Features
Where have our ethics gone?
“A man without ethics is a wild beast let loose upon this world.”– Albert Camus –
(Address to the Ceylon College of Physicians, 19 September, 2024, Colombo, Sri Lanka)
You might wonder why a scholar would opt to ask a question as seemingly banal and commonsensical as ‘where have our ethics gone’ when you, as the Ceylon College of Physicians, and others, are here to deliberate on your own intellectual, research and policy quests focused on the theme, ‘Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity.’ When I was asked to speak at this event, I was, at the same time, impacted by a serious personal crisis.
It was obvious to me that it would be impossible to deal with my crisis without considering the implication of ethics and its absence in the broader sense. After all, my former university was censuring me for standing up for something I considered was a fundamental body of ethics: freedom of thought and expression on the one hand, and academic freedom on the other. The compromise of these ethics took place in a situation my former superiors and colleagues thought they should be seen as the guardians of what they thought were the interests of the state – in this instance, India. Hence, setting out from how ethics were both impacted and compromised in this situation, and reflecting further, it became abundantly clear that without serious consideration of ethics, you, as a group of professionals, would also not be able to work in your profession, and all of us would also not be able to collectively imagine our futures as a civilization.
The world we are used to and our taken-for-granted comfort zones in it would be in crisis if we moved too far away from our commitment to what we used to call ethics. And to reiterate, I was reflecting upon this in both personal and public contexts where ethics, as I thought I understood them, had become very distant from work and life. It is in explaining this general situation that John Berger has noted, “without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them [ethics] cannot be itself.
Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.” I have referred to ethics as ‘what we used to call ethics.’ This is a very conscious choice of words on my part. And this is because ethics in the way we used to understand them in the not-so-distant past that are still remembered by my generation and practiced by my parents until they passed on, is not how ethics are understood or practiced today. Often, it seems to me ethics is looked down upon as a reflection of foolishness and naivety, and, therefore, very casually violated, too, often without consequences. And I am not talking of our country alone, but also our region and the world. To put it more bluntly, ethics are often seen as a liability and, therefore, something that can be done away with. This, in a sense, is my point of departure for what I have to say today.
Given this situation of liminality, what would ethics constitute in its most basic sense? Within a commonsensical understanding, I suggest ethics incorporates two interrelated elements.
First, ethics would mean an adherence to well-established standards of what is right and wrong. At this fundamental level, ethics would outline what people, as human beings, should do and what they should refrain from. At this level, ethics are generally understood in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, and notions of fairness. Ethics, for example, refer to those standards that impose reasonable obligations to refrain from actions that are clearly wrong, which includes, but are not limited to, rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud.
But looking at Sri Lanka’s Parliament alone and the extended landscape of our local politics, individuals who commit all or many of these crimes are voted into positions of power by the people themselves. The situation is more or less very similar in South Asia. Against this backdrop, it almost seems as if these ethically wrong acts have become virtues.
So, where indeed have our ethics gone?
Second, as pointed out in the 1987 essay, ‘What is Ethics’ by Velasquez, Andre, Shanks, and Meyer, “ethics incorporate(s) the study and development of one’s ethical standards.” As they further note, personal “feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical.” Given this possibility, they remind us, “it is necessary to constantly examine one’s standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded.” Ethics, in this sense then also refer to “the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our moral conduct, and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to standards that are reasonable and solidly based.” In effect, ethics have a component of reflection through formal close examination in societies where ethics are taken seriously. But in our context, either in schools, in universities or in other spaces of citizenship training, do we engage in this kind of reflection?
So, where have our ethics gone?
This is a question I constantly asked myself and continue to ask when my own personal crisis began to unfold in my former university. The “deafening silence” of my colleagues in the midst of an unreasonable and targeted attack on me for merely standing up to a PhD student’s right to free expression and academic freedom meant that South Asian University, for which, incidentally, your tax rupees must also have been channelled as a SAARC initiative, “will never again stand for academic freedom.” As I noted in public at the time in an interview with Vidheesha Kuntamalla “the fallout of this silence and the institutionalized and choreographed timidity is that no critical and self-reflective research will ever be undertaken at the South Asian University” again. This is one small example of the long-term consequences in a single institution when ethics are deliberately placed on the back burner in the interest of mere personal convenience and gain.
