Pots and kettles

Thursday 8th February, 2024

There could hardly be anything more shameful for a person than to be accused of carrying out pharmaceutical rackets and amassing wealth at the expense of poor patients who are fighting for their lives. Equally reprehensible is the act of defending such racketeers. One sees no difference between the crooks who endanger the lives of the sick to enrich themselves and the savages who snatched necklaces of the tsunami victims in their death throes, in Dec., 2004.

Keheliya Rambukwella, who had to resign from the Cabinet on Tuesday after being arrested and held on remand over the procurement of a consignment of fake immunoglobulin during his tenure as the Minister of Health, was invited to attend the ceremonial opening of the new session of Parliament yesterday. Thankfully, he did not turn up.

The SLPP-UNP government must not be allowed to absolve itself of responsibility for the health sector corruption by throwing Rambukwella to the wolves. It stooped so low as to defend him to the hilt when a motion of no confidence was moved against him in Parliament in 2023 over the Health Ministry procurement scams. It would not have allowed him to be arrested last week but for its fear that protests against him would snowball into another popular uprising. However, it has enabled him to stay in the prison hospital.

We are never short of self-righteous politicians who take the moral high ground and condemn their opponents as crooks. The SJB is taking great pains to make itself out to be a clean party, and its MPs are out for Rambukwella’s scalp. The Opposition’s backing is crucial to the success of any anti-corruption campaign, but the SJB politicians are not paragons of virtue; they have a history of shielding the corrupt. They defended a group of Treasury bond racketeers when they were in the Yahapalana government as members of the UNP. Some of them prevented the first COPE (Committee on Public Enterprises) report on the Treasury bond racket being made public, and then did their damnedest to derail the second COPE probe into the bond scam, but in vain. Finally, they diluted the COPE report in favour of the racketeers by having a slew of footnotes incorporated into it. The ‘footnote gang’ is now in the SJB, which is on a mission to rid the country of corruption!

The JVP leaders never miss an opportunity to tear the corrupt elements in the government to shreds—and rightly so. They are demanding deterrent punishment for the racketeers who procured fake immunoglobulin and made a killing. One cannot but agree with them. However, the question is why they backed the Yahapalana government despite its corruption.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe, addressing Parliament, yesterday, said a JVP nominee had been appointed as the head of Anti-Corruption Committee office under the Yahapalana administration, and some of the files pertaining to corruption were still with the JVP. In late 2018, the JVP defended the Yahapalana government when President Sirisena tried to dislodge it, and subsequently propped it up.

Interestingly, the JVP Leader Dissanayake displayed a large number of files at a press conference in 2022, claiming that they were on corrupt deals struck by his party’s political opponents, especially the Rajapaksas and their loyalists. Are they the files which, President Wickremesinghe says, the JVP did not return to the Yahapalana Anti-Corruption Committee?

SLFP leader Maithripala Sirisena pretends to be the epitome of morality, but he has also shielded the corrupt. Having secured the coveted presidency with the help of the UNP in Jan. 2015, he dissolved Parliament six months later, thereby foreclosing the presentation of the first COPE report on the Treasury bond scams to the House. Thereafter, he queered the pitch for the SLFP-led UPFA to settle scores with his predecessor, Mahinda Rajapaksa, thus enabling the UNP to form a government, which caused the second Treasury bond scam to be carried out in early 2016. In October 2018, he unashamedly joined forces with the Rajapaksas, whom he had demonised ahead of the 2015 presidential election and pledged to throw behind bars for corruption, etc.

The TNA and the SLMC backed the Yahapalana government, which earned notoriety for corruption, and are therefore without any moral right to vilify others as crooks.

There may be some MPs of integrity, but the political parties represented in Parliament and their leaders have sullied their reputations either by indulging in corruption and/or defending the corrupt. When they fight, condemning one another for corruption, it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.