Tuesday 11th February, 2025

Most detractors of the NPP claimed, before last year’s elections, that Sri Lanka would find itself in the same predicament as Oceania in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, if the JVP-led alliance was voted into power, but thankfully their prognostication has not come true although the NPP parliamentary group is said to be under the spell of a kind of Big Brother, as evident from their regimented conduct. However, it looks as if the current dispensation needed a Ministry of Excuses, as it were, a la the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty in Oceania, given the sheer number of excuses the NPP leaders trot out on a daily basis albeit ineffectively.

Sri Lanka has suffered what may be described as the biggest shock at the hands of a monkey since Hanuman’s arson attack mentioned in Ramayana, if a statement made by the Minister in charge of the power sector, Kumara Jayakody, about Sunday’s countrywide power outage is anything to go by.

Power cuts have returned due to the latest breakdown of the Norochcholai coal-fired power plant. Minister Jayakody lost no time in attributing Sunday’s power failure to ‘a monkey coming into contact with a transformer’ at the CEB’s Panadura Grid Substation. Subsequently, he and other government politicians started blaming the previous governments which, they said, had not developed the national grid.

The NPP government considers itself infallible and blames its predecessors and even wild animals whenever something goes wrong. Some of its members have blamed the current coconut shortage on depredation by monkeys, making one wonder whether those animals intensified raids on coconut cultivations after last year’s regime change.

An NPP minister continues to draw heavy flak for having faulted the public for consuming coconut oil and pol sambol excessively thereby worsening the current coconut shortage. The government has also claimed that the rice shortage is attributable, inter alia, to the practice of Sri Lankans feeding their pets with rice! Before last year’s elections, the JVP/NPP accused large-scale millers of hoarding rice, and manipulating the paddy/rice markets to exploit both farmers and consumers alike, and pledged to end millers’ exploitative practices with a single stroke of the presidential pen. But that promise has gone unfulfilled and the millers’ cartel is far from tamed.

Some former military officers who contested the last general election on the NPP ticket thundered from election platforms that they needed only two months to wipe out the underworld. Today, they are in power, but hardly a day passes without underworld killings being reported.

The NPP government should seriously consider setting up the Ministry of Excuses fast so that it will be able to present its excuses, ruses, etc., in an effective manner and prevent its members from making contradictory statements by way of self-exculpation.

Ironically, in the late 1980s the JVP unleashed mindless terror purportedly to save the country from a ‘monkey army’ (derogatory term it used for the Indian Peace Keeping Force). It destroyed countless CEB assets including transformers in a bid to cripple the economy. Fortunately, it failed in its endeavour.

Going by Minister Jayakody’s aforesaid claim, the JVP leaders must be feeling ashamed that in the late 1980s they failed to achieve a task that even a monkey is equal to—causing a countrywide power failure. Today, those who promised to defeat an entire ‘monkey army’ are in power, but they cannot even protect an electricity substation against monkeys!