of Sri Lanka. Whether a country is democratic or socialist should be judged by the way it is governed, the PHU has argued. This argument sounds tenable. Moreover, one may say the lumping together of the aforesaid modifiers is queer in that the country is certainly not ‘socialist’, given the inequitable distribution of national wealth and glaring disparities in every sector; whether it is ‘democratic’ is open to question. Anyway, what’s in a name?

All political parties that voted for the 20th Amendment to the Constitution are without any moral right to speak of democracy, much less champion it. Democracy is coterminous with the separation of powers, which helps prevent excesses on the part of a government by ensuring coexistence and cooperation among its three branches. As air (va), bile (pith) and phlegm (sem) are to human body, so are the executive, the legislature and the judiciary to a political system; any imbalance thereof is harmful.

One of the biggest flaws in the present Constitution is the concentration of state power in the executive presidency. Some half-hearted attempts were made over the last several decades to rectify it, but without success. The 18th Amendment made an already bad situation worse by causing the executive presidency to be even more powerful, and the 19th Amendment, which was intended to be a remedy proved to be a nostrum because it, for political reasons, vested more powers in the Prime Minister than necessary instead of bringing about the much-needed balance. The 20th Amendment restored the status quo ante. What should have been done was not to abolish the 19th Amendment but to amend it. Sadly, the SLPP bulldozed its way through and the country is where it is today.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s presence in Parliament on Thursday served as a reminder that some constitutional provisions in place to make the executive and the legislature work in tandem have taken the opposite effect. It is said that the framers of the present Constitution expected the practice of the President sitting in Parliament to help forge ties between the two institutions. But, sadly, the ruling party MPs used the President’s presence to make a show of their servility to the executive. Every President has exuded a sort of my-right-there-is-none-to-dispute attitude in Parliament.

Meanwhile, some MPs have expressed concern about failure on the part of Parliament to manage its time properly. Sri Lankan politicians are notorious for their penchant for talking a blue streak. They have a remarkable ability to say so little in so many words, and, therefore, take an hour to say what can be said in five minutes. It is only natural that the Speaker has a hard time stopping MPs from exceeding allotted time even when bills and motions are guillotined.

SJB MP Buddhika Parthirana, the other day, questioned the wisdom of Parliament allocating time for condolence votes. The deceased MPs were praised by their political rivals who had tarred and feathered them, Pathirana told Parliament, calling the practice of holding condolence votes a joke. He is right. The government and the Opposition are red in tooth and claw when they clash, and their members trade insult and even blows in the House. But when one of them happens to go the way of all flesh, all of them shed copious tears and shower praise on him or her to the point of queasiness. MP Pathirana has also pointed out that a condolence vote is a monumental waste of time.

Meanwhile, the question time also drags on, and the party leaders have decided to limit it. But this decision has not found favour with some MPs who ask too many questions, most of which are irrelevant. The real problem is the MPs’ love for prefacing their questions with long statements in a bid to grab media attention. Not to be outdone, ministers who provide answerers thereto do likewise, haranguing the House as if to make their rivals regret having asked questions. All efforts by the Chair to have questions and answers shortened are in vain.

What the MPs need to be told is that public funds to the tune of millions of rupees spent on parliamentary sittings go down the gurgler when they waste time in the House.