Prez and PCs

Thursday 31st December, 2020

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s Gama Samaga Pilisandarak (GSP) programme has apparently stood the people inhabiting far-flung corners of the country in good stead. The President seems to have taken a leaf out of the book of the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa, who made a name for himself as a man of action. President Premadasa launched a presidential mobile service (PMS), which he craftily used to make inroads into the provinces at the expense of the Provincial Councils (PCs). The fact that the people did not benefit from the PCs and were desperate to have their problems solved expeditiously made the PMS hugely popular. It also served as an indictment of both the PCs and the public service, characterised by lethargy, inefficiency and callousness.

The ongoing GSP is a presidential mobile service in all but name. However, President Rajapaksa has, to his credit, taken steps to reduce the cost thereof to a bare minimum; it is not a political dog and pony show as such, but it can be considered part of his re-election campaign.

One may argue that there are huge crowds at the GSP venues because people love to see the President and make various appeals to him. But the fact remains that they are faced with burning problems. Most of their complaints to the President are related to bureaucratic bungling, scarcity of water, lack of infrastructural facilities and seemingly intractable issues pertaining to agriculture, their children’s education and, most of all, rural poverty. These problems have gone unaddressed all these years despite the existence of the PCs with 455 members. The blame for this sorry state of affairs should also be apportioned to 225 MPs and more than 8,000 members of the local government institutions. Hardly anything gets done in this country without a presidential intervention.

If the past PC members had served the public faithfully and cared to solve their problems, people would have taken to the streets calling for the PC polls. The yahapalana government postponed the local government and PC polls for fear of defeat, but in so doing, it proved, albeit unwittingly, that the people did not care whether these institutions exited or not. The same holds true for Parliament as well to some extent in that there were no popular protests when the last general election was postponed for months.

Meanwhile, the government decision against holding the PC polls anytime soon is welcome. It has only made a virtue of necessity. An electoral exercise at this juncture is a recipe for disaster. There is no shying away from the fact that the national healthcare system is reaching breaking point, and the death toll from the pandemic is likely to rise exponentially, perhaps necessitating the setting up of triage tents at hospitals unless the runaway virus is brought under control urgently.

Opposition to devolution is growing. The opponents of the PCs maintain that the country has done without the elected PC members for two years or so and, therefore, the PC polls must not be held at all. They are also calling for the abolition of the PC system. Most vociferous among the critics of the PC are some Buddhist monks. The government has not taken kindly to their campaign. Minister Vasudeva Nanayakkara, an ardent supporter of the PC system, while returning from a party leaders’ meeting, where the PC polls were discussed, on Monday, sought to pooh-pooh the monks’ protests, when he was interviewed by the media. He said the monks were not party leaders, implying that they should not be taken seriously as regards their opposition to the PC system.

Comrade Vasu is one of the few politicians people do not dislike. But he needs to be told that it is not only party leaders who should have a say in matters concerning the affairs of this nation; there are other stakeholders, whose views should be heeded. Religious leaders are among them. This, however, does not mean that the clergy should be allowed to run parallel governments or make unfair demands. Similarly, party leaders are vested with no power to commit the country to anything irrevocably at the expense of the national interest. The argument that a nationwide referendum should have been held on the 13th Amendment, which added another tier of government, posing a threat to the unitary status of the state holds water.

The popularity President Rajapaksa’s GSP is proof that the colossal amounts of funds allocated to the PCs have not benefited the rural folk, who have a plethora of problems, which have remained unsolved for more than three decades since the PCs were established. It is doubtful whether their lot will improve in any way even if the PC polls are held and new councillors returned. The proponents of the PC system will have a hard time, trying to counter the arguments being put forth against the PCs.