The Crab House

Wednesday 1st December, 2021

An oft-heard complaint is that Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa is more absent than present in Parliament during the ongoing debate on Budget 2022. This, however, is not the first time Opposition MPs have complained of the absence of ministers in the House during important debates. The ordinary MPs are no better. The Speaker, more often than not, has a hard time, trying to have quorate sittings.

A budget debate without the presence of the Finance Minister in the House is like Sinhabahu without the Lion’s son, so to speak. Yesterday, only Chief Government Whip Johnston Fernando was present in the front row of the government side when the House took up the issue of gas explosions reported during the last few days. Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena asked Minister Fernando to ensure that the front-row members of the government were present, especially when the issues of national importance were discussed. One can only hope that the SLPP seniors and their counterparts in the Opposition will heed the Speaker’s concerns, and care to attend Parliament regularly.

Finance Minister Rajapaksa experienced some difficulties in reading out the Budget, last month. If the reading of the Budget is so difficult, how hard its implementation will be is not difficult to imagine. However, what really matters is not the Finance Minister’s speech as such but how the government proposes to implement its budget proposals and bridge the huge deficit. The late President Ranasinghe Premadasa was so averse to long-winded budget speeches, maybe because he had an axe to grind with the then Finance Minister Ronnie de Mel, that he famously said that even a taxi driver could present the national budget! Ironically, today, the economic downturn has been so bad during the past couple of years that even some educated private sector executives work as cabbies at night to augment their declining income; these ‘taxi drivers’ are knowledgeable enough to handle public finance or even present the country’s budget.

Finance Ministers are masters of subterfuge. They say so little in so many words, make ambiguous statements and, most of all, have got obfuscation down to a fine art. Therefore, after their lengthy budget speeches, there arise many questions that need to be answered. So, the Finance Ministers have to be present in the House during budget debates to field questions from the Opposition MPs, and elucidate budget proposals, government policies, etc. The same goes for other ministers, whose presence is required in Parliament when questions are raised about institutions under their purview, and vital issues concerning their subjects are debated. Yesterday, all the ministers should have been in Parliament, where the issue of gas explosions was taken up. Is it that the SLPP frontbenchers do not consider kitchen explosions serious enough to warrant their attention? Let them be warned that it will be a big mistake for them to ignore the so-called kitchen vote, which can make or break governments.

When the senior members of political parties themselves skip parliamentary sessions, how can they expect their juniors to carry out their legislative duties and functions properly? They are like the proverbial crab which, while moving sideways, urges its offspring to walk straight.

Colossal amounts of money are spent on parliamentary sittings which serve little purpose when ministers and MPs do not attend them. Public funds must not be sent down the gurgler in this manner while many people are struggling to dull the pangs of hunger. If Parliament can have a budget debate without most of its members present, the question is why the public should continue to pay through the nose to maintain as many as 225 MPs.