Features

President Premadasa’s attitude towards Ministers and Secretaries

Published

6 months ago

2026/02/1

Premadasa

To cap all these (differences between Premadasa and Athulathmudali), there was the remarkable meeting the President summoned of Ministers. Project and State Ministers and Secretaries of Ministries in the auditorium of the Presidential Secretariat at Galle Face. At this meeting he laid down the principles of his administration, emphasizing speed, service, integrity and finding continuous solutions for the problems of the poor.

He spoke about the responsibilities of Ministers and Secretaries. Then he launched into a stunning critique of his Ministers. He said that he was not satisfied with the work of several Ministers. He said that he was aware that some of them were spending their time shoring up their private interests at public expense. He questioned their integrity. He said that he knew of Ministers who gave out their private houses on rent or lease on lucrative terms and lived in subsidized government houses.

He spoke of the abuse of government vehicles by them, as well as other Ministry and departmental property. Having gone on in this strain whilst we all sat in shocked silence, the President came out with an unbelievable directive to the Secretaries. He said that he required with immediate effect a confidential report on the workings of the Ministry addressed directly to him every month.

Here was an Executive President exercising his considerable powers commanding Secretaries to Ministries to send confidential reports directly to him by-passing the Ministers he had appointed to the Cabinet! We listened in disbelief. All of us had decades of public service behind us. Never in all that time were we faced with a situation of this nature. The gist of what happened that morning was that the President severely criticized his Ministerial team in the presence of the Secretaries, and indicated his lack of confidence in them by directing Secretaries to report confidentially to him.

At the end of the meeting, a universally embarrassed crowd trooped out silently from the auditorium. The Ministers were embarrassed for obvious reasons, and the Secretaries embarrassed because they were a captive audience at this remarkable meeting. Both parties felt too embarrassed to look at one another in the face as we walked out. In fairness to the President, much of what he articulated were not untrue, particularly in the case of some Ministers.

He was in a way demonstrating a sense of frustration and disillusionment at slow progress, insufficient commitment and doubtful integrity. We as Secretaries felt that there was certainly validity in some of the President’s comments. We thought he was mistaken however in articulating all this in our presence, and in the final directive he gave us. We also felt that there was unfairness in his generalizing and applying his strictures to all Ministers.

It would have been better if he had summoned any “problem” Ministers separately and chastised them in confidence, and put them on whatever notice he wished to. Needless to say the Ministers were deeply hurt and angry at what had happened. Acts such as these would definitely have contributed to the defections and the later attempt to impeach the President under the Provisions of the Constitution.

We as Secretaries were now faced with a very tricky problem. How were we to carry out the President’s directive without hurting and upsetting our Ministers and disturbing the balance of our relationships with them? I thought rapidly on this matter, at the meeting itself, and had reached my own conclusions by the end of it. I was ready therefore when several Secretaries came up to me after the meeting and inquired as to what to do and how to proceed. I said that as far as I was concerned I was not going to by-pass the Minister. The nexus, in fact the close cooperation and mutual trust between Minister and Secretary, I thought were vital to the smooth running of Ministries, departments and other agencies.

A relationship based on mutual suspicion would undermine not only efficiency but the whole structure. It was just not practical for a President to run Ministries in remote control fashion through their Secretaries. As for the reports, I said, that I had decided that they were going to be innocuous ones, shown in confidence to the Minister before dispatch. The Secretaries who spoke with me, that day, and some who discussed matters with me later, all agreed that they were going to do the same thing.

Instinctively they did not wish to be parties to this scheme. They spoke with me, only to find some formula to act in terms of their own instincts. There was no debate on substance. The search was for a modality.

My first report which I showed the Minister was so innocuous, that he chuckled and said “You will get sacked!” That, or at least displeasure, was a risk that had to be run in the interest of maintaining balance and working relations, which in turn impinge on efficiency and the output of work. That all Secretaries had thought so, and acted accordingly was revealed at a Secretaries’ conference a few months later, when the Chairman, Mr. Paskaralingam, Secretary to the Treasury informed us, “The President is very disappointed with your reports. He thinks they are useless. They did not contain the type of information he requires. He said that he had given you all the powers. He wished to know what other powers you required.”

