Youth, tooting and hooting

Saturday 22nd January, 2022

President Gotabaya did not say anything new in his policy statement presented to Parliament on Tuesday (18), much less spell out how his government was planning to hoist the country from the current economic mire. The parliamentary debate thereon did not leave us any the wiser, for the Opposition did not offer any alternatives to the government’s policies.

What President Rajapaksa has said of the youth in his address to Parliament, however, is of interest: “I especially hope that the patriotic youth who painted wall art and cultivated barren paddy fields in the recent past will also support this.” But mere exhortations will not help rally the youth around the government, which has driven them away. The SLPP leadership ought to make a serious effort to figure out what led to the alienation of the youth. That will be half the battle in winning them back.

Former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, MP got it right when he told Parliament, on Thursday, that we were witnessing the end of politics. He did not care to define that concept, maybe because a large number of books have been written thereon, or he thought it would be an exercise in futility, given the calibre of most of the House members. What is termed anti-politics, defined as ‘reaction against or rejection of the practices or attitudes associated with traditional politics’ has become the order of the day, at least where the youth are concerned, and this is the political reality that all politicians should come to terms with, as Wickremesinghe has said.

The present-day youth are not dyed-in-the-wool ideologists. They are receptive to new ideas and not blindly faithful to political parties. They are conscious of their rights, and without political allegiances as such, and therefore the number of floating voters has grown considerably in the Sri Lankan polity, making it well-nigh impossible for political parties to garner enough votes to win elections with the help of their traditional vote banks alone. They have to woo the youth. Gotabaya’s appeal to the youth stood the SLPP in good stead at the 2019 presidential election.

The SLPP was lucky that the yahapalana government, which the youth backed in 2015 as they were fed up with the previous Rajapaksa regime, dug its own political grave, and the Easter Sunday terror attacks brought the country under a pall of uncertainty, making the people look for a leader capable of bringing order out of chaos. The youth pinned their hopes on Gotabaya, expecting a radical departure from the rotten political culture under his stewardship. They saw Gotabaya as a technology-savvy, efficient, no-nonsense technocrat capable of draining the swamp that is Sri Lankan politics, straightening up the economy, protecting national security and ushering in a new era. Their wall-painting spree was an expression of their hope of a new beginning. During the first months of his term, President Rajapaksa lived up to the high expectations of the youth and endeared himself even to some of his critics. He was able to do so because he had free rein to govern the county as there was no SLPP parliamentary group. Most of those who had ruined the Mahinda Rajapaksa government were still out of power.

The youth thought there would be a complete reset after the 2019 presidential election, and Gotabaya, being the toughie that he was thought to be, would have complete freedom and, above all, a tabula rasa to work from. But the corrupt in the SLPP started crawling out of the woodwork, after the last general election, and the new President put the family before the country much to the disappointment of young Sri Lankans.

The youth who longed for a meritocracy came to be burdened with a kleptocracy. The yahapalana administration committed the Treasury bond scams within the first few weeks of its formation in 2015, and a mega sugar tax racket besmeared the SLPP government’s reputation irreparably.

The youth are now convinced that their interests do not figure in the government’s scheme of things, and what they are witnessing is a replay of the latter stages of the second Mahinda Rajapaksa regime (2010-2015), which became synonymous with corruption, criminal waste of public funds, cronyism, impunity and abuse of power. They know where the government and the country are heading with one family having all the luck. Hence their disillusionment, and it is not surprising that they are queuing up at foreign embassies to obtain visas.

The youth are intelligent enough to know that it is at the country’s expense that politicians and their progeny without any legitimate sources of income are living high on the hog. They are therefore resentful and give vent to their pent-up anger via social media. At this rate, the day may not be far off when they graduate from hate posts to other forms of protest, the way the people did from tooting at night to hooting during the daytime.

If the government is serious about winning the youth back, it will have to make an immediate course correction, and its leaders will have to put the country before the family.