The gravy train

The ongoing Committee Stage of the Budget 2025 debate due to end on March 25 has elicited some, if we may call it that, salacious information of the spending habits of functionaries of the previous regime. While the public was not unaware of the fact that the political hierarchies of successive governments in office lavished tax rupees on themselves, a trend that unfortunately kept growing from regime to regime post-Independence, there was no focus of how badly the situation had deteriorated until some telling figures were presented to parliament during the current budget debate when the spotlight was shone, among others, on the former speaker, Mahinda Yapa Abeywardene.

The first volley was fired when some figures on food costs at the speaker’s official residence was revealed. This indicated that Rs. 2.6 million had been spent on food at the speaker’s official residence in 2023 and Rs. 3.2 million on this account the following year. In a strong rebuttal that out stablemate, The Island, headlined “Ex-Speaker lambastes NPP Leader of the House”, Abeywardene denied that he had spent government funds for his personal meals saying that official expenditure incurred entertaining foreign diplomats and visitors had been lumped together to give the people the impression that he was eating off the tax exchequer. The former speaker’s statement might have struck a responsive chord in the public mind had it not been well known that many of his family members had been recruited to his personal and parliament staff following his assumption of office. Some had accompanied him on visits abroad.

Further figures were thereafter presented on the transport expenses of the former speaker, his deputy and the deputy chairman of committees. Leader of the House Bimal Rathnayake revealed that between Jan. 1, 2024 and Sept. 24, 2024, Abeywardene had used six vehicles with a fuel cost of Rs. 33.34 million over a period of nine months. The former deputy speaker had used six vehicles incurring a fuel cost of Rs. 13.5 million and the former deputy chairman of committees four vehicles burning fuel costing Rs. 7.2 million. There is no doubt that ex facie such expenditure is excessive and cannot be defended on any grounds. But also, as the former speaker has said, he is entitled by virtue of the office he holds to his own vehicle and two escort vehicles “as Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya has found out for herself.” Abeywardene has further claimed that the expenses revealed were “statistically impossible” and invited investigative journalists using the Right to Information Act to find out what was spent on his account not only in 2023 and 2024 but also from 2020 when he assumed office as speaker.

Quite apart from the former speaker, the government seized the opportunity of flaunting details of public funds spent on the foreign travel of former presidents with Mahinda Rajapaksa spending some Rs. 3.6 billion between 2010 and 2014; Maithripala Sirisena Rs. 384 million between 2025 and 2029; Gotabaya Rajapaksa Rs. 126 million between 2029 and 2022 and Ranil Wickremesinghe who among other overseas visits attended the funerals of Queen Elizabeth and the Japanese Emperor as well as King Charles’ coronation spending Rs. 533 million. In contrast, incumbent Anura Kumara Dissanayake had spent just Rs. 1.8 million on three foreign trips since he assumed office in Sept. 2024, two of his air tickets being paid by the hosts. Government has also said that Dissanayake had returned unspent per diem allowances paid to him. In that context older readers may remember that Mrs. Bandaranaike as prime minister flew economy class to the consternation of host waiting to welcome her at the foot of the business class exit.

Apart from these there have been revelation of the of the big bucks paid to politicians whose homes and offices were destroyed by mobs at the tail-end of the aragalaya. It has been pointed out that sums running to over Rs. 1.2 billion had been paid to 43 MPs ranging from a relatively modest half million rupees to over Rs. 90 million. Other politicians too, at local government level, have been compensated. This appears to have been done in a hush hush manner with details, including the names of the beneficiaries and what was paid to them emerging only earlier this year. It has been pointed out that the maximum compensation payable to people who have lost their homes in natural disasters is Rs. 1.5 million. After the 1983 riots, the government set up a body called Rehabilitation of Industrial Property Authority (REPIA) to compensate riot victims but payments were relatively low. Over and above that, the media is repleted with stories of the vast amounts spent on former resident Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Colombo residence.

Such to-ing and fro-ing is inevitably the nature of politics. So the former speaker cannot be faulted for taking a side swipe at the current regime by saying that while it presents itself today as a guardian of public funds, the history of the JVP demonstrates that it was responsible for destroying billions of rupees worth of public property during its two insurrections in 1971 and 1988-89. While all this is true, there appears to be a serious effort by the current dispensation to curtail unconscionable benefits enjoyed by politicians. Already MPs must pay realistically for what they eat at the once highly subsidized parliament restaurant and it has been promised that their pensions after a mere five years service are on the way out. Privileges accorded to former presidents too are being trimmed. All to the good.