This was greeted with total silence. No one had anything to say, because the problem was an insoluble structural one of Secretaries commenting on the work of their Ministers. In fairness to Mr. Paskarallngam, it should be said that he made his statement without any enthusiasm. One had the feeling that he was performing a not very agreeable duty in conveying the President’s sentiments to us. The matter was never resolved. More important political issues overtook the government.

Finally, the comment may be made that this whole episode also reflected the ability of a bureaucracy to thwart the wishes of even a President as powerful as Mr. Premadasa. In fact this is nothing new. There is a considerable body of literature on the subject of the interaction between political and bureaucratic actors. For instance, Dr. Kissinger the former United States Secretary of State, in his book “White House Years” refers to this in relation to the State Department. He writes as follows:

“The State Department, when it receives an order of which its bureaucracy approves, is a wondrously efficient institution. When it wishes to exhaust recalcitrant superiors, drafts of memoranda wander through its labyrinthine channels for weeks and even months. But when it receives an instruction it considers wise, paper work is suddenly completed in a matter of hours and the bureaucracy springs to marvelous action. “

So it is in Sri Lanka. This particular order of the President was one which did not find favour with the bureaucracy. It was therefore undermined. That it was done on the grounds of decency and ensuring effective work was a different matter. This of course, is a subject that will never be exhausted as long as there are governments and human society.

Death of my mother

During 1990, after my appointment to the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, amidst a very heavy work load and hectic activity, I had also to cope with my mother’s final illness. On March 28′, she passed the milestone of 95 years. Sheer old age was taking its toll. She was getting disoriented from time to time and therefore needed close care and attention. This, my wife provided with the assistance of a faithful female servant, who had been long with us. My wife was so concerned that she might wander off and fall in the night, that she took to sleeping on a mat by her bedside. Later, when she became totally bed-ridden, and eventually had to have a catheter on and needed to be fed nasally, it was my wife who personally. attended on her.

We used to have two attendants one for the morning hours and one for the night. But introducing liquid nourishment into the nasal tube and washing and sponging her daily below the waist were personally undertaken by my wife. Since my mother had a catheter on, she would not trust the attendant to do the sponging. Those were duties she took upon herself voluntarily and without any persuasion or request. It gave me great peace of mind, and assisted me greatly in coping with my own considerable load in running a large Ministry.

Towards the end, I became disturbed by the visible strain my wife was undergoing. My mother’s situation required so much care and constant attention that she found herself unable even to leave the house. The last three weeks or so towards the end became an extremely stressful period for me. I had to cope with three major problems. One was the workload in the Ministry as well as other official responsibilities. Next was my mother’s condition. The third was my wife’s position, which began to worry me most. I was fearing for her health. The reason why we did not enter my mother to hospital at this stage was because the doctors treating her advised that it would be best if she could be made comfortable at home.

My mother died during the early afternoon of Sunday August 12. The undertakers stated that the body would be brought home only during mid-morning next day. Since there seemed to be a custom not to cremate a body on a Tuesday, the funeral was fixed for Wednesday the 15th afternoon at the General Cemetery Kanatte. The Minister, Mr. Athulathmudali not only visited my mother when she was earlier in hospital, but came home everyday, on Sunday evening, Monday and Tuesday, and acted as a pall bearer on Wednesday.

These were singular acts of solidarity and concern. We wanted to have a simple funeral without decorations and wreaths as was the case when my father died. This time too, many came forward volunteering to decorate the road, to print hand bills with my mother’s picture and to do numerous other things. We thanked them and explained that we would prefer to have a simple and quiet funeral. But it became a little more public than we anticipated due to another reason.

