Midweek Review

Do not abuse Sri Lanka Administrative Service and degrade university education

Published

2 years ago

2021/06/9

Sahan Weerasooriya

‘Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.’ – John Maynard Keynes

By Usvatte-aratchi
(The writer has not been a member of
either SLAS or of a university faculty.)

Parliament and government in our country in the 21st century so far have been dominated by persons with no post-secondary education and often with little secondary education. This has been accompanied by a lack of people with high level management experience. In contrast, parliaments in the 20th century have had a surfeit of persons with both university education and professional experience. There were Solomon Bandaranaike, Philip Gunawardene, S. A. Wickremasinghe, Pieter Keuneman, N. M. Perera, Colvin R.de Silva, G. G. Ponnabalam, S. J. V. Chelvanyakam, Dudley Senanayake, M. V.P. Peiris, W. Dahanayake, Felix Dias Bandaranaike, Lalith Athulathmudali, Ranjith Atapattu, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sarath Amunugama, G. L.Peiris, W. B.Wijekoon and several others. We have yet to elect a local university graduate as the President of the Republic. Recent governments have forsaken such men and women, except for two or three, or more likely, such men and women have forsaken political activity altogether. Viyath Maga is a new emergence, that has yet to be tested. Jaffna was once rightly reputed for its educated public who actively participated in its civic life, but no longer. These changes are strange in a society where education at all levels has grown markedly during the last 70 years, not only grown massively but also diversified, both geographically and content wise.

Governments were assisted by a senior management team first recruited as junior managers from among the brightest output of the universities. Only university teaching challenged the attraction of the Ceylon Civil Service to bright students from universities. They accomplished brilliantly tasks of management, though often not innovation. While Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia saw opportunities in a new world of electronics, shipping and aviation, our bureaucracy failed to free themselves of the politicians’ infatuation with Rajarata and to lead us into the brave new world. Our entrepreneurs were hopelessly lethargic. The exception was the collective of public servants under President Premadasa, who took the garment industry to all corners of the island. If any group of people accumulated wealth during these last 20 years, they were politicians who were in government and occasionally a few other men who collaborated with those politicians. And those politicians accumulated wealth more rapidly and in larger bulk than in their wildest imaginations. That they are not in prison tells its own story.

The present government has gone further than any other. There are all too few men of university learning in the government but the intellectual heavy lifting in government (not withstanding Viyath Maga) seems to be in the hands of men and women of little post-secondary education and even less of relevant professional experience. See the confusion in the administration of the vaccination programme; this, in a country whose healthcare workers nearly eliminated malaria 70 years ago with no help from the WHO, the World Bank, the Doctors without Borders, OXFAM or Bill Gates––Malaria still kills more than a million every year in Africa––and poliomyelitis two decades later and still later childhood diseases DPT. Grave is the danger that the government has placed the public in when they failed to read the danger in permitting a ship turned down by two ports on their voyage to come to harbour in Colombo. So, is the crisis that peasants face in planting seed designed to grow with inorganic fertiliser, now using miniscule amounts of organic fertiliser. There is a strong case for going back to using organic fertiliser; but it is also necessary that plant breeders develop seed that respond with productivity to that fertiliser. Otherwise, we must take the responsibility for pre-1965 yields (before the introduction of H-4, BG 111 and later seed) and the consequent necessity to import large quantities of rice. The price of cereals in world markets are already up. VP tea growers face the same hazard as those plants may not respond to organic fertiliser as they do to inorganic fertiliser. Nor can plantations, given the price of tea and of labour, any longer employ labour for weeding, in the absence of chemical herbicides. The government has given an Apple IIG desktop to growers and asked them to mine bitcoin.

There is a saying in our villages:

‘ekak kadatolu hada gannata gihin mata vu kariya;

dekak kadatolu hada dunnai induruve achariya’:

the smith to whom I handed over (an implement) to repair one defect returned it to me with two defects’. Apt, indeed!