I want to flag three misconceptions we often have about what constitutes ethics:
One,people often equate ethics with religion. The main religious traditions in our country certainly stress high ethical standards in the conduct of their adherents. But this generalization makes sense if we only focus on the doctrinal and textual positions of these religions. However, even this cannot be sustained if we consider examples from the public and private utterances and lives of many people who claim to be religious, and particularly religious leaders. The reduction of ethics into religion is also very dangerous because then it could also mean that only religious people would carry the burden of ethics. But we know ethics should matter in the conduct of life of both the pious and the non-believers. For sure, religion can set “high ethical standards and can provide intense motivations for ethical behaviour” (Velasquez, Andre, Shanks, and Meyer 1987).
But we know from our own experience in this country, and by looking at our immediate regional neighbourhood, the first casualty in the practice of local and national politics, are usually ethics. And this compromise is often made in the name of religion. So, reducing ethics to religion, and that, too, without proper reflection is always a grave mistake.
Two, people also often believe being ethical means following the law. Without doubt, the law is expected to incorporate ethical standards drawn from bodies of legal codes, history and civilizational memory. But laws are not always the same as ethics. Let me explain. Championed by unprincipled autocrats and adopted in dubious political climates, laws could very drastically deviate from what are ideal ethical standards for a society.
The recent attempts in Sri Lanka to stifle freedom of expression under the provisions of the ICCPR Act (which is based on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), and the much longer-term experience of using the Prevention of Terrorism Act for similar purposes, are classic examples. The manner in which blasphemy laws in Pakistan have been drafted and applied historically is another example. Similarly, ‘National Security’ Laws, ‘Anti-Terrorism’ Laws and elements of the Public Safety Act have been used in India to repress dissent and to suspend fundamental rights, particularly of minorities in specific situations.
So, in these situations, when laws themselves are proven to be unethical in their application, the ethical position would be the commitment to change these laws and not to become subsumed by their erroneous logic.
Three, many of us also believe that being ethical means adhering to what society considers acceptable. It is generally correct that most of us would accept societal standards and norms that are ethical. Our respect towards elders is one such position. But standards of behaviour in any society can deviate from what is ideally ethical to not only to what is simply unethical, but also clearly tyrannical. It is not an exaggeration to say that “an entire society can become ethically corrupt” under specific historical conditions (Velasquez, Andre, Shanks, and Meyer 1987). To use a personal example, whatever society’s ideals are, caste, religious and ethnic discrimination is strictly not possible for me. I have never engaged in such discrimination, and I never will. It is about adhering to an ethical principle, irrespective of society’s dominant trends. The way in which draconian social and political orders have been planned, implemented and broadly accepted by some societies is a classic example of an entire society becoming ethically compromised. Nazi Germany and South Africa, under apartheid, are two recent examples.
So, what does all this mean?
What concerns me, as a person, as a citizen, as an inhabitant of the planet, and I think the least important in this context, as a scholar, is that ‘ethics’, as an idea and as a set of good practices, as understood above, have lapsed from the commonsense in our country; in our extended geopolitical neighbourhood; and, in varying degrees, in the world we live in. For those of my generation, the value of ethics came from our parents which they had learnt as part of their colonial education and as part of their citizenship training to be good colonial subjects. Whatever other failures that education might have had due to the very imprint of coloniality and its necessary brutality, it did give a very strong sense of ethics within the colonial framework.
But even after independence, aspects of that education and the ethics that came with it, held sway as a central preoccupation of many people in my parents’ generation. For people like my father who was a government surveyor, my mother who was a school teacher and my father-in-law who was a civil servant – just to take three personal examples – doing anything wrong, and therefore unethical, was simply unthinkable. But their principled positions, at times, did have negative personal consequences. While there were examples to the contrary, even at that time, there was a strong sense of what they called the ‘right thing.’ This was their reference to ethics. But today, that quotidian emphasis is not something that is easily seen. Our present-day education system does not seem to place too much conscious emphasis on ethics. I am also not sure if this is even done within the family as it used to be. It seems to me, in this time and age, being ethical is understood as depriving oneself of economic, social and political opportunities.
This rupture of ethics, its distancing from day-to-day life, is most clearly manifest in our politics at all levels. It is not that an old set of ethics has been deliberately replaced by a new one. It is more like ethics have been overdetermined by what I would call ‘non-ethics.’ That is, a discourse on power, money, avarice and influence has made adherence to ethics and reflection on ethics immaterial, relegating them to a position of insignificance and relative erasure.