One morning an officer from the President’s personal staff rang and said that the President would like to come and pay his respects, and inquired as to whether I had any objection if his visit was televised. I of course had no option but to say that I had no objection. I was later told that this visit came on the Rupavahini news that night. This led to an unexpected result. Many persons who had not seen the newspaper obituary, now got to know and we had to cope with large numbers of people visiting, some from quite far.

It was a great strain, coming after the strain of dealing with my mother’s illness. The fact that I was an only child compounded matters, for courtesy demanded that I remain and greet all the visitors. I had no brothers or sisters to share this burden and from morning till almost 11 p.m. it was a case of greeting and talking to people. At the end of it I had lost most of my voice and every bone in my body ached. There were also compensations and emotional moments. Some of my friends I met after decades, so too some of my teachers. One of my teachers sneaked out of the intermediate coronary care unit of the general hospital and came home. A few days previously he had been transferred there from the intensive care unit. He looked weak and visibly ill. When I remonstrated with him for coming he said simply, “It is my duty to come. How can I not come?” It was profoundly touching. Sadly a few months later he was dead. Tired as I was, I had many precious moments with relations, friends, teachers and colleagues.

It was only after the event and peace and quiet were restored that the void left by my mother’s death came into full focus. There was a strange emptiness about the house, and an even greater emptiness in the heart. We had been together for nearly 53 years in a relationship that was very close and on the part of my mother, very protective. She had been clearly the most important influence in my life as guide, friend, philosopher, moral tutor and protector. She had been as steadfast as a rock throughout the vicissitudes of my life.

The very fact that I entered the civil service was due primarily to her. She believed I would pass even though I did not share that belief. When I was vacillating, it was she who gave me the money and compelled me to apply to sit the examination. She was a person of strong values and had a direct and frank approach to anybody and anything. She just didn’t know how to dissemble or prevaricate. There was nothing clandestine in anything she did.

Her only major flaw was that it was not easy for her to reconcile sincerity with tact. Many a time she proceeded on the basis that an attempt at being tactful would compromise the expression or manifestation of sincerity of purpose. She never fully understood the difference when this was pointed out to her.

(Excerpted from In Pursuit of Governance, the autobiography of MDD Pieris)

All News Advertisement

Features

Trump’s tariffs, AKD’s gazette and Sri Lanka’s diplomatic slumber

Published

10 hours ago

2026/07/17

Thilina Walpola

“We are rather respectable in Colombo. We go to bed fairly early, and we remain there till morning. “

According to Sri Lanka’s diplomatic folklore, the late S.W. R. D. Bandaranaike uttered these words while explaining the reasons for Sri Lanka’s abstention on the UN resolution condemning the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Apparently, SWRD’s foreign ministry officials were asleep at home when the diplomatic cable seeking instructions was received from New York. In those days, there were no cell phones, Internet, or even fax or telex machines. The diplomatic cables were sent through post offices. Decoding them was a slow and time-consuming process. Thus, the government could not provide appropriate instructions to our mission in New York in time, and the Sri Lankan delegation abstained on that sensitive UN vote.

Sri Lanka’s Absence from Section 301 Consultations

But then, how does one explain Sri Lanka’s absence from the crucial bilateral consultation held in Washington by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) during March-April on “Forced Labour” under the Section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974? Didn’t our foreign and trade ministries send appropriate instructions to Washington in time? Even if the instructions from the foreign ministry were transmitted to our embassy in Washington by pigeon carriers, there was enough time for Sri Lanka to participate in those meetings.

In March, the USTR initiated these 301 investigations on 60 trading partners, and invited all of them for confidential consultations. Out of the 60, 46 participated in these consultations. Sri Lanka was not one of them. Other countries that didn’t participate in these consultations included China, Russia, and Venezuela! In addition to that, the Section 301 Committee conducted a public hearing with interested parties on April 28 and 29. Washington-based diplomats, representatives from few trade ministries as well as representatives from many foreign trade associations and chambers participated in these hearings. Sri Lanka was once again conspicuously absent.

