Saturday 22nd March, 2025

A protest by a group of unemployed graduates has been going on for days near Parliament. The protesters are urging the JVP-led NPP government to fulfil its promise to employ them in the state sector. The government has apparently adopted the proverbial ostrich posture, hoping that the problem will resolve itself without its intervention. But the protesters say they will not go away until the government carries out its promise to them.

There was a heavy police presence near the unemployed graduates’ protest yesterday with a water cannon vehicle at the ready. One can only hope that there won’t be a confrontation between the protesters and the police.

The government has announced its decision to recruit 30,000 more workers into the public service, and it is only natural that the unemployed graduates have taken to the streets, demanding jobs. They are obviously eyeing some of the vacancies which, the government says, have arisen in the state sector.

The state service is already overstaffed as successive governments have used it as a source of employment for their supporters over the years. There is a pressing need to downsize the unproductive, ever-burgeoning public service, which is a drain on the state coffers. We already have one state employee for every 15 citizens.

The government has taken a census of some crop-raiding animals, such as monkeys and peafowl, claiming that it needs reliable data to tackle the problem of depredation in a scientific manner. Curiously, it has not cared to carry out a comprehensive survey on state institutions to find out the excess workers in them and assess the efficiency of those outfits so as to streamline the public service. Progress will continue to elude this country unless its state service is rationalised urgently. Successive governments have baulked at doing so for fear of a political backlash. The UNP-led UNF government (2001-2004) tried to reform the state sector, but it was dislodged and its successor restored the status quo ante.

One’s sympathies are with the protesting unemployed undergraduates; they are some of the victims of the current education and political systems. Most products of Sri Lankan universities lack employability mostly due to deficiencies in the education system, which needs reform.

Students themselves are not without blame for this sorry state of affairs; most of them do not care to gain the skills demanded by the job market. They expect the state to employ them after their graduation. Governments over the decades have given university graduates jobs in the state sector for political reasons. But this practice cannot go on indefinitely, given severe resource constraints and increasing pressure from the international lending agencies to curtail state expenditure. The day may not be far off when the state service has to be downsized whether politicians like it or not.

The government will have to stop dilly-dallying and make a firm policy decision on state sector recruitments. Those who are to graduate from the state universities need to be told the bitter truth, in advance, that they will not be able to secure jobs in the state sector as of right. Unless the government reduces the public sector salary bill drastically to increase its revenue significantly, the economy will not be able to emerge from the present crisis. However, as for the graduates on the warpath near Parliament, the government is left with no alternative but to find ways and means of carrying out its election promise or face the consequences.

What Sri Lankan governments should do is to develop the national economy, bring in educational reforms, take steps to produce employable graduates and create employment opportunities for the country’s youth. Instead, they choose to expand the state sector at the expense of the economy. There’s the rub.

Friday 21st March, 2025

There has been a sharp increase in fatal accidents on Sri Lanka’s expressways during the past several years. On Tuesday night, a university lecturer lost his life and his family members sustained serious injuries in a mishap on the Kurunegala-Mirigama stretch of the Central Expressway. Road accidents cause about 2,500 deaths a year in Sri Lanka. Most of these accidents are preventable, according to road safety experts.

Public focus is typically on bereavement caused by road fatalities, but these incidents lead to serious social and economic issues as well. A World Bank (WB) report, Delivering Road Safety in Sri Lanka; Leadership Priorities and Initiatives to 2030, reveals that ‘the high road crash fatality and injury rates on Sri Lanka’s roads undermine the economic growth and progress made over the past decade on reducing poverty and boosting prosperity’. The report says the annual crash deaths per capita in Sri Lanka are twice the average rate in high-income countries and five times that of the best performing countries in the world! Sri Lanka reportedly has the worst road fatality rate among its immediate neighbours in the South Asia region. Numerous programmes have been implemented under successive governments to ensure road safety, but they have not yielded the desired results, and the Grim Reaper has been in overdrive.

Road safety experts have identified the following factors, inter alia, as the common causes of crashes on expressways and other roads, the world over: speeding, distracted driving, reckless driving, fatigue, driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics, inclement weather conditions, inadequate road conditions, tailgating, improper lane changes, inexperience of drivers, overtaking dangerously, poor visibility, unroadworthy vehicles, poor signage or lack of road markings and impatience or time pressure. One of the aforesaid factors or a combination of two or more of them could lead to fatal accidents on any road. So, any strategy to prevent road mishaps consists in addressing those causes.

Crashes on expressways are usually rear-end collisions, as is obvious, and they involve heavy vehicles, in most cases. This is something the police should pay special attention to. On expressways, one can see many vehicles with taillights that are too dim to be noticed from a distance at night. Bulk haulers do not display properly-lit overlength signs. They pose a grave danger to other vehicles that ply at 100 kmph behind them at night. Such vehicles must not be allowed to use expressways or any other roads.