Young men and women who enter the Administrative Service are among the brightest output of our schools. Usually, they come into the arts faculties at universities having been admitted entirely on merit, not subject to entitlements on the basis if quotas. Pundits often blame these students from rural schools for choosing the arts stream. They have not looked at the preponderance of 1C schools in rural areas when 1AB schools abound in urban areas. Truthfully, the only stream available for rural children to swim in that desert is the Arts Stream. It is a pity that, like Amu Darya and Syr Darya that end in the Aral sea, they end up in a desert. These students receive little private tuition, being too poor to buy it. In SLAS, the best of them end up as CEOs, Secretaries to ministries. They may be poorly taught in universities, but intelligence cannot be mottled by bad teaching and stupidity emblazoned with sophistication. The present government has appointed as Secretaries to ministries and as Chairmen of corporations senior military men (retired or in service) under whom members of the Administrative Service must work. Military men and women may excel on the battlefield. But public administration in a modern complex society is a different ball game, as chess is from American football. It must gall these civil servants near the end of their careers to be denied opportunities of occupying CEO positions for which they have been trained for long years from the time they joined as junior managers. One cannot expect deep commitment from them. It is wrong to deny SLAS men and women what is their right.

Some assume that there exists a strong association between the number of graduates in STEM subjects and the rate of economic growth in a society. Read a little bit of history. In 1890, when the United States toppled Britain off its pedestal of top dog in economic wellbeing, the US had less than two percent of its population as university graduates, most of them in Arts. In 1890, there were no motor cars in US but by 1929, every household there had a car. Cars were not imported from Britain or elsewhere. When Britain brought down the industrial revolution to this world 1760-1840, ‘Formal education in Britain before 1850 was, with the exception of a very small minority, confined to what we would consider today an elementary education.’

(Joel Mokyr.2009). The two English universities in Oxford and Cambridge, did not have departments of engineering. As the official historian of Cambridge University wrote ‘In 1870 the university of Cambridge was a provincial seminary enhanced by a traditional prestige, by expertise in a small range of disciplines ….’ The Cavendish Laboratory was still to come. The University of London had not begun to throw in its weight. Redbricks showed their colours later. Yet, Britain had completed the first Industrial Revolution!

Britain did not have its students enrolled in foreign universities (though much was learnt from Germany in late 19th century) or steal science and engineering secrets from other countries to become the factory to the world. They had none to steal from. If entrepreneurs, whether private or state, work under the right policies, economic progress takes place and university graduates find employment in those enterprises.

In 1975, there were no courses in computer programming in colleges and universities in US for an electronics industry to blossom in 1990. When did you first hear of Tsinghua University and the Harbin Institute of Technology? When industries grow, university graduates take up jobs offered. During the last decade of the 20th century, there were letters in The New York Times from Ph.D.s in mathematics that they drove taxis to make a living. (There was a huge exodus of mathematics men from the USSR after its collapse.) By 2005, Wall Street firms and banks could not find enough of them for employment.

The relationship between education and employment is not as simple-minded as our rulers imagine. Both administrators and scholars had learnt those lessons from manpower planning in the USSR and the forecast for manpower in Britain the early 1960s. The number of doctors trained according to manpower plans was so low as to create a problem of running NHS. The first large scale migration of Indian doctors (some doctors from Ski Lanka also joined in) to Britain took place in that milieu. Nor have we heard of successful economies that stacked up loads of trained manpower and waited for economic growth to take place. Literacy is another matter, altogether, as we have learnt from China and Vietnam, unfortunately belied in Sri Lanka. The wheel is an old invention; it is too costly to invent it again.

SLAS men (and women) have the know how to work government programmes. Military men excel in the battlefield. Let not the latter invade the former lest disaster should overtake us all. Universities do not stack up graduates waiting for industries to grow to give them employment. Promote the growth of industries; trained personnel will come in. Do not abuse SLAS and do not degrade university education.

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Midweek Review

Blind security sector reforms:

Published

5 days ago

2023/05/24

Sahan Weerasooriya

State Defence Minister Pramitha Bandara Tennakoon greets US State Department official Afreen Akhter (pic courtesy MoD)

Assurance to US on the size of military

By Shamindra Ferdinando

The Defence Ministry recently quoted State Defence Minister, Pramitha Bandara Tennakoon, as having assured US State Department official, Afreen Akhter, that the military would be ‘right-sized’ to perform their classic role.

