I urge the honorable president to focus more on broad system level issues that the country is facing than fixing nuts and bolts.by Thrishantha Nanayakkara
(October 18, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) I was prompted to write this brief article after watching how the Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapakse gave a judgment ordering the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) under the Power and Energy Ministry to make a construction on credit (News 1st clip). The dispute was between a school and the CEB. Due to non-payment of the cost of construction, the CEB had refused to go ahead with the project. There are several points I wish to make on this issue:
1. Nearly 16million voters of Sri Lanka spend billions of Rupees, sacrifice lives, and spend millions of man hours to elect a president to solve system level problems in the country. It is the duty of the president to design proper guidelines and mechanisms to get the detailed level micro-systems like installing a concrete pole in a school go without hick-ups. In this particular case, this friction may have arisen due to bad planning, bad budgeting, or bad coordination on the part of the school, weak guidelines at the ministry of education level, or even anomalies at the fund disbursement level at the treasury. I wouldn’t mind if the president sacrificed valuable presidential time to identify such system level generic issues that he is expected to solve through this type of sundry administrative issues. However, without attending to such generic flaws in the system, the president going to give Kekille type judgments is highly disappointing and embarrassing.
2. The precedence given in this very particular example is very bad. The president is effectively asking the CEB to incur losses in order to compensate for bad budgeting of another institute. Who is the final victim of such flawed practices? It is none other than the TAX payers themselves.
3. The Government officers addressed the president with very decent language such as “Athigaru Janadhipath Thumani (your Excellency the president)”. But the president addressed the Government officers in thug language like “Karanavako, denavako (better have it done)”. The president cannot and should not abuse Government officers in public like that. He should remember that he is an elected president by the people for the people. Therefore, preserving the respect for Government officers is a very important aspect of his duty to serve the country.
Finally, I urge the honorable president to focus more on broad system level issues that the country is facing than fixing nuts and bolts. This particular example hints us that there is an urgent need to correct budgeting practices of the Government institutes and the need to include sustainability into planning and decision making. In this case, the CEB is right to stay by their guidelines to carry out projects without causing a damage to their long term sustainability.
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