You may think that I am being unreasonably dreamy, and too idealistic, and our world still knows about ethics, and that I simply do not see it. I have actually been told this before. But to me, the problem is not that we do not know about ethics today, but that we do not allow ethics to blossom as an integral part of our lives, and rule our lives, work and conscience. The problem with ethics anywhere historically is that they tend to be very fragile and are usually among the first casualties in any condition of catastrophe or challenge.
In my monologue today, I have not tried to provide you with ideal answers. To provide answers to such complex questions is not the role of a sociologist. That is the job of self-proclaimed religious gurus with divine connections, know-it-all politicians we may or may not believe in and certainly street corner magicians. My job and that of others like me is to simply situate problems in context and explore what is possible and what is at stake. That, I think I have done.
As you begin your deliberations within the theme, ‘Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity,’ you may also want to consider why you came up with this theme in the first place in this time and age when these three principles should already be well ingrained in the way we think and work. But if you were concerned enough to bring this up as a theme, perhaps we share the same anxieties about ethics in our society and work environments, and what our collective futures may look like.
The final question you may wish to ask yourselves is, where would our youth learn and be inspired by ethics that can rebuild a decent world for them. It certainly cannot come from the life lessons imparted by political leaders and publicly vocal religious leaders of our time. There is a vast difference between what is preached by them and what is actually done. For me, this dichotomy is a cartography of the collective failure in our times. This is what Bertrand Russell meant when he noted, “we have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach.”
My request and suggestion is that we can no longer bank on politics or religion to re-invent our disappearing sense of ethics for the future. We also cannot hope for divine intervention or anticipate that someone else in the form of a local superman or superwoman, or in Sri Lanka’s case a super reptile rising from the depths of a sanctified river will resolve our problems.
It can only come from individuals, like us, whose only vested interest should be our own stake in an ethically sound collective future, and to bring that urgency to our families, workplaces and the wider public sphere.
Thank you.
(This is the 100th column of the Out of the Box series, which began on 6 September, 2023, at the invitation of this newspaper – Ed.)
A new year is an appropriate moment to pause, not for celebration, but to interrogate what our politics, policies, and public institutions have chosen to remember, forget, and repeat. We celebrate the dawn of another brand-new year. But whose calendar defines this moment?
We hang calendars on our walls and carry them in our phones, trusting them to keep our lives in order, meetings, exams, weddings, tax deadlines, pilgrimages. Yet calendars are anything but neutral. They are among humanity’s oldest instruments of power: tools that turn celestial rhythms into social rules and convert culture into governance. In Sri Lanka, where multiple traditions of time coexist, the calendar is not just a convenience, it is a contested terrain of identity, authority, and fairness.
Time is never just time
Every calendar expresses a political philosophy. Solar systems prioritise agricultural predictability and administrative stability; lunar systems preserve religious ritual even when seasons drift; lunisolar systems stitch both together, with intercalary months added to keep festivals in season while respecting the moon’s phases. Ancient India and China perfected this balancing act, proving that precision and meaning can coexist. Sri Lanka’s own rhythms, Vesak and Poson, Avurudu in April, Ramadan, Deepavali, sit inside this wider tradition.
What looks “technical” is actually social. A calendar decides when courts sit, when budgets reset, when harvests are planned, when children sit exams, when debts are due, and when communities celebrate. It says who gets to define “normal time,” and whose rhythms must adapt.
The colonial clock still ticks
Like many postcolonial societies, Sri Lanka inherited the Gregorian calendar as the default language of administration. January 1 is our “New Year” for financial statements, annual reports, contracts, fiscal plans, school terms, and parliamentary sittings, an imported date shaped by European liturgical cycles and temperate seasons rather than our monsoons or zodiac transitions. The lived heartbeat of the island, however, is Avurudu: tied to the sun’s movement into Mesha Rāshi, agricultural renewal, and shared rituals of restraint and generosity. The result is a quiet tension: the calendar of governance versus the calendar of lived culture.
This is not mere inconvenience; it is a subtle form of epistemic dominance. The administrative clock frames Gregorian time as “real,” while Sinhala, Tamil, and Islamic calendars are relegated to “cultural” exceptions. That framing shapes everything, from office leave norms to the pace at which development programmes expect communities to “comply”.