The assurance was given on 15 May at his office, in Colombo, just ahead of the14th anniversary of Sri Lanka’s triumph over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), when our security forces brought the war to a successful conclusion, on the morning of 19 May with the Vijayabahu Infantry Regiment (VIR) troops wiping out a small group of hardcore LTTE cadres, on the banks of the Nanthikadal lagoon. Among the dead was LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Why did the State Defence Minister make such a pledge? Did Akhter, the Deputy Assistant Secretary, South and Central Asia Bureau of the State Department, seek a clarification as regards security sector reforms? If the military had continued to perform their classic role of being a ceremonial Army, the LTTE could have achieved Eelam. But the nearly three-year long sustained offensive brought the LTTE to its knees, 14 years ago.

Afreen Akhter oversees Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and the Maldives, as well as the Office of Security and Transnational Affairs.

Her visit was the first by a State Department official, since National Freedom Front (NFF) leader, Wimal Weerawansa, last month alleged, in a published book ‘Nine: The Hidden Story;, that the US had a direct role in the removal of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa last year. The former industries minister is on record as having disclosed that US Ambassador here, Julie Chung, personally offered Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena an opportunity to succeed Gotabaya Rajapaksa, regardless of constitutional impediment, to bypassing Ranil Wickremesinghe, in an unannounced visit to his official residence.

Ambassador Chung swiftly rejected the allegation made no sooner ‘Nine: The Hidden Story’ was launched at the Sri Lanka Foundation on 25 April. However, Speaker Abeywardena gave credence to lawmaker Weerawansa’s shocking claim by remaining dead silent.

Since the conclusion of the war, the Mahinda Rajapaksa government quietly began downsizing the SLA, which was little above 200,000 at the height of the war. However, the present government officially acknowledged the downsizing of the war-winning, Army on 13 January, 2023. State Minister Tennakoon was quoted as having said that the SLA strength would be further reduced to 135,000 by the end of next year and 100,000 by 2030.

Of course there cannot be an issue over the need to gradually decrease military strength in peace time, taking into consideration post-war national security requirements and the pathetic economic situation, confronting the country.

Regardless of the developing political-economic-social crisis, it would be the responsibility of the military top brass to brief the political leadership of the ground situation. Post-war national security requirements shouldn’t be looked at only on the basis of economic indicators. That would be suicidal. In other words, the country is in such a precarious situation, political leadership may tend to conveniently ignore basics, especially to please Uncle Sam, the obvious king-maker here now, thereby jeopardizing the country’s national security.

Declaration that the SLA would be reduced to 100,000 by 2030 means the total strength would be cut by half, from its peak.

The Defence Ministry statement didn’t refer to any other issue. But that doesn’t mean contentious issues hadn’t been taken up with Akhter during her visit. The US continuing to needle Sri Lanka, 14 years after the eradication of the LTTE’s conventional military capability, despite Washington’s own hands dripping with so much innocent blood from so many of its worldwide military misadventures, to retain its international hegemony, is mired in continuing controversy.

The designation of Sri Lanka’s most successful Navy commander (2005-2009) Admiral of the Fleet Wasantha Karannagoda, in late April, this year, over a spate of abductions carried out in 2008-2009, at the height of the war with the world’s most ruthless terrorist outfit, as was even acknowledged by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, highlighted how the Washington establishment continues to pursue an agenda severely inimical to Sri Lanka.

Sanctioning of Karannagoda is the latest in a series of US measures directed at the war-winning military here. Among the sanctioned are Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka and General Shavendra Silva, the controversial travel ban on the celebrated wartime General Officer Commanding (GoC) of 58 Division formerly Task Force 1, the Numero Uno among the SLA fighting formations that literally took the fight to the LTTE, was imposed in Feb. 2020.

