The government has announced a sweeping compensation package for the Ditwah disaster victims, and the disbursement of money for cleaning the flood-affected houses, is already underway. It is spending funds that belong to the people and not the JVP or the NPP. It must therefore not only disburse state funds responsibly but also be seen to be doing so. Transparency is the most potent antidote to all forms of financial malpractice. Worryingly, complaints abound that government politicians are interfering with relief distribution operations and even diverting funds for the benefit of their supporters.

Sri Lanka United Grama Niladhari Association (SLUGNA) President Nandana Ranasinghe told the media on Monday (08) that JVP/NPP politicians and their supporters were meddling with the ongoing disaster relief programmes at all levels and even obstructing the Grama Niladharis (GNs). He claimed that the political authority had sent letters to the District and Divisional Secretaries, directing them to appoint ruling party members to the state-run welfare centres. SLUGNA Secretary Jagath Chandralal said state officials had been directed to obtain approval from the government members of the Prajashakthi committees for carrying out relief work. On Thursday, addressing the media, Convenor of the Sri Lanka Grama Niladhari Association Sumith Kodikara made a number of similar allegations. He said the NPP politicians were arbitrarily helping their supporters obtain Rs. 25,000 each as compensation. He stressed that only the disaster victims had to be paid compensation, and never had relief programmes been politicised in that manner. These allegations are shocking enough to warrant probes.

Those who are misusing state funds allocated for disaster relief must be arrested and prosecuted under the Offences against Public Property Act. Some Opposition politicians and their family members have been jailed for obtaining fuel allowances fraudulently while in power. So, the offence of misusing funds meant for disaster victims must not go unpunished.

A ruling party politician, in his wisdom, once claimed that all 159 NPP MPs were of the same calibre as the late Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar. He caused a posthumous affront to Sri Lanka’s nonpareil statesman, whose presence adorned national politics. His egoistic, lofty claim drew derision. However, the government politicians ought to take cognisance of something Kadirgamar said in answer to a question from a BBC journalist about alleged irregularities in the handling of tsunami relief in early 2005. He said that wherever humans and money happened to be together, there was the possibility of corruption, but the then government was doing everything in its power to prevent irregularities in tsunami relief distribution. No truer words can be said about humans and their greed, especially in this country, where some corrupt politicians and officials have stooped so low as to enrich themselves by procuring fake cancer drugs.

No relief or welfare programmes have been devoid of politics in this country. It may be recalled that one of the factors that led to the country’s bankruptcy in 2022 was a politically motivated pandemic relief programme, aimed at enabling the SLPP to garner favour with the public and win the 2020 general election. The interim SLPP government gave away state funds at the rate of Rs. 5,000 per family besides distributing baskets of goods. It won the parliamentary election that followed, but the mismanagement of state funds and the loss of revenue due to ill-conceived tax and tariff reductions had a crippling impact on the economy. One can only hope that there is no truth in the allegation that the NPP government is using the ongoing relief operations to shore up its approval rating and electoral prospects in view of the Provincial Council elections expected next year. Strangely, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, while announcing the compensation package in Parliament, declared that the families who had suffered even minimal damage to their houses, such the loss of a single roofing sheet, would receive as much as Rs. 1 million as compensation! Sri Lankan politicians are very generous with state funds.

The success of relief and rebuilding programmes hinges on several prerequisites, including transparent allocation of resources, proper coordination, efficient delivery systems, accountability and monitoring, and sustainability and follow-up. No room must be left for partisan politics and the agendas of political parties where relief and rebuilding programmes are concerned.

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.