Ending the Regency

By Uditha Devapriya

The Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) recently made some disclosures about certain events organized, and transactions entered into, by a government agency during the last two years that said much about the state of impunity, and I daresay elitism, which was part and parcel of the previous government. Though these allegations have yet to be proved, I thought they made it clear that the present administration needs to step up its game in probing into the excesses and abuses of its predecessor.

The allegations in question are, all things considered, damning, and since they have been reported in the local press, I will not get to them. Essentially, COPE has ascertained that, immediately prior to the presidential election last year, certain procedures relating to procurement were violated in deference to the wishes of the organization’s leadership at the time. If true, the amounts concerned would run into hundreds of millions of rupees. Taken in themselves, this may be just the tip of the iceberg: as a friend correctly remarked while watching the proceedings with me online, COPE is likely to grill other government agencies in the coming few weeks. Yet taken together, they reveal, for me, disclosure by disclosure, the sense of impunity that was so characteristic of the previous government.

I believe the NPP has its faults, and I think that it’s only fair to point them out when they need to be. This government’s best friends are its critics, and we need to note the criticisms that are aired every week by the likes of Dayan Jayatilleka and Kusum Wijetilleke.

Yet even considering this, there is no denying Sri Lanka’s first center-left party in decades has brought into the government a fresh outlook and a clear mandate for reform. More than anything, there is absolutely no sense of regency in the air: no sign, at least not yet, that old school ties and elite connections will shield officials from due process. This is a breath of fresh air not just from the Wickremesinghe presidency but the yahapalana administration, the latter of which was undone by the politics of class and prestige Wickremesinghe’s premiership, and much of his Cabinet, exemplified. It is this sense of regency that is up on trial, and I, for one, could not be any happier.

There is also no denying that the reformism of this government differs considerably from the faux reformism of the yahapalana administration. The present government was elected to power on pledges of rooting out corruption and mismanagement. The challenge it faces now is institutional: how to weed out the bad eggs from organizations which have been sustained by those bad eggs for so long. The solution may not be, as supporters of the NPP think, to do a Kristallnacht on government agencies. Rather, it should be a longer and phased out process. And a crucial part of that process should be to make as many verifiable disclosures as possible about the misdeeds of past administrations.

This is not to say that we should expect shifts and ruptures immediately. Even with a new government in power, changes are going to come slowly. But informing the public on how exactly past governments let off certain officials on questionable, dubious grounds, and revealing to them the hollowness of the reformist and developmentalist rhetoric of its predecessor, would serve the NPP well. This is because there is much anger at what was allowed to happen under the previous government, but also much frustration with the slow pace at which reforms are being rolled out by the present regime.

Tied to this is the critique that the NPP is going ahead with the economic policies of the Wickremesinghe presidency. The NPP’s defense is that it has no other choice, or to put it bluntly, that there is no alternative. Yet even with the limits of neoliberal restructuring – which is what IMF engagements amount to – the government has tried to discontinue its predecessor’s reforms, including privatization of strategic assets and relations with China. With regard to its foreign policies, too, one can air criticisms, which Dr Dayan Jayatilleka has done in his most recent column.

Yet here too, the government has to perform a difficult balancing act. Dr Jayatilleka notes that we no longer possess the intellectual caliber of the Chandrika Kumaratunga cabinet. I would agree, and would add that no government since 2004 has had that caliber, barring a few exceptions. But one must grant the NPP the benefit of the doubt. As far as its mandate is concerned, I think, it is focused on revealing the misdeeds of past regimes. It is true that this in itself will not be enough to make up for its less than proactive responses to the price hikes, shortages, and other policy problems. It may also be true that attacking certain sacred cows – prime among them Mahinda Rajapaksa – may provoke a backlash against it if taken too far. But it has a mandate, and part of that mandate has been to show that, on a balance of scales, the regency that was part of the State is fading away.

For better or worse, for a vast segment of the population, the course of this government will depend on how far they will go to uproot norms and practices that were accepted as part of the political system for so long. I am aware that this is a difficult task and a tough ask. No government so far, however reformist they may have been, has had the courage to confront directly the misdeeds of its predecessors. One may be tempted to single out the yahapalana government as an outlier in this respect, but really, with all due respect to CIABOC and the other Commissions that government established, there was no real progress on weeding out the fundamental rot in our system – perhaps because the rot was allowed to continue if not thrive considerably, vis-à-vis the Bond Scandal. The NPP is the only outlier we have for this. If it fails in this essential task, we will truly have run out of alternatives.

Uditha Devapriya is an independent researcher and international relations analyst who can be reached at .