Government by the people for the people: Plea from citizenry

By an Old Connoisseur

The incumbent rulers keep on reminding the people, ad nauseam, that the current administration is a government for the people by the people. They have claimed the current government was born out of the uprising of the people.

All governments in democratic societies are born out of the will of the people. In such a context, all such governments have to work towards the well-being of the people with undiluted commitment. There is no doubt in the minds of even the most discerning citizens of Sri Lanka that all these promulgations are indeed the most noble of objectives and one would justifiably expect such contentions to even warm the cockles of the hearts of all and sundry.

Yet for all this, we do need to remember and firmly reiterate to our politicians that this principle should be the bedrock on which the political governance of any democracy is based. The people of a country should come first and foremost in all considerations of any legally elected democratic government. True enough, we do know for sure that even despite the very loud vocal grandiloquence of all previous governments, and I repeat all previous governments, they did not go even a little distance to hold the welfare of the people to be sacred, and their deeds and interests were completely at loggerheads with such an honourable foundation as well as essential and admirable attitudes. Without any significant exceptions, all previous political systems over the last 77 years of independence of our much-loved Motherland, have gone on record as institutions that put themselves first in all their considerations.

In point of fact, we also have to agree even unequivocally that this noble task cannot be achieved by the politicians alone. Politicians will have to take steps to stimulate, facilitate and unite all sections of society so that our people will put their collective shoulder to the wheel in a concerted initiative to lift up this country from the mire into which it has been pushed by politicians of various hues. Delving deeper into the depths of this contention, the question arises as to what or who are understood as people. In any society when one talks of people, we should focus on all people; the rich and the poor, the able and the disabled, the educated and the not so well educated, the employed and the unemployed, public-sector workers and the private-sector workers, the farmers as well as the white-collar workers, government enterprises as well as community organisations, and the business enterprises; in fact, the whole lot of Homo sapiens in our country. To improve the well-being of people we need the participation and unstinted cooperation of all these groups in our populace. An abiding sense of patriotism in the psyche of all of our people is definitely the need of the hour.

Politicians lay down the policies and the public sector ensures the implementation of these rules and regulations to improve the wellbeing of people. The public sector, including all politicians of different sorts, are servants of the people and are not deities with unlimited power just to take care of themselves and their political institutions as well as their kith and kin and acolytes. To realise these exalted goals we have to ensure that we have certain universal rules including respect for our people at all times, fair distribution of resources in an equitable manner, kindness, empathy and respect for the freedom of others, preservation and conservation of nature and the environment, adherence to the rule of law, unmitigated compliance with basic human rights and dignity, as well as the development of those very fine humane attributes such as beneficence, non-maleficence and altruism.

If we are to develop by transforming society by the people for the people, we will have to internalise and translate these attributes in our behaviour all the time and in all sectors of the community. Political leadership alone cannot do this honourable task. Society has to unite under these values and other attributes to be articulated and facilitated by the leadership. This is what many other progressive countries have attempted, some of them forging ahead with great success. For this to happen the entire society will have to work together over a long time with respect and minimal adversity. The stakeholders for this endeavour would be all individuals of society, Public Service including the political leadership, Private Sector and their leading figures and Community Organisations including their management. Every member of the population of our wonderful country should be invited to put his or her shoulder to the common wheel in a trek towards prosperity to enable everybody to enjoy an era of opulence.

The most admirable theme for the celebrations of our independence on the 4th of February this year was “Let us join the National Renaissance”. It was a clarion call to enable us to rise up like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes towards a magnificent revival. In addition to all that has been written above, the government and its leadership, for their part, have an abiding duty to take all necessary steps to facilitate the revitalisation of patriotism to urge the populace to contribute to the prospect of national resurgence. Towards that end, the general public has to be happy in this thrice blessed land and they need to live in a country that is safe and affluent. The powers that be need to realise most urgently that unless corruption is completely eliminated, the drug lords effectively neutralised, murderers and other law-breakers swiftly brought to book, various Mafia-type impertinent audacious organised collectives such as Rice Millers, Egg Manipulators, Coconut Wheeler-dealers, and Private Transport Syndicates; all of which hold the public to ransom, are ruthlessly tamed, there is no way in which we can rise and march towards any kind of Nationwide Resurgence. Of course, equally importantly, the farmers who provide sustenance to the entire nation should be looked after like royalty. It is also ever so important that vital and purposeful steps are taken to develop the rural impoverished areas and take steps to alleviate the poverty of the downtrodden. If these things are not attended to, at least for a start, the grandiose but implausible and tenuous rhetoric of that call to rally would just be a ‘pus vedilla’, and could even be a virtual non-starter.