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President Premadasa’s attitude towards Ministers and Secretaries

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Premadasa

To cap all these (differences between Premadasa and Athulathmudali), there was the remarkable meeting the President summoned of Ministers. Project and State Ministers and Secretaries of Ministries in the auditorium of the Presidential Secretariat at Galle Face. At this meeting he laid down the principles of his administration, emphasizing speed, service, integrity and finding continuous solutions for the problems of the poor.

He spoke about the responsibilities of Ministers and Secretaries. Then he launched into a stunning critique of his Ministers. He said that he was not satisfied with the work of several Ministers. He said that he was aware that some of them were spending their time shoring up their private interests at public expense. He questioned their integrity. He said that he knew of Ministers who gave out their private houses on rent or lease on lucrative terms and lived in subsidized government houses.

He spoke of the abuse of government vehicles by them, as well as other Ministry and departmental property. Having gone on in this strain whilst we all sat in shocked silence, the President came out with an unbelievable directive to the Secretaries. He said that he required with immediate effect a confidential report on the workings of the Ministry addressed directly to him every month.

Here was an Executive President exercising his considerable powers commanding Secretaries to Ministries to send confidential reports directly to him by-passing the Ministers he had appointed to the Cabinet! We listened in disbelief. All of us had decades of public service behind us. Never in all that time were we faced with a situation of this nature. The gist of what happened that morning was that the President severely criticized his Ministerial team in the presence of the Secretaries, and indicated his lack of confidence in them by directing Secretaries to report confidentially to him.

At the end of the meeting, a universally embarrassed crowd trooped out silently from the auditorium. The Ministers were embarrassed for obvious reasons, and the Secretaries embarrassed because they were a captive audience at this remarkable meeting. Both parties felt too embarrassed to look at one another in the face as we walked out. In fairness to the President, much of what he articulated were not untrue, particularly in the case of some Ministers.

He was in a way demonstrating a sense of frustration and disillusionment at slow progress, insufficient commitment and doubtful integrity. We as Secretaries felt that there was certainly validity in some of the President’s comments. We thought he was mistaken however in articulating all this in our presence, and in the final directive he gave us. We also felt that there was unfairness in his generalizing and applying his strictures to all Ministers.

It would have been better if he had summoned any “problem” Ministers separately and chastised them in confidence, and put them on whatever notice he wished to. Needless to say the Ministers were deeply hurt and angry at what had happened. Acts such as these would definitely have contributed to the defections and the later attempt to impeach the President under the Provisions of the Constitution.

We as Secretaries were now faced with a very tricky problem. How were we to carry out the President’s directive without hurting and upsetting our Ministers and disturbing the balance of our relationships with them? I thought rapidly on this matter, at the meeting itself, and had reached my own conclusions by the end of it. I was ready therefore when several Secretaries came up to me after the meeting and inquired as to what to do and how to proceed. I said that as far as I was concerned I was not going to by-pass the Minister. The nexus, in fact the close cooperation and mutual trust between Minister and Secretary, I thought were vital to the smooth running of Ministries, departments and other agencies.

A relationship based on mutual suspicion would undermine not only efficiency but the whole structure. It was just not practical for a President to run Ministries in remote control fashion through their Secretaries. As for the reports, I said, that I had decided that they were going to be innocuous ones, shown in confidence to the Minister before dispatch. The Secretaries who spoke with me, that day, and some who discussed matters with me later, all agreed that they were going to do the same thing.

Instinctively they did not wish to be parties to this scheme. They spoke with me, only to find some formula to act in terms of their own instincts. There was no debate on substance. The search was for a modality.

My first report which I showed the Minister was so innocuous, that he chuckled and said “You will get sacked!” That, or at least displeasure, was a risk that had to be run in the interest of maintaining balance and working relations, which in turn impinge on efficiency and the output of work. That all Secretaries had thought so, and acted accordingly was revealed at a Secretaries’ conference a few months later, when the Chairman, Mr. Paskaralingam, Secretary to the Treasury informed us, “The President is very disappointed with your reports. He thinks they are useless. They did not contain the type of information he requires. He said that he had given you all the powers. He wished to know what other powers you required.”

This was greeted with total silence. No one had anything to say, because the problem was an insoluble structural one of Secretaries commenting on the work of their Ministers. In fairness to Mr. Paskarallngam, it should be said that he made his statement without any enthusiasm. One had the feeling that he was performing a not very agreeable duty in conveying the President’s sentiments to us. The matter was never resolved. More important political issues overtook the government.

