President Maithripala Sirisena, Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake, Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe. A triad of issues – and not necessarily whether Government brings brigands under past regimes to book – may well enter the lists as the key issues on which good governance will stand – or fall… the economy, corruption, and nationalism vs national reconciliation
Last week, in a fit of journalistic pique, I wrote that Good Governance had lost the plot. While friends and family grieved by his graveside, I – a colleague of the former Chief Editor of The Sunday Leader – slaved away at my laptop. Observing his passing in a more passionate than pained mien. And after a diatribe in which I denounced this Government’s empty promises to bring the culprits of Lasantha’s egregious murder to book; and having excoriated their stated reasons and lame excuses about the law’s unexpected delays and hitherto unforeseen procedural obstacles such as lack of witnesses and/or evidence; I penned this conclusion: “What of the present Government’s feet-dragging and trotting-out of sundry reasons or excuses? For a political movement that so successfully brought the scourge of an authoritarian antidemocratic regime to heel has no reason for not rooting out the cowardly villains who ordered the execution of someone who – had he been alive today – would have been one of its foremost champions. Or perhaps not? … The year of grace is up. Happy birthday/anniversary! Grieve they may, as people or as a party of which the slain editor was demonstrably a part. Get on with seeing to it that justice is done – and seen to be done – and done expediently – is a must, not a might. Government’s reputation, duration, consummation, are riding on it.
For one, the Government’s handling of the economy will be a golden thread that could either be wound into a golden ball, or unravel – and with it Good Governance could come undone. As those who know something more than I do about the intricacies as well as the bigger picture of macro realties have essayed, even the economic-policy-savvy UNP was caught on the wrong foot by dint of inheriting an economy submerged by debt and unserviceable loans.
For another, the State’s management of people and resources with regard to fingering and chipping away at corruption in its manifold forms (including cronyism and nepotism) – Which the UNFGG (GG being Good Governance) is good at raising awareness on and talking ad nauseam about.
Then again, the Administration’s opportunity to carve out a truly democratic, inclusive, pluralistic society – By dint of constitutional reform as well as by virtue of its responses to, and initiatives on, ethno-religious integration and national reconciliation.
It is these three major points of conflict – and perhaps one more than the other two (“it’s the economy, stupid!”) – that will resolve how recent history and posterity alike will remember Sri Lanka’s most ambitious democratic project to date….