Expansion of SLA

The LTTE couldn’t have been defeated if not for the rapid expansion undertaken during the then Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka’s tenure as Commander of the Army (2005-2009). The SLA lacked the wherewithal to sustain a large scale ground offensive while deploying sufficient troops on a holding role. For want of adequate infantry battalions, the SLA couldn’t undertake large scale offensives, simultaneously. But the rapid expansion, since the launching of operations on multiple fronts, in Vanni, from 1997, paid dividends soon enough.

Sri Lanka should review post-war developments, taking into consideration the overthrowing of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in July last year. The overall failure of the security apparatus to meet the public protest campaign that had been backe, clandestinely by the US, as alleged repeatedly by lawmaker Weerawansa, quickly overwhelmed law enforcement authorities and the military. Law enforcement authorities and the military should have been prepared to meet any eventuality. Unfortunately, a public protest campaign that was launched on 31 March, last year, targeting the private residence of the then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, exposed the serious weakness in overall government response to hitherto unknown threat.

Military strength should be the prerogative of the government. The Sectoral Oversight Committee on National Security, now headed by retired Rear Admiral Sarath Weerasekera MP, should closely examine the developments and take up matters of importance, both in and outside Parliament. It would be a grave mistake, on Sri Lanka’s part, to consider/implement defence sector reforms at the behest of literally bankrupt external powers, with sinister motives. Defence sector reforms should be in line with overall security-political doctrine, instead of piecemeal restructuring. There cannot be a better example than the then President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s readiness to enhance the SLA’s strength by nearly 100,000. That decision, taken in the aftermath of Velupillai Prabhakaran declaration of Eelam War IV, in August 2006, was perhaps the single most decisive factor in Sri Lanka’s final victory over terrorism against so many odds placed against it.

Conclusive factor

In spite of the increasing military strength, as the LTTE gradually stepped up the offensive, and, finally, its threat became conventional in 1990, Sri Lanka never gave a real boost to military personnel numbers as explained in the chart published on this page. The period from 1981 to 1987 can be categorized as the Eelam War l. The Eelam War ll and lll were fought from 1990 to 1994, and 1995 to 2001, respectively.

Sri Lanka launched Division-sized ground offensives during Eelam War lll that began with the sinking of two gunboats, berthed at the Trincomalee harbour, and the downing of two Avros, with 100 officers, and men all, in April 1995, during an informal ceasefire with the Chandrika Kumaratunga regime. But the military top brass, or the political leadership, at that time, never felt comfortable in executing a real expansion of the SLA.

In hindsight, they never wanted to go the whole hog. Operation ‘Riviresa.’ launched in Oct. 1995. was meant to bring Jaffna town under military control and consolidate government positions in the Jaffna peninsula. The operation that involved three Divisions was the largest combined security forces campaign until the Vanni campaign in 2007-2009.

However, the SLA never received the boost it desired during Eelam War lll. President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga authorized Operation ‘Jayasikurui’ (victory assured) to restore the overland Main Supply Route (MSR) to Jaffna peninsula. Having launched the offensive in May 1997, the government called it off, in 1999, following unbearable debacles. It was a miracle that the Army did not crumble at the time down to Anuradhapura or even beyond with a Commander in Chief like that, who was nothing but a cunning chatterbox with no sense of time. The government quite conveniently refrained from making a real difference on the ground by enhancing the number of infantry battalions available for ground commanders. According to the chart on this page, the SLA strength had been 117,705 officers and men (volunteers included) in 1996, the year before the launch of Operation ‘Jayasikurui’ and by 1999 when it was called off the paid strength in that particular year was 121,473.

The chart reveals a drop in the paid strength in 2000 to 116,739 in the wake of a series of humiliating battlefield defeats, culminating with the worst single debacle in the entire war when SLA abandoned the strategically located Elephant Pass base. A Division plus troops couldn’t repulse the LTTE offensive and the base collapsed in April 2000. Regardless of the Elephant Pass fall, the following year paid strength recorded a marginal increase. According to the chart, the paid strength in 2001 had been 118,331 while the strength dropped again in 2002 and 2003 during the operation of Oslo-arranged infamous Ceasefire Agreement.