When calendars enforce authority
History reminds us that calendar reforms are rarely innocent. Julius Caesar’s reshaping of Rome’s calendar consolidated imperial power. Pope Gregory XIII’s reform aligned Christian ritual with solar accuracy while entrenching ecclesiastical authority. When Britain finally adopted the Gregorian system in 1752, the change erased 11 days and was imposed across its empire; colonial assemblies had little or no say. In that moment, time itself became a technology for governing distant subjects.
Sri Lanka knows this logic. The administrative layers built under colonial rule taught us to treat Gregorian dates as “official” and indigenous rhythms as “traditional.” Our contemporary fiscal deadlines, debt restructurings, even election cycles, now march to that imported drumbeat, often without asking how this timing sits with the island’s ecological and cultural cycles.
Development, deadlines and temporal violence
Modern governance is obsessed with deadlines: quarters, annual budgets, five-year plans, review missions. The assumption is that time is linear, uniform, and compressible. But a farmer in Anuradhapura and a rideshare driver in Colombo do not live in the same temporal reality. Monsoons, harvests, pilgrimage seasons, fasting cycles, school term transitions, these shape when people can comply with policy, pay taxes, attend trainings, or repay loans. When programmes ignore these rhythms, failure is framed as “noncompliance,” when in fact the calendar itself has misread society. This mismatch is a form of temporal violence: harm produced not by bad intentions, but by insensitive timing.
Consider microcredit repayment windows that peak during lean agricultural months, or school examinations scheduled without regard to Avurudu obligations. Disaster relief often runs on the donor’s quarterly clock rather than the community’s recovery pace. In each case, governance time disciplines lived time, and the least powerful bend the most.
Religious time vs administrative time
Sri Lanka’s plural religious landscape intensifies the calendar question. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity relate to time differently: lunar cycles, solar markers, sacred anniversaries. The state acknowledges these mainly as public holidays, rather than integrating their deeper temporal logic into planning. Vesak is a day off, not a rhythm of reflection and restraint; Ramadan is accommodated as schedule disruption, not as a month that reorganises energy, sleep, and work patterns; Avurudu is celebrated culturally but remains administratively marginal. The hidden assumption is that “real work” happens on the Gregorian clock; culture is decorative. That assumption deserves challenge.
The wisdom in complexity
Precolonial South and East Asian calendars were not confused compromises. They were sophisticated integrations of astronomy, agriculture, and ritual life, adding intercalary months precisely to keep festivals aligned with the seasons, and using lunar mansions (nakshatra) to mark auspicious thresholds. This plural logic admits that societies live on multiple cycles at once. Administrative convenience won with the Gregorian system, but at a cost: months that no longer relate to the moon (even though “month” comes from “moon”), and a yearstart with no intrinsic astronomical significance for our context.
Towards temporal pluralism
The solution is not to abandon the Gregorian calendar. Global coordination, trade, aviation, science, requires shared reference points. But ‘shared’ does not mean uncritical. Sri Lanka can lead by modelling temporal pluralism: a policy posture that recognises different ways of organising time as legitimate, and integrates them thoughtfully into governance.
Why timing is justice
In an age of economic adjustment and climate volatility, time becomes a question of justice: Whose rhythms does the state respect? Whose deadlines dominate? Whose festivals shape planning, and whose are treated as interruptions? The more governance assumes a single, imported tempo, the wider the gap between the citizens and the state. Conversely, when policy listens to local calendars, legitimacy grows, as does efficacy. People comply more when the schedule makes sense in their lives.
Reclaiming time without romanticism
This is not nostalgia. It is a pragmatic recognition that societies live on multiple cycles: ecological, economic, ritual, familial. Good policy stitches these cycles into a workable fabric. Poor policy flattens them into a grid and then blames citizens for falling through the squares.
Sri Lanka’s temporal landscape, Avurudu’s thresholds, lunar fasts, monsoon pulses, exam seasons, budget cycles, is rich, not chaotic. The task before us is translation: making administrative time converse respectfully with cultural time. We don’t need to slow down; we need to sync differently.
The last word
When British subjects woke to find 11 days erased in 1752, they learned that time could be rearranged by distant power. Our lesson, centuries later, is the opposite: time can be rearranged by near power, by a state that chooses to listen.
Calendars shape memory, expectation, discipline, and hope. If Sri Lanka can reimagine the governance of time, without abandoning global coordination, we might recover something profound: a calendar that measures not just hours but meaning. That would be a reform worthy of our island’s wisdom.
