Executive premier - and why it takes two to tango

(August01,Colombo,Sri Lanka Guardian)It appears that the views of Ranil Wickremesinge and Mahinda Rajapaksa are coterminous on the issue of establishing the horribly named executive premiership.

They both want to be elected Executive in their own right, without having to depend on the performances of their respective political outfits.

Executive president is one thing, but being elected Prime Minister in a national poll exclusive and dedicated to that post —- now that is, in short, heard of nowhere in the world.

Yes, you’d say, there is Israel.

We all know that Israel is supposed to have had a brief experiment with such a comically grafted executive premiership, but they could not take the farce for too long and shut down the institution almost as soon as it was created.

It seems to be obvious that both Wickremesinghe and Rajapaksa do not want to be tied to the fortunes of their parties. In the case of Wickremesinghe the party has been tied to him for too long, but that’s the objective reality — and Wickremesinghe is more interested in any tantalising theory. R and W are not enamoured with the way it goes in the Westminster system of governance; the leader of the party with the majority is the Prime Minister until Parliament is dissolved, the next election is called, or the governing party loses its majority in parliament.

People see a great deal of cynical urgency in the current joint moves to tinker with the system in order that one man can govern for more than two terms. Is this the national priority, most political observers would want to ask?

Constitutional reforms

The key problem that the president seems to be having in delivering on constitutional reforms is that these reforms are seen to be cynically engineered for the self-aggrandising purpose of being in power as long as possible. This president or any president can be Prime Minister for as long as they want, if the parties they lead can win majorities in Parliament at successive elections. But obviously this is considered too risky; if the party loses, it is reckoned that the party leader would have to relinquish the premiership, which is not considered feasible for furtherance of monumental personal ambitions.

The root theoretical rationale - i।e.: the guliya fed to the people — in all of this is that executive power being reposed in one man lends towards stability. It is also taken for granted that powerful people have their own substantial constituencies and therefore have reason - almost divine entitlement — to be elected in their own right.

This argument in turn stems from the locally popular wisdom that a dictator may be good for the fortunes of the country —- a dictator who is benevolent or otherwise।

JR Jayewardene authored this argument and was living personification of it, or at least so he thought.

The stability argument rests on the theory that there can be continuity of policy with one person at the helm. Shorn of frills, the urging is on behalf of a strong executive.

In which case, why is the current president at the receiving end of considerable static/noise when he appears to say rather transparently “vote for me for Executive premier again and again, because a benevolent strongman would be good for the country and you.’’

People are not warming up to the argument, because this president was a war president in the first term, and is a peacetime president now.

Though the people were willing to give him a second term as a peacetime executive, they are yet to put his peacetime role on par with his wartime performance.

Not just that, they also feel that there are just too many wartime tactics in the current president’s peacetime policy for governance. They have intuited that it is cynical to ask for a personal lien on power —- a ‘personal’ vote to remain one-man executive —- without showing peacetime results that can be comparable to wartime success.

Militaristic approach

In fact the Rajapaksa peacetime approach has been so militaristic, that people associate the possibility of executive power reposed in a single person, with his current militaristic approach। They see a dangerous incendiary mix that they do not want to take a chance on; read they do not want to see a Suharto in the making.

The people will not second-guess the sincerity of these constitutional-gerrymander moves if they see less of an unholy hurry — in short, less cynical expediency, and a better sense of priorities. In other words if the president delivers the goods on the economy and good governance, and then asked that he be given the chief executive’s posting in perpetuity, people may want to think about it.

The best bet would be for the president to take a chance with the Westminster system of parliamentary elections.

Revert back to that relatively bucolic political era of prime ministers riding on the back of party majorities, and he buys back his legitimacy. He may be able to win many more majorities for his party and be the Prime Minister for several successive terms. Being that kind of Prime Minister is not to abdicate very many powers - Sirimavo Bandaranaike went on for seven years and her iron rule was a hard act to follow even for the very powerful self-styled despot, the executive president J. R. Jayewardene.

The roadblock the president has encountered in his path to change the constitution shows that people understand the difference between change for the long haul and change in the short term. They were willing to leave the incumbent with a roaring majority under the prevailing system, but that was a short-term calculation.

Changing the constitution alters collective fortunes on the long-haul. Even the most fickle minded electorate is not willing to leave the task to two politicians who have coterminous views on marshalling all state power essentially for themselves. The foregoing is in short the unravelling of the Ranil Rajapaksa pact for constitutional reform.