As a result, when the USTR published the proposed forced labour tariffs on June 2nd, Sri Lanka ended up with a 12.5% duty. Pakistani and Indonesian diplomats participated in these consultations and took appropriate follow-up measures, and managed to enter the 10% duty category. As even a threat of a modest tariff hike could disrupt supply chains and reduce competitiveness, particularly in an industry such as garments, I discussed this issue on 15 June and underscored the importance of Sri Lanka’s participation at the next hearing, which was scheduled to be held from July 7th .

Awakening from Diplomatic Slumber and AKD’s Gazette

Fortunately, Sri Lanka finally awoke from weeks of diplomatic slumber, and Ambassador Mahinda Samarasinghe participated in the public hearing on 9 July, and promised, “…. · We have agreed to the text in our negotiations with the USTR on forced labour, …. The gazette as we speak is being printed and I’m getting the gazette tomorrow morning, and the gazette will be shared with USTR as I get it“.

As promised, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake issued a gazette on 10 July banning the imports of goods produced by forced labour. These new regulations are very similar to what Pakistan and Indonesia enacted in April, after their consultations with USTR in March. Why couldn’t we do it in April? Why did we wait till the very last minute?

Challenges ahead

“War is too important to be left to generals alone,” is a famous saying attributed to former French Premier Georges Clemenceau. Similarly, monitoring our main markets is too important to be left to diplomats alone. The United States is the largest single-country market for Sri Lanka. Therefore, Sri Lankan trade chambers and associations should become more proactive in these markets and participate in these events. For example, the chairman of the Pakistani apparel exporters association participated in the April hearings. Similarly, representatives from the Indian Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Confederation of Indian Industry, and Reliance Industries also participated in July hearings. At an event where each speaker is given only five minutes (strictly enforced), having a number of speakers from a country is an advantage. The presence of industry representatives in these kinds of events also help them understand the market dynamics and the future challenges. This is important, particularly because there will be many more challenges with Trump’s tariffs.

With the gazette issued on 10 July, Sri Lanka has imposed a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labour. Now, the challenge will be to effectively enforce the prohibition. And what are the goods produced with forced labour? The USTR list only focuses on aluminum, cotton, electronics, lithium-ion batteries, rice, and tobacco. However, according to the U.S. Department of Labour, the list is much longer. Hence, this list may change continuously during the next two years and tariffs may fluctuate once again.

So, this is definitely not the time to slumber.

(The writer, a retired public servant, can be reached at senadhiragomi@gmail.com)

by Gomi Senadhira ✍️

Features

Tales of Mystery and Suspense 10 Casino for Sale

Published

10 hours ago

2026/07/17

Thilina Walpola

After the overwhelming grotesquerie of J K Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike novel (written, I should have noted, as the others were, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith), I thought I should return to the world of fun, and also a much shorter description since this thriller moves quickly without the layers of detail that Rowling engages in.

I then move to the second comic thriller by Caryl Brahms and S J Simon. This, their second story to feature Vladimir Stroganoff and Adam Quill, was Casino for Sale, as lunatic a romp as the first, though without the emphasis on the ballet that characterized A Bullet in the Ballet.

This one begins with the impresario Stroganoff buying a casino cheap from Baron Sam de Rabinovich, only to find that it was a rundown place, not the grand casino of La Bazouche, a resort on the Frenc+h Riviera, as he had initially thought. The grand one belonged to Lord Buttonhooke, and Stroganoff could not compete, until he thought of bringing the Ballet Stroganoff to the casino – which of course leads to Buttonhooke deciding to have ballet performances in his Casino too.

Stroganoff invites Quill to visit him, which Quill decides to do since he has left Scotland Yard, having come into a legacy. No one believes this, and he has to face questions as to what he did to have been sacked, with sympathy for having been found out.

Caryl and Simon

The day he arrives in La Bazouche there is a murder, of a vitriolic critic called Citrolo, in Stroganoff’s office. He had been going to write a damning review of the opening night of the ballet and Stroganoff, when he realizes Citrolo cannot be swayed, drugs him and dictates the review himself to the papers. He leaves Citrolo sleeping and finds him shot the next morning, whereupon he decides to muddy the waters and leave a suicide note and lots of other murder weapons. So much overkill, as it were, of course ensures that he is arrested.