The police personnel stationed at interchanges are required to conduct visual inspections of vehicles, especially ill-maintained ones, that enter expressways to determine their roadworthiness, but they do not seem to carry out their duties and functions diligently. The only thing they do properly is to ticket errant drivers who exceed speed limits. Most drivers are aware of the expressway stretches that are not monitored by speed cameras, and they often tend to break speed limits in such areas, endangering their own lives as well as others’.

Countries such as South Korea, China, Australia, and Italy reportedly use drones equipped with speed detection technologies to monitor traffic, and this method is reported to have yielded impressive results. Sri Lanka should acquire the modern technologies to curb speeding, and the costs thereof can be passed on to errant drivers in the form of increases in fines for their efforts to break the sound barrier, as it were.

As for sleep-related road accidents, which have become a significant concern, there is a need for more rest areas along the expressways. Gadgets and technologies are available to monitor drivers’ eye movements and facial expressions and detect signs of drowsiness and fatigue. There are also steering wheel sensors to detect drowsiness of drivers. Modern vehicles come fitted with them, and some drowsiness detection systems can be retrofitted to older vehicles to help save lives. Making such technologies available at affordable prices should be part of any road safety programme.

The National Council for Road Safety, the police, etc., have been working tirelessly to make roads safe, but their efforts need a big fillip from the political authority. The above-mentioned WB report has said Sri Lanka will require an additional investment of almost US$ 2 billion to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 3.6 target of a 50% reduction in national road crash fatalities. This is a difficult target for a country emerging from an economic crisis, but it has to be achieved. The government should consider launching a national initiative similar to the Clean Sri Lanka programme to reduce road accidents.

Thursday 20th March, 2025

The police have found their ‘head’ at long last, but they’ve lost face. Their much-publicised manhunt for IGP Deshabandu Tennakoon came a cropper. Having been in hiding for 20 days, he surrendered to the Matara Magistrate’s court yesterday and was remanded.

The government sought to save face by claiming, in Parliament, yesterday that Tennakoon had surrendered while a CID team was in Matara to obtain a court order to freeze his assets. It also said the CID had conducted a thorough search of his house the previous day and taken into custody a large number of bottles of liquor, a small firearm, and two mobile phones. It would have the public believe that such actions scared Tennakoon into giving himself up. However, there is reason to believe that Tennakoon surrendered because his last-ditch attempt to have the arrest warrant for him stayed by the Court of Appeal failed.

It is now up to the CID to ascertain from Tennakoon where he was hiding and who helped him evade arrest for almost three weeks. The act of aiding and abetting the evasion of arrest is a punishable offence, as is public knowledge. The police are known to arrest the family members of the suspects they fail to arrest. One may recall that they took into custody the mother and another family member of Ishara Sewwandi, an accomplice of the killer of Gannemulle Sanjeewa. Acting on a tip-off, they arrested the shooter within a few hours of the incident, but Sewwandi has been on the run since 19 Feb., and the search for her has drawn a blank.

Tennakoon’s illegal behaviour has been a black mark on the police, who have also blotted their copybook by failing to arrest him. How can they be expected to catch the masterminds behind serious crimes, such as terror attacks?

In 2024, the then President Ranil Wickremesinghe appointed Tennakoon IGP amidst protests. His action made the SLPP-UNP government even more unpopular, and it is believed that the previous administration launched Operation Yukthiya against the underworld in a bid to shore up its crumbling image and justify Tennakoon’s appointment as IGP. There were many complaints of police excesses and fundamental rights violations during that operation. However, there was a pressing need for an all-out effort to neutralise the criminal gangs engaged in drug trafficking, contract killing, armed robberies, etc., but Yukthiya became a kind of political circus. There has been a steep rise in underworld activities since last year’s regime change. Hardly a day passes without a fatal shooting somewhere, but the police are doing precious little to stem the crime wave.

Tennakoon should not have been appointed IGP, but the previous regime needed someone who was willing to do its bidding unquestioningly. There were serious allegations against him including wrongful arrests, obstructing police investigations, failure to prevent the Easter Sunday terror attacks, threatening journalists, and attacking protesters. Above all, in December 2023, the Supreme Court, in a historic judgement, held Tennakoon responsible for torture. Not even that apex court judgement deterred the SLPP-UNP government from making Tennakoon the police chief.

There are lessons that the current police top brass should learn from their predecessors’ mistakes, especially those of Tennakoon. Unless they refrain from compromising their professional integrity to commit excesses and/or do politicians’ dirty work, they, too, will face the same fate as Tennakoon.