Saturday 13th December, 2025

NPP MP and former Speaker Asoka Ranwala was arrested yesterday over a road accident, where an infant and two women were injured, in Sapugaskanda. He has been charged with dangerous driving and failure to prevent an accident, according to media reports quoting the police. He was in the National Hospital of Sri Lanka, Colombo, at the time of going to press. An attempt is being made in some quarters to have the public believe that the law applies to everyone equally under the current dispensation, but it is said that one swallow does not make a summer.

The police have apparently acted the way they should, where the accident allegedly caused by Ranwala is concerned, but they ought to explain why they baulked at arresting a deputy minister and an NPP mayor facing a fraud charge, and went out of their way to consult the Attorney General instead to buy time. They swiftly arrest Opposition politicians and haul them before courts in double-quick time, don’t they?

One may recall that former Senior DIG Ravi Seneviratne was arrested in 2023 for drunk driving and causing a multiple vehicle collision in Colombo. Thereafter, he joined the NPP’s Retired Police Collective as its head, and had himself appointed Secretary to the Ministry of Public Security, after the NPP’s rise to power, the following year. Now, the drunk driving charge against him has been dropped, according to media reports! This is proof that political interference with the Attorney General’s Department is far from over, and the rule of law is yet to be restored. The police remain putty in the hands of the ruling party politicians, and the Executive is keeping the AG’s Department under his thumb.

Hundreds of JVP supporters broke their journey on the Southern Expressway, of all places, on their way to their party’s May Day rally this year. Several buses carrying them were seen parked in undesignated areas of the expressway in full view of the police. It will be interesting to know if the police have prosecuted those offenders.

The national anti-graft commission and the CID have come under criticism for dragging their feet on complaints against the NPP politicians and their cronies while going hell for leather to arrest and prosecute the political rivals of the current administration. No government politician has been questioned on the controversial release of 323 red-flagged containers via the green channel in the Colombo Port in January 2025. What those containers carried is anybody’s guess.

In September, a group of JVP activists stormed a Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) office in Yakkala. The police shamelessly sided with the JVP members, who produced a document, claiming that it was a court order, vesting the place in their party. The police accepted their claim unquestioningly and drove the FSP members away. They went on to put up barricades in the area to prevent the FSP from trying to reclaim their office seized by the JVP. We argued in a previous editorial comment that it was a clear instance of the police misusing state resources to safeguard the interests of the government.

A few days later, Gampaha Additional Magistrate Dhammika Uduwe Withana directed the Yakkala Police to evict all those who were occupying the FSP office and to hold the premises under police custody pending the Gampaha District Court ruling on its ownership.

One should not be so naïve as to take the wheeling of a single swallow in a gyre as a sign of the arrival of summer.

Friday 12th December, 2025

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake is apparently determined to have one of his loyalists appointed Auditor General though the Constitutional Council (CC) has prevented him from doing so. The government is apparently playing a waiting game.

Sri Lanka has never been short of self-proclaimed messiahs who promise to deliver people from suffering and secure enough votes to win elections. It is only after being ensconced in power that they lay bare their true faces. The public is left with a choice between merely voicing protest and grinning and bearing it. Sri Lankans boast of their high literacy rate, but fall for the wiles of politicians.

Last year, it was widely thought that a new era was about to dawn at long last. Most voters, civil society outfits and good governance activists reposed their trust in the JVP-led NPP, which embarked on a much-publicised crusade against bribery, corruption, abuse of power and waste. They were in the vanguard of a movement led by the JVP/NPP purportedly to upend rotten systems, usher in a new political culture and improve the people’s lot as never before. They helped the JVP/NPP turn the last general election into what they described as a shramadana to cleanse Parliament. But their disillusionment with the incumbent dispensation is now palpable.

Ex-Director of Parliament of Sri Lanka and former Secretary to the Presidential Commission on corruption, Lacille de Silva, has torn into the NPP government for keeping the post of Auditor General vacant with an ulterior motive. He has told the media that President Anura Kumara Dissanayake is trying to catapult one of his cronies into the high post, which has been kept vacant since April 2025. De Silva is of the view that the government will keep the key post vacant until early 2026, when the CC will have to be reconstituted, so as to have its crony appointed Auditor General. The government has brought a member of its Retired Police Collective––Shani Abeysekera––out of retirement and appointed him Director of the CID, which is pursuing the NPP’s political opponents relentlessly while sparing the government politicians and their supporters.

De Silva has said Mahinda Rajapaksa, after winning the 2005 presidential election, packed vital state institutions with stooges who pandered to his whims and fancies, and President Dissanayake is doing something similar. He has dubbed President Dissanayake Mahinda II!