But the excitable French detective who makes the arrest follows up his suggestion that Buttonhooke was also involved, and so the two casino owners find themselves in cells next door to each other, with the detective Gustave quite happy to provide creature comforts for a fee.

Quill decides he must investigate, and finds Gustave most cooperative, since he has a laid back attitude to work. So it is Quill that finds a notebook which makes it clear Citrolo is an accomplished blackmailer, and that there are lots of possible murderers, including Stroganoff’s croupier, who was crooked, Rabinovich, who was now working for Buttonhooke, a confidence trickster called Kurt Kukumber, whose prospectus for a dud gold mine was found in the office and Prince Alexis Artishok who was engaged in a deal to buy diamonds from the ballerina Dyra Dyrakova.

Stroganoff had been trying to get Dyrakova to dance for him, but having done so previously she had refused. But then to Stroganoff’s chagrin she agreed to dance for Buttonhooke. The clearly crooked Artishok had told Buttonhooke’s mistress Sadie Souse, who was not very bright, that Dyrakova possessed diamonds she was willing to sell cheap, and Sadie was determined to have them.

Quill meanwhile finds out that there was a secret passage to Stroganoff’s office, the obvious solution to what had begun as a locked room mystery, and that this was known by almost everyone apart from Stroganoff himself. And then Rabinovich is murdered, just after Gustave had released his two original suspects, leading him to blame Quill for having insisted on that and thus allowing them to kill again.

Soon afterwards Dyrakova arrives, and the town is full of posters announcing that she will appear in the casinos, elaborate posters for either one, since Stroganoff is determined that she will dance for him, and if she does not come willingly, he has devised a scheme to make her do so unwillingly. So, though Buttonhooke has her taken off to his yacht immediately she arrives at the station, Quill along with Arenskaya gets her into a launch and to Stroganoff’s casino, where she performs to tumultuous applause, not knowing for whom she is dancing.

When Quill asked her about the diamonds, she said she had sold them long ago, and that gave Quill the solution to the mystery. Rabinovich had known about this, and Artishok had killed him to prevent Sadie learning it from him, he had killed Citrolo who had recognized him for an accomplished card sharper, not a Russian prince at all. But before he is arrested, he gets away in a boat, and the police launch that pursues him is on the point of catching him up when it runs out of petrol.

Again, lots of excitement, and entertaining references – Gustave grows marrows – and if not quite as brilliant as its predecessor, Casino was certainly a delightful read.

Features

The challenge of being positive about SAARC

Published

1 day ago

2026/07/16

Sahan Weerasooriya

The RCSS forum addressed by SAARC Secretary General Ambassador Md. Golam Sarwar in progress. (Pic courtesy RCSS)

It was a few years back that a former President of Sri Lanka took it on himself to pronounce SAARC ‘dead’. Since then there have been other sections of Sri Lankan opinion that have joined the critics of SAARC and taken the solemn stance that SAARC has indeed died what may be called a natural death.

Their fatalism is understandable. SAARC has failed to meet at heads of government or state level for the past several years to take the SAARC process notably forward. Regional cooperation has more or less been only an appealing idea. No substantive concrete projects have taken off to make the idea a hard reality. ‘Inner paralysis’ seems to be SAARC’s lot. Hence the fatalism in these circles.

However, being one of the worst cash-strapped regions of the world and a teemingly populated one with people virtually left to their devices, what choices do the ‘SAARC Eight’ have other than to try their best to band together and continue with their cooperation efforts, however small they may be?

There is no escaping the mounting debt trap for many of these countries and bankrupt Sri Lanka is a glaring example, but ‘throwing in the towel’ and abandoning themselves entirely to the diktats of the strongest economies and their agencies will prove a ‘living death’ for many countries in the SAARC fold.