(The writer, a senior Chartered Accountant and professional banker, is Professor at SLIIT, Malabe. The views and opinions expressed in this article are personal.)
The recent wave of pharmaceutical tragedies in Sri Lanka, as well as some others that have occurred regularly in the past, has exposed a terrifying reality: our medicine cabinets have become a frontline of risk and potential danger. In recent months, the silent sanctuary of Sri Lanka’s healthcare system has been shattered by a series of tragic, preventable deaths. The common denominator in these tragedies has been a failure in the most basic promise of medicine: that it will heal, not harm. This issue is entirely contrary to the immortal writings of the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates of the island of Kos, who wrote, “Primum non nocere,” which translates classically from Latin as “First do no harm.” The question of the safety of medicinal drugs is, at present, a real dilemma for those of us who, by virtue of our vocation, need to use them to help our patients.
For a nation that imports the vast majority of its medicinal drugs, largely from regional hubs like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the promise of healing is only as strong as the laboratory that verifies these very same medicinal drugs. To prevent further problems, and even loss of lives, we must demand a world-class laboratory infrastructure that operates on science, not just sentiment. We desperately need a total overhaul of our pharmaceutical quality assurance architecture.
The detailed anatomy of a national drug testing facility is not merely a government office. It is a high-precision fortress. To meet international standards like ISO/IEC 17025 and World Health Organisation (WHO) Good Practices for Pharmaceutical Quality Control Laboratories, such a high-quality laboratory must be zoned into specialised units, each designed to catch a different type of failure.
* The Physicochemical Unit: This is where the chemical identity of a drug is confirmed. Using High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS), scientists determine if a “500mg” tablet actually contains 500mg of the active ingredient or if it is filled with useless chalk.
* The Microbiology Suite: This is the most critical area for preventing “injection deaths.” It requires an ISO Class 5 Cleanroom: sterile environments where air is filtered to remove every microscopic particle. Here, technicians perform Sterility Testing to ensure no bacteria or fungi are present in medicines that have to be injected.
* The Instrumentation Wing: Modern testing requires Atomic Absorption Spectrometers to detect heavy metal contaminants (like lead or arsenic) and Stability Chambers to see how drugs react to Sri Lanka’s high humidity.
* The injectable drug contamination is a serious challenge. The most recent fatalities in our hospitals were linked to Intravenous (IV) preparations. When a drug is injected directly into the bloodstream, there is no margin for error. A proper national laboratory must conduct two non-negotiable tests:
* Bacterial Endotoxin Testing (BET): Even if a drug is “sterile” (all bacteria are dead), the dead bacteria leave behind toxic cell wall products called endotoxins. If injected, these residual compounds cause “Pyrogenic Reactions” with violent fevers, organ failure, and death. A functional lab must use the Limulus Amoebocyte Lysate (LAL) test to detect these toxins at the parts-per-billion level.
* Particulate Matter Analysis: Using laser obscuration, labs must verify that no microscopic shards of glass or plastic are floating in the vials. These can cause fatal blood clots or embolisms in the lungs.
It is absolutely vital to assess whether the medicine is available in the preparation in the prescribed amounts and whether it is active and is likely to work. This is Bioavailability. Sri Lanka’s heavy reliance on “generic” imports raises a critical question: Is the cheaper version from abroad as effective as the original, more expensive branded formulation? This is determined by Bioavailability (BA) and Bioequivalence (BE) studies.
A drug might have the right chemical formula, but if it does not dissolve properly in the stomach or reach the blood at the right speed, it is therapeutically useless. Bioavailability measures the rate and extent to which the active ingredient is absorbed into the bloodstream. If a cheaper generic drug is not “bioequivalent” to the original brand-named version, the patient is essentially taking a useless placebo. For patients with heart disease or epilepsy, even a 10% difference in bioavailability can lead to treatment failure. A proper national system must include a facility to conduct these studies, ensuring that every generic drug imported is a true “therapeutic equivalent” to the brand-named original.
As far as testing goes, the current testing philosophy is best described as Reactive, rather than Proactive. The current Sri Lankan system is “reactive”: we test a drug only after a patient has already suffered. This is a proven recipe for disaster. To protect the public, we must shift to a Proactive Surveillance Model of testing ALL drugs at many stages of their dispensing.
* Pre-Marketing Approval: No drug should reach a hospital shelf without “Batch Release” testing. Currently, we often accept the manufacturer’s own certificate of analysis, which is essentially like allowing students to grade their own examination answers.
