Blues of the Greens

Wednesday 25th September, 2024

The UNP has announced that its leader and former President Ranil Wickremesinghe will not contest the next parliamentary election; nor will he return to Parliament via the National List (NL). It has also said it will contest future elections under its Elephant symbol and invited the SJB to close ranks with it and form a new electoral alliance. The SJB has rejected the UNP’s invitation out of hand.

Ranil is known for his lateral thinking and unpredictable moves, and therefore it is not possible to guess what is up his sleeve. After suffering a humiliating defeat at the last parliamentary election, he said he would not enter Parliament, but a few months later he became an NL MP and went on to secure the premiership and the presidency.

Ranil, one of the most experienced and knowledgeable political leaders around, took over the reins of government in 2022 while the country was in flames and teetering on the brink of anarchy. No other leader dared come forward to do so in spite of repeated appeals from President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Ranil skillfully navigated the ship of state between Scylla and Charybdis. He had the courage to make quite a few unpopular decisions, which helped resuscitate the economy and bring order out of chaos. It is doubtful whether any other leader would have done what he intrepidly did on the economic front despite the huge political costs his bold actions entailed. Some measures that the government adopted under his leadership were hurtful to the public, but there was no way they could be avoided, given the sorry state of the economy and IMF bailout conditions. True, Ranil did not act out of altruism; he had a political agenda, but what he did helped manage the economic crisis and prevent the country’s descent into anarchy.

Perhaps, what caused Ranil’s failure on the political front, as the President, was the arrogance of power, which he did not care to overcome like most other political leaders including Mahinda Rajapaksa. He was seen to be a defender of the corrupt. He refused to take action against Keheliya Rambukwella over several procurement scams in the Health Ministry during the latter’s tenure as the Health Minister. When it became too embarrassing for the government to go on defending Rambukwella, he was thrown to the wolves, but by then public opinion had turned irreversibly against the government and President Wickremesinghe. Rambukwella should have been sacked from the Cabinet when the mega rackets such as the procurement of fake immunoglobulin came to light.

President Wickremesinghe also protected the crooked cricket administrators in spite of a unanimous parliamentary resolution calling for their resignations. He incurred much public opprobrium as a result. He berated the judiciary while speaking in Parliament, and contemptuously defied a Supreme Court (SC) order that funds be granted to the Election Commission for conducting the local government elections, which he arbitrarily put off. He refused to carry out another SC order that IGP Deshabandu Tennakoon be suspended and an Acting IGP appointed. Perhaps, it was the on-arrival visa racket that sealed his fate; no action was taken against the masterminds behind that multi-billion-dollar scam. Unless new President Anura Kumara Dissanayake ensures that the visa racketeers are brought to justice forthwith in keeping with his solemn pledge to eliminate corruption, he too will be in serious trouble.

President Wickremesinghe undermined virtually all institutions, especially the judiciary, the legislature and the public service. Given the manner in which he behaved as an unelected President, it was only natural that the people became wary of electing him to the most powerful position in the country.

It was also a big mistake for Ranil to form an alliance with the SLPP dissidents with serious allegations against them. Maybe he was left without an alternative, but his dependence on those unpopular characters also became his undoing. Some of them have earned notoriety for drug dealing, extortion and chain snatching. The SLPP defectors who closed ranks with the UNP have fallen between Mahinda’s sataka and Ranil’s coattails! They have become a bunch of political refugees. The public must be deriving some perverse pleasure from their predicament.

Most political leaders in this country do not care to exercise power cautiously, minding public opinion and rectifying their mistakes. Ranil failed to be different and his good work on the economic front did not help him improve his chances in Saturday’s presidential race, which he could have won if he had learnt from his mistakes and mended his ways.