The gains may be meagre but giving-up on SAARC cooperation in full would prove self-defeating for the organization and South Asia. Right now, the collective intention ought to be to salvage what the region could from the tenuous cooperative efforts. Moreover, such initiatives could go some distance to generate a degree of goodwill among the Eight and help in sustaining a dialogue process.

Given this backdrop it proved ‘a stich in time’ for the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS), Colombo, to recently host the SAARC Secretary General Ambassador Md. Golam Sarwar to a round table discussion on the unifying potential of SAARC and its future possibilities, besides other related issue areas.

Held on June 24th and moderated by RCSS Executive Director and former ambassador Ravinatha Aryasinha, the forum brought together a vibrant, wide ranging audience comprising academicians, diplomats, senior public servants, civil society activists and many others. Following the presentation by Ambassador Golam Sarwar titled, ‘Reigniting SAARC: Achievements, Challenges and the Way Ahead’, a lively Q&A followed.

The above forum could be described as an act of lighting the proverbial ‘candle’ rather than ‘cursing the darkness.’ It surely is a ‘darkness’ that could be seen as daunting considering that the region’s pivotal powers, India and Pakistan, are failing to act in a spirit of accord but are engaged in bitter finger-pointing on a number of questions of vital importance to SAARC.

On the other hand, what is the rest of the region doing to bring the above sides together? It is disappointing that to date the rest of SAARC has failed to launch a major diplomatic drive to bring peace between the feuding regional heavyweights. It needs to act without delay and establish its earnestness and this effort would need to prove SAARC’s staying power in the unfolding months and even years.

In assessing SAARC’s seeming failure local opinion in particular has failed to factor in what could be described as weak leadership. Since Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh, the founding father of SAARC, the region has failed to produce a visionary leader who could advance the SAARC cause with charisma and drive.

Among other reasons, weak leadership accounts considerably for the faltering and stuttering status, as it were, of SAARC. Badly needed are leaders who could go the extra mile, think less of narrow national interests and work diligently towards the collective well being of the region but SAARC’s millions of ordinary people have been made to wait in vain for leaders of such stature. Instead, they have been burdened with politicians who seem to be relishing the apparently moribund state of SAARC.

Looking back, it could be said that it was the dynamic leadership factor that led to the launching of the Non-Aligned Movement and for its sustenance for a few decades. True, it could be seen in some quarters that NAM is no more, but as in the case of SAARC, the former too has been unfortunate to be burdened over the years with politicians who lack the vision and drive to unflaggingly advance the fortunes of the South. NAM and SAARC lack the dynamism and vision of leaders of the stature of Jawaharlal Nehru, for example, to give them the required guidance and intellectual depth.

The reasons are complex for there not being among us currently political leaders with the vision and the steadfast commitment to advance the legitimate interests of the South. However, it could be stated with conviction that the majority of Southern leaders have too easily caved in to the demands of the global North and its financial agencies.

These leaders have failed to see, for instance, that the largely market economy oriented Northern governments would not view with favour a centrist economic model that attaches priority to the interests of the dis-empowered publics of the South. This realization ought to have dawned on the current government in Sri Lanka, for instance, some while ago but it has no choice but to abide by IMF dictates since economic survival at present is unthinkable without the latter’s succour.

Accordingly for SAARC this should be the time for some soul-searching. Priority needs to be attached to ending the feuding between India and Pakistan since at present the material fortunes of the region hinge largely on these regional giants giving peaceful relations among them a try. This is no easy challenge to meet but some daring, visionary diplomacy needs to take hold among the rest of SAARC.

There is some sense in SAARC bringing the peoples of the region together through programs that address their best collective interests. A meeting of minds among SAARC nations could enable SAARC and its agencies to build a region-wide people’s movement for progressive political and economic change that could in turn lead to the region’s political leaders sensitizing themselves more to the neglected needs of their publics.

However, the time is ‘now’ for the initiation of these progressive changes and the voice of SAARC well wishers would need to drown out those of their critics.