* Random Post-Marketing Surveillance (PMS): Regulatory inspectors must have the power to walk into any rural pharmacy or state hospital, pick a box of medicine at random, and send it to the lab. This could even catch “substandard” drugs that may have degraded during shipping or storage in our tropical heat. PMS is the Final Safety Net. Even the best laboratories cannot catch every defect. Post-Marketing Surveillance is the ongoing monitoring of a drug’s safety after it has been released to the public. It clearly is the Gold Standard.
* Pharmacovigilance: A robust digital system where every “Adverse Drug Reaction” (ADR) is logged in a national database.
* Signal Detection: An example of this is if three hospitals in different provinces report a slight rash from the same batch of an antibiotic, the system should automatically “flag” that batch for immediate recall before a more severe, unfortunate event takes place.
* Testing for Contaminants: Beyond the active ingredients, we must test for excipient purity. In some global cases, cheaper “glycerin” used in syrups was contaminated with diethylene glycol, a deadly poison. A modern lab must have the technology to screen for these hidden killers.
When one considers the Human Element, Competence and Integrity, the very best equipment in the world is useless without the human capital to run it. A national lab would need the following:
* Highly Trained Pharmacologists and Microbiologists and all grades of staff who are compensated well enough to be immune to the “lobbying” of powerful external agencies.
* Digital Transparency: A database accessible to the public, where any citizen can enter a batch number from their medicine box and see the lab results.
Once a proper system is put in place, we need to assess as to how our facilities measure up against the WHO’s “Model Quality Assurance System.” That will ensure maintenance of internationally recognised standards. The confirmed unfavourable results of any testing procedure, if any, should lead to a very prompt “Blacklist” Initiative, which can be used to legally bar failing manufacturers from future tenders. Such an endeavour would help to keep all drug manufacturers and importers on their toes at all times.
This author believes that this article is based on the premise that the cost of silence by the medical profession would be catastrophic. Quality assurance of medicinal compounds is not an “extra” cost. It is a fundamental right of every Sri Lankan citizen, which is not at all subject to any kind of negotiation. Until our testing facilities match the sophistication of the manufacturers we buy from, we are not just importing medicine; we are importing potential risk.
The promises made by the powers-that-be to “update” the testing laboratories will remain as a rather familiar, unreliable, political theatre until we see a committed budget for mass spectrometry, cleanroom certifications, highly trained and committed staff and a fleet of independent inspectors. Quality control of therapeutic medicines is not a luxury; it is the price to be paid for a portal of entry into a civilised and intensively safe healthcare system. Every time we delay the construction of a comprehensive, proactive testing infrastructure, we are playing a game of Russian Roulette with the lives of our people.
The science is available, and the necessary technology exists. What is missing is the political will to put patient safety as the premier deciding criterion. The time for hollow rhetoric has passed, and the time for a scientifically fortified, transparent, and proactive regulatory mechanism is right now. The good health of all Sri Lankans, as well as even their lives, depend on it.
Dr B. J. C. Perera
MBBS(Cey), DCH(Cey), DCH(Eng), MD(Paediatrics), MRCP(UK), FRCP(Edin), FRCP(Lond), FRCPCH(UK), FSLCPaed, FCCP, Hony. FRCPCH(UK), Hony. FCGP(SL)
Specialist Consultant Paediatrician and Honorary Senior Fellow, Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Joint Editor, Sri Lanka Journal of Child Health
Section Editor, Ceylon Medical Journal
In the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Ditwah, the government has moved swiftly to establish a Presidential Task Force for Rebuilding Sri Lanka with a core committee to assess requirements, set priorities, allocate resources and raise and disburse funds. Public reaction, however, has focused on the committee’s problematic composition. All eleven committee members are men, and all non-government seats are held by business personalities with no known expertise in complex national development projects, disaster management and addressing the needs of vulnerable populations. They belong to the top echelon of Sri Lanka’s private sector which has been making extraordinary profits. The government has been urged by civil society groups to reconsider the role and purpose of this task force and reconstitute it to be more representative of the country and its multiple needs.
The group of high-powered businessmen initially appointed might greatly help mobilise funds from corporates and international donors, but this group may be ill equipped to determine priorities and oversee disbursement and spending. It would be necessary to separate fundraising, fund oversight and spending prioritisation, given the different capabilities and considerations required for each. International experience in post disaster recovery shows that inclusive and representative structures are more likely to produce outcomes that are equitable, efficient and publicly accepted. Civil society, for instance, brings knowledge rooted in communities, experience in working with vulnerable groups and a capacity to question assumptions that may otherwise go unchallenged.