Stooges have been going places under successive governments and turned key state institutions into mere appendages of the party in power. The NPP is trying to go even further. Nothing could be more demeaning for the self-righteous JVP/NPP grandees than to be compared to the Rajapaksas, whom they condemn vehemently at every turn.

The Auditor General’s independence must be safeguarded to eliminate corruption in the state sector. Only an independent Auditor General can scrutinise government spending without fear or favour to ensure that state funds are utilised responsibly according to the law, issue credible reports, prevent political interference, strengthen accountability and parliamentary oversight, build public trust, deter corruption and promote good governance. A political appointee will be beholden to his or her political masters and become a mere puppet willing to help further the interests of the government in power.

The least President Dissanayake can do to prevent the public from bracketing him and his government with those he has been demonising is to abandon his plan to appoint a crony as Auditor General and allow a qualified person of integrity to hold that post. The best way out is to elevate someone from within the ranks to the top post.

There are senior, capable, honest officers in the Auditor General’s Department. One of them can be appointed Auditor General.

The despicable practice of governments parachuting their loyalists into top posts, bypassing qualified internal candidates must be brought to an end forthwith. After all, that is what the NPP promised before last year’s elections. Just like its predecessors, the NPP government does not seem to have any sense of shame.

Thursday 11th December, 2025

The Opposition has blamed the severity of recent floods that devastated many areas, such as Gampola, on the controversial appointment of some engineers loyal to the NPP government to oversee the Kotmale reservoir in place of senior, experienced engineering professionals who could have responded to emergencies swiftly. It has claimed that if the experienced officials had been allowed to operate the reservoir, they would have begun releasing water early to prevent flash floods, without waiting for the sluice gates to open automatically.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has been on a whirlwind tour of the cyclone-hit areas during the last several days. Obviously, his mission is not only to speed up the ongoing relief and rebuilding programmes but also to mitigate the adverse political fallout from the disaster. He however has his work cut out. The dash of the Leader of the Red Comrades across the country reminds us of the Red Queen’s remark to Alice: “It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.”

President Dissanayake would not have had to exert himself in this manner if his government had responded swiftly to the warnings of cyclonic winds and heavy rains, issued by local and foreign meteorological agencies, two weeks before the landfall of Cyclone Ditwah. It has now been revealed that as early as 13 November, the India Meteorological Department, which runs the Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre (RMSC) responsible for monitoring the oceans in this region and issuing warnings of cyclones, alerted Sri Lanka to the impending adverse weather. The Sri Lankan government should have convened the Disaster Management Council and directed all state institutions to be prepared to face the impending extreme weather events.

Ironically, India’s warning of adverse weather came on 13 November, when the JVP leaders including President Dissanayake commemorated their party’s leaders and rank and file, who had died in the name of a cause that the JVP has since relinquished—defeating ‘Indian expansionism’ and ending Indian interference with Sri Lanka’s internal affairs’.

The Opposition insists that the severity of the Ditwah disaster could not be minimised owing to the JVP-NPP’s inexperience in governance. This argument is not without some merit, but the key members of the Opposition themselves have a history of ignoring dire warnings; they were in the dysfunctional Yahapalana government led by the UNP (2015-2020), which failed to act on repeated warnings of a series of terror attacks. They and other ‘experienced’ politicians in the Opposition are responsible for the rise of a group of inexperienced politicians to power.

It is not only power that corrupts; political experience also does, as evident from the prevalence of corruption under the watch of the so-called experienced leaders, who left the public with no alternative but to throw in their lot with a bunch of self-proclaimed messiahs with little or no experience in governance.

‘Inexperienced’ politicians’ rapid ascent to power can be traced to the people’s desperation to see the back of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose rule had become a metaphor for corruption, nepotism, abuse of power and political violence. But the country had to pay a huge price for electing Maithripala Sirisena, a mediocre politician, as President in 2015. He neglected national security and undermined the National Security Council, so much so that actionable intelligence about the Easter Sunday terror attacks went unheeded in 2019. Thereafter, the country took a huge gamble by electing Gotabaya Rajapaksa as President. His lack of experience in governance almost left the economy and democracy dead. Thankfully, he resigned without plunging the country into a bloodbath, but his failure paved the way for the meteoric rise of a bunch of inexperienced politicians to power; they stand accused of having failed to mitigate the impact of the recent disaster and save lives.

The need of the hour is for the self-proclaimed experienced Opposition politicians and the inexperienced government leaders to sink their political differences and join forces to accomplish the uphill task of providing relief to the disaster victims and helping rebuild their lives. Political battles and investigations into alleged lapses and failures can wait.