President Premadasa, a committed human dynamo

Excerpted from the Memoirs of Chandra Wickremasinghe, Retd. Addl. Secy, to the President

I moved to the President’s Office as Additional Secretary to the President in February 1989. It was indeed a pleasure to work with my good friend KHJ Wijeyadasa who was as enthusiastic a workaholic as President Premadasa. Wije, was a proven, well seasoned administrator, who had shown his administrative ability as GA and in other responsible positions he had held in the public service. But his exceptional organizational prowess was brought out, I think, when the late PM Sirima Bandaranaike assigned him the daunting task of setting up the Land Reform Commission, vesting around one million acres of plantation lands in the State, virtually overnight. Wije, set about this enormous task with alacrity and had within a matter of months, taken over the entire extensive acreage and set up alternative managing Corporations/Boards, thereby ensuring a smooth transition from private to public ownership of all these broad acres across the island. He was at the helm of this gigantic undertaking till the advent of the new political dispensation in 1977.

I was privy to a memorable episode which I feel merits being fully recorded here, as it shows how high level decisions, affecting the history and the future of the country, are being made by certain Executive Presidents. I recollect vividly ,how President Premadasa strode into Wije’s room around 8.30 pm while the results of the 1989 General Elections were being announced. He sat at the head of the table with Mrs. Premadasa seated at the other end, with Wije, the late Gamini Iriyagolle(who was a close confidante of the President), Addnl. Secys. MBC de Silva, Neville Piyadigama and myself seated on either side.

President Premadasa then said “We will now appoint the Cabinet”. We hardly had time to recover from the shock when he said that he does not want to take over Defence as he dislikes getting involved in fighting wars. As I had been in the Defence Ministry, I knew the grave implications of the President not taking up the Defence portfolio and immediately pointed out that under the Constitution the President while being the Head of State and Head of the Govt. was also the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and it was mandatory for the Defence portfolio to be under him. With both Wije and Gamini endorsing what I said, President Premadasa agreed reluctantly to have the Defence portfolio and to leave the warring part in the hands of Ranjan Wijeratne.

It was in this manner that the entire Cabinet was selected by President Premadasa. I will limit myself here to recounting the manner in which two particularly surprising decisions he. When it came to the appointment of the Prime Minister, everyone’s expectation was that it would be Mr. Lalith Athulathmudali. All this was belied by President P, when he calmly said ” You know, our DB Wijetunge is very popular, no? He is liked even by people in the Opposition. Everyone speaks well of him. He is the best person for the job”.

Then again,when it came the selection of the Health Minister, President P. said with a straight face, (his very words) ” Renukata dang ingrisi hondata kathakaranna pulluwang ne. Mekata honda eya thamai”. President Premadasa had his own mind and made the selections of individual Ministers for the new Cabinet, exactly as he wanted them to be placed. After selecting the Ministers to head the new Cabinet portfolios, the President directed ,Wije , MBC, Neville and myself to immediately get down to the business of assigning subjects and functions to the newly created Ministries, with Nalin Abeysekera, the Legal Draftsman, assisting us in this exercise. The five of us had to literally work round the clock for two full days to make doubly sure that there were no overlaps of these subjects spilling them over into other Ministries, with related subjects. This was no easy task as the subjects and functions assigned to a particular Ministry, had to be determined, making them into a perfectly integrated whole. Wije had to constantly consult the President whenever certain doubts arose in making these allocations.

During his tenure in office as President, the Presidential Secretariat became the hub of administrative governance. Each Additional Secretary had to oversee six Cabinet Ministries. No Minister could submit a Cabinet paper on any important project without first obtaining clearance from the President. Each Additional Secretary had to study the Cabinet papers relating to the Ministries he was overseeing and submit them with appropriate recommendations to the President via Secretary/President. This only meant that in effect the entire system of governance was highly centralized, with all important policy matters having to be first cleared by President Premadasa before they could be submitted to Cabinet. Although Secretary/President and the four Additional Secretaries to the President had to work at a cracking pace to keep up to the near impossible deadlines given by the President and the exacting efficiency levels expected by him, it was nevertheless a satisfying experience as we knew the impact we were having on policy making and implementation, at the highest level.

Furthermore, Additional Secretaries had to take turns to attend the weekly Cabinet Meetings and brief the President on the concerned Cabinet papers, whenever the need arose. I for one, and I am sure the other three colleagues of mine will concur with me in this, found it easy to work at the Presidential Secretariat as all the Secretaries to Ministries and other high level officials were only too eager to co-operate with us in getting things attended to expeditiously.

As is was overseeing the Ministry of Lands from the Presidential Secretariat, I was selected along with Secretary/Lands for a study tour of the United States in September 1991 on the “Establishment of Wild Life Trusts for Wild Life Conservation.

President Premadasa was a person of incredible verve and energy who brooked no opposition and who wanted the assignments given to Ministers and Officers done in double quick time. The expenditure aspect did not bother him overmuch, as long as the work was completed to his satisfaction. His pet projects were primarily, the ones carried over from his days as Minister of Housing and included the upgrading of sub-standard housing in the city, the construction of lower middle class and middle class flats in the city, rural housing, Gam Uudawa housing schemes, development of infrastructure facilities including rural roads and water supply projects etc.

Coming from lower middle class beginnings, on becoming President, Mr. Premadasa made the alleviation of poverty and the upliftment of the poor one of his abiding concerns. He was ambitious and had exceptional political acumen to match this overweening ambition. He also had in good measure, the rare knack of making the poor identify themselves with him to the extent of making them believe that any successes achieved by him were their successes as well! He did try his utmost, to improve the lot of the poor, the dispossessed and the deprived. He perceived the latent potential of the poor to move forward on their own, given the correct incentives. He combined State assistance with self –help inputs by the beneficiaries themselves, particularly in his rural housing programmes. This was to instill in the poor the virtue of self-reliance.

His Gam Udawa Exhibitions were often itinerant carnivals and florid extravaganza, which however enabled him to get closer to the rural masses while providing them entertainment of a kind rarely seen by people in rural areas. He even toyed with the idea of enlisting the support of the JVP and even of the LTTE to join him in his relentless endeavours to put the country on a course of rapid development rivaling the new Asian Tiger economies. These earnest efforts however turned out to be fruitless and abortive in the case of the JVP who were hell bent on pursuing its own destructive path of murder and mayhem in pursuit of the anachronistic ideological goals set out by them, for which folly, they paid a terrible price by having their youthful members ruthlessly decimated by a Govt. that had totally exhausted it’s patience with them. Despite the hopes of peace and the end of hostilities with the LTTE that President Premadasa had fondly entertained, the former had him assassinated with characteristic insouciance.

President Premadasa known for berating public servants for not living upto his expectations, strangely enough, never upbraided me although I may have failed occasionally to meet his exacting deadlines for completing assignments given to me. All Additional Secretaries had to keep a cracking pace to keep to the near impossible deadlines set by him. On many occasions Neville Piyadigama and I worked till the wee hours of the morning, writing his speeches to be delivered at meetings the next day. He always gave instructions for dinner to be supplied by Galadari Hotel, next door.