The situation started gradually improving in 2004 and by 2007 paid strength stood at 151, 538. Having neutralized the LTTE in the Eastern theatre, the SLA was on the move on the Vanni west in 2007. That year marked the turning point in the war against the LTTE as the latter was overwhelmed on the Vanni front. The opening of multiple fronts on the Vanni theatre wouldn’t have been possible without the continuous flow of fresh recruits for newly raised Divisions as well as Jaffna-based formations.

It would be pertinent to mention that Sri Lanka acquired Mi-24 helicopter gunships in 1995, Kfirs in 1996, MiG27s in 2000 and a range of naval platforms since 1980s, though successive governments that ignored the need to expand the fighting strength. During the deployment of the Indian Army (July 1987- March 1990) the military ignored the basic requirement to provide sufficient troops to protect the MSR northwards from Vavuniya to Elephant Pass. The situation was so bad, Vavuniya-Elephant Pass stretch was held by isolated and poorly manned detachments at the time the LTTE resumed hostilities in June 1990 following 14-month-long ‘honeymoon’ between President Ranasinghe Premadasa and Velupillai Prabhakaran.

At the time Eelam War ll erupted in 1990, the paid SLA strength had been 60,596 whereas it consisted of 37,759 officers and men. Sri Lanka, in 2015, cancelled the war Victory Day parade following Western pressure. The last Victory Day parade was held in Matara in 2014. The rest is history.

Midweek Review

Rukmani Devi; Mohideen Baig ; Gamini Fonseka

Published

5 days ago

2023/05/24

Sahan Weerasooriya

The Popular Sinhala Cinema:

~ Part two ~

by Laleen Jayamanne

Ethnicity perhaps was not a political problem in the fledgling film industry, unlike in the wider political world, after the ‘Sinhala only’ Act of 1956, which made it the sole national language. In fact, without the entrepreneurial skills and vision of a group of indigenous and Indian Tamil businessmen, it’s very likely that the first steps towards the creation of a Lankan film industry of sorts would have been delayed at least by about a decade or so after political independence in 1947. The connection with India was essential. The first Sinhala film Kadawuna Poronduwa (Broken Promise, dir. B.A.W. Jayamanne, 1947), was in fact filmed in a studio in South India, belonging to the Indian producer S.M. Nayagam, who, subsequently, came to Ceylon and established the Sundera Sound Studio and obtained citizenship. The lack of capital, technical know-how, infrastructure and technology meant that the fledgling industry was dependent on India, in several ways, including the robust Indian melodramatic genre films in Tamil and Hindi which provided a durable prototype for many years to come.

However, despite the fundamental contribution of Tamil and Muslim, businessmen, technicians and artists in developing the Sinhala film industry, since the July 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom, the history of Sri Lankan cinema is blood stained. The pioneer entrepreneurs who established the national film industry were a group of astute Lankan and Indian Tamil businessmen not unlike the pioneering American Jewish entrepreneurs (immigrants from Eastern Europe), who established the major Hollywood studios in the 1920s in a foreign tongue. Despite this contribution to the national culture, the director K. Venkat was burnt alive in his car in July 1983 anti Tamil pogrom, by a Sinhala nationalist mob. Also, the most high-profiled pioneer film producer and industrialist, K. Gunaratnam’s house was attacked in July ’83 but he managed to escape the mobs and found refuge in the Holiday Inn. But his Vijaya Studio was burned down along with a large number of Sinhala films stored there. A large number of imported modern looms he had stored there, to be installed in a new factory for weaving a specialist textile, were also destroyed. In 1989 a JVP gunman shot him dead in his car, at point blank range, during a period of extreme Sinhala terrorist and state violence, between 1988-89. He donated the Tower Hall cinema, which he owned, to the state at President Premadasa’s request, but I read that there was no visible sign of acknowledgment of this magnanimous, rare, public-spirited gesture of Gunaratnam’s. Gunaratnam has been referred to as a movie Moghul because he established and controlled significant assets in all three tiers of the Ceylon film industry, namely production, importation and distribution and exhibition, from the early 1950’s on, producing Sinhala films that were highly successful at the box office. He also astutely diversified his business portfolios into the manufacture of plastics, and other industries, such as tourism, as it grew in importance after the open economic policies of 1977. Sir Chittampalan Gardiner’s Ceylon Theatres funded Lester James Peries’ Rekava, considered the foundational film for a new realist cinema after the nationalist revival of Sinhala culture in 1956, which also introduced Irangani Serasinghe to film. When this pioneering film flopped at the box office, Gunaratnam took a big risk and funded Lester’s historical epic, Sandeshaya which was a box office hit. This is a turning point in Lester’s career and therefore in the fledgling Lankan film history, too. Jabir Cader owned several theatres, including the New Olympia, where Hollywood films were screened.