A positive and important development is that the government has been responsive to these criticisms and has invited at least one civil society representative to join the Rebuilding Sri Lanka committee. This decision deserves to be taken seriously and responded to positively by civil society which needs to call for more representation rather than a single representative. Such a demand would reflect an understanding that rebuilding after a national disaster cannot be undertaken by the state and the business community alone. The inclusion of civil society will strengthen transparency and public confidence, particularly at a moment when trust in institutions remains fragile. While one appointment does not in itself ensure inclusive governance, it opens the door to a more participatory approach that needs to be expanded and institutionalised.
Costly Exclusions
Going down the road of history, the absence of inclusion in government policymaking has cost the country dearly. The exclusion of others, not of one’s own community or political party, started at the very dawn of Independence in 1948. The Father of the Nation, D S Senanayake, led his government to exclude the Malaiyaha Tamil community by depriving them of their citizenship rights. Eight years later, in 1956, the Oxford educated S W R D Bandaranaike effectively excluded the Tamil speaking people from the government by making Sinhala the sole official language. These early decisions normalised exclusion as a tool of governance rather than accommodation and paved the way for seven decades of political conflict and three decades of internal war.
Exclusion has also taken place virulently on a political party basis. Both of Sri Lanka’s post Independence constitutions were decided on by the government alone. The opposition political parties voted against the new constitutions of 1972 and 1977 because they had been excluded from participating in their design. The proposals they had made were not accepted. The basic law of the country was never forged by consensus. This legacy continues to shape adversarial politics and institutional fragility. The exclusion of other communities and political parties from decision making has led to frequent reversals of government policy. Whether in education or economic regulation or foreign policy, what one government has done the successor government has undone.
Sri Lanka’s poor performance in securing the foreign investment necessary for rapid economic growth can be attributed to this factor in the main. Policy instability is not simply an economic problem but a political one rooted in narrow ownership of power. In 2022, when the people went on to the streets to protest against the government and caused it to fall, they demanded system change in which their primary focus was corruption, which had reached very high levels both literally and figuratively. The focus on corruption, as being done by the government at present, has two beneficial impacts for the government. The first is that it ensures that a minimum of resources will be wasted so that the maximum may be used for the people’s welfare.
Second Benefit
The second benefit is that by focusing on the crime of corruption, the government can disable many leaders in the opposition. The more opposition leaders who are behind bars on charges of corruption, the less competition the government faces. Yet these gains do not substitute for the deeper requirement of inclusive governance. The present government seems to have identified corruption as the problem it will emphasise. However, reducing or eliminating corruption by itself is not going to lead to rapid economic development. Corruption is not the sole reason for the absence of economic growth. The most important factor in rapid economic growth is to have government policies that are not reversed every time a new government comes to power.
For Sri Lanka to make the transition to self-sustaining and rapid economic development, it is necessary that the economic policies followed today are not reversed tomorrow. The best way to ensure continuity of policy is to be inclusive in governance. Instead of excluding those in the opposition, the mainstream opposition in particular needs to be included. In terms of system change, the government has scored high with regard to corruption. There is a general feeling that corruption in the country is much reduced compared to the past. However, with regard to inclusion the government needs to demonstrate more commitment. This was evident in the initial choice of cabinet ministers, who were nearly all men from the majority ethnic community. Important committees it formed, including the Presidential Task Force for a Clean Sri Lanka and the Rebuilding Sri Lanka Task Force, also failed at first to reflect the diversity of the country.
In a multi ethnic and multi religious society like Sri Lanka, inclusivity is not merely symbolic. It is essential for addressing diverse perspectives and fostering mutual understanding. It is important to have members of the Tamil, Muslim and other minority communities, and women who are 52 percent of the population, appointed to important decision making bodies, especially those tasked with national recovery. Without such representation, the risk is that the very communities most affected by the crisis will remain unheard, and old grievances will be reproduced in new forms. The invitation extended to civil society to participate in the Rebuilding Sri Lanka Task Force is an important beginning. Whether it becomes a turning point will depend on whether the government chooses to make inclusion a principle of governance rather than treat it as a show of concession made under pressure.
by Jehan Perera
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