Two approaches to Lankan Film History

One might approach Lankan film history from two different perspectives or with two different emphases. The first approach is the perspective formulated by the Royal Commission on the Film Industry established in 1962-1965, chaired by Regi Siriwardena, the eminent film critic and independent scholar. The second approach is one that would ask how the Lankan popular Sinhala cinema was produced from 1947, its economic foundations and examine the specific aesthetic reasons for its durable mass appeal in the country for about three decades, focusing especially on the songs, which is where Rukmani Devi and Master Baig come into the picture.

The huge popular appeal of the genre cinema and its songs and lyrics (printed on attractive song sheets sold at cinemas), rather than the rather poor dances, often as many as 10 songs per film, has been acknowledged and discussed in the circles of older cinephiles, who collected song sheets and Rukmani Devi’s records for instance from their youth. I am not sure what the younger contemporary critical intelligentsia thinks of this past film culture though. Here, Aruna Gunarathna’s encyclopedic knowledge of Lankan film history, as a long term, but now retired, editor of Sarasawiya and his extensive YouTube programmes on the early popular cinema are in a class of their own. He calls himself a ‘pictur-pissa’, someone crazy about cinema as such, a medium like no other. One would also have to agree with the Royal Commission’s approach outlining the reforms needed to create a local product that was economically, aesthetically and culturally viable. This entailed the rejection of the Indian prototypes. Though the exclusive emphasis on vernacular Sinhala subjects and language, effectively implied an erasure through silence, of the ethnic minorities from the new desired model of a national (appema ‘our very own’ Sinhala) cinema. This idea of ‘our very own’, meaning ‘Sinhala only’, is one that had considerable currency then. This desire for ‘original purity’ resulted in considering the popular Tamil and Muslim artists as ‘honorary Sinhala folk’! That these confident artists from the minority communities (with access to other traditons), were all creating together, durable, hybrid films and songs, which also might have resonated with the minority communities in the country. Such a possibility was rarely actively explored, the exception being Garmini Fonseka.

So, it’s a matter of emphasis now, from this historical distance, when we can assess that past in a non-polemical sophisticated way, after a 30 year civil war waged on the competing, exclusionary claims of both Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms. That is, to not simply reject the ‘song and dance’ films, as they were referred to, in a dismissive manner by critics, who called for a true national cinema, which was ‘Sinhala’ in themes and use of language. The emphasis on songs and dance were abandoned in favour of more ‘serious’ concerns. But it’s worth noting that some ‘serious’ directors still loved using songs and those from say Bambaruawaith and Hansavilak scored by Khemadasa master, have by now become classics with their poetic lyrics. However, once a popular cinema is lost it’s not possible to recreate the conditions that gave rise to it, especially its devoted mass fan base in the first instance. This was so with Classical Hollywood cinema during the studio era with its mass audience and it was so with the Sinhala films made during the first 30 years or so. But India remains the striking exception to this mass cultural historical decline, especially after the advent of Television. India with its diverse folk songs, including Thumri and several classical musical traditions (Drupad, Khayal and Karnataka), and vibrant hybrid pop cultures should teach us that musical and cinematic creativity flourishes only when artists are open to outside influences and exchange of ideas. Indian films inherit all of this diverse cultural patrimony with unshaken confidence, while Lankans in power turn inward by sustaining an obsolete idea of cultural purity.

(To be Continued)