Finally, the comment may be made that this whole episode also reflected the ability of a bureaucracy to thwart the wishes of even a President as powerful as Mr. Premadasa. In fact this is nothing new. There is a considerable body of literature on the subject of the interaction between political and bureaucratic actors. For instance, Dr. Kissinger the former United States Secretary of State, in his book “White House Years” refers to this in relation to the State Department. He writes as follows:

“The State Department, when it receives an order of which its bureaucracy approves, is a wondrously efficient institution. When it wishes to exhaust recalcitrant superiors, drafts of memoranda wander through its labyrinthine channels for weeks and even months. But when it receives an instruction it considers wise, paper work is suddenly completed in a matter of hours and the bureaucracy springs to marvelous action. “

So it is in Sri Lanka. This particular order of the President was one which did not find favour with the bureaucracy. It was therefore undermined. That it was done on the grounds of decency and ensuring effective work was a different matter. This of course, is a subject that will never be exhausted as long as there are governments and human society.

Death of my mother

During 1990, after my appointment to the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, amidst a very heavy work load and hectic activity, I had also to cope with my mother’s final illness. On March 28′, she passed the milestone of 95 years. Sheer old age was taking its toll. She was getting disoriented from time to time and therefore needed close care and attention. This, my wife provided with the assistance of a faithful female servant, who had been long with us. My wife was so concerned that she might wander off and fall in the night, that she took to sleeping on a mat by her bedside. Later, when she became totally bed-ridden, and eventually had to have a catheter on and needed to be fed nasally, it was my wife who personally. attended on her.

We used to have two attendants one for the morning hours and one for the night. But introducing liquid nourishment into the nasal tube and washing and sponging her daily below the waist were personally undertaken by my wife. Since my mother had a catheter on, she would not trust the attendant to do the sponging. Those were duties she took upon herself voluntarily and without any persuasion or request. It gave me great peace of mind, and assisted me greatly in coping with my own considerable load in running a large Ministry.

Towards the end, I became disturbed by the visible strain my wife was undergoing. My mother’s situation required so much care and constant attention that she found herself unable even to leave the house. The last three weeks or so towards the end became an extremely stressful period for me. I had to cope with three major problems. One was the workload in the Ministry as well as other official responsibilities. Next was my mother’s condition. The third was my wife’s position, which began to worry me most. I was fearing for her health. The reason why we did not enter my mother to hospital at this stage was because the doctors treating her advised that it would be best if she could be made comfortable at home.

My mother died during the early afternoon of Sunday August 12. The undertakers stated that the body would be brought home only during mid-morning next day. Since there seemed to be a custom not to cremate a body on a Tuesday, the funeral was fixed for Wednesday the 15th afternoon at the General Cemetery Kanatte. The Minister, Mr. Athulathmudali not only visited my mother when she was earlier in hospital, but came home everyday, on Sunday evening, Monday and Tuesday, and acted as a pall bearer on Wednesday.

These were singular acts of solidarity and concern. We wanted to have a simple funeral without decorations and wreaths as was the case when my father died. This time too, many came forward volunteering to decorate the road, to print hand bills with my mother’s picture and to do numerous other things. We thanked them and explained that we would prefer to have a simple and quiet funeral. But it became a little more public than we anticipated due to another reason.

One morning an officer from the President’s personal staff rang and said that the President would like to come and pay his respects, and inquired as to whether I had any objection if his visit was televised. I of course had no option but to say that I had no objection. I was later told that this visit came on the Rupavahini news that night. This led to an unexpected result. Many persons who had not seen the newspaper obituary, now got to know and we had to cope with large numbers of people visiting, some from quite far.

It was a great strain, coming after the strain of dealing with my mother’s illness. The fact that I was an only child compounded matters, for courtesy demanded that I remain and greet all the visitors. I had no brothers or sisters to share this burden and from morning till almost 11 p.m. it was a case of greeting and talking to people. At the end of it I had lost most of my voice and every bone in my body ached. There were also compensations and emotional moments. Some of my friends I met after decades, so too some of my teachers. One of my teachers sneaked out of the intermediate coronary care unit of the general hospital and came home. A few days previously he had been transferred there from the intensive care unit. He looked weak and visibly ill. When I remonstrated with him for coming he said simply, “It is my duty to come. How can I not come?” It was profoundly touching. Sadly a few months later he was dead. Tired as I was, I had many precious moments with relations, friends, teachers and colleagues.

It was only after the event and peace and quiet were restored that the void left by my mother’s death came into full focus. There was a strange emptiness about the house, and an even greater emptiness in the heart. We had been together for nearly 53 years in a relationship that was very close and on the part of my mother, very protective. She had been clearly the most important influence in my life as guide, friend, philosopher, moral tutor and protector. She had been as steadfast as a rock throughout the vicissitudes of my life.

The very fact that I entered the civil service was due primarily to her. She believed I would pass even though I did not share that belief. When I was vacillating, it was she who gave me the money and compelled me to apply to sit the examination. She was a person of strong values and had a direct and frank approach to anybody and anything. She just didn’t know how to dissemble or prevaricate. There was nothing clandestine in anything she did.

Her only major flaw was that it was not easy for her to reconcile sincerity with tact. Many a time she proceeded on the basis that an attempt at being tactful would compromise the expression or manifestation of sincerity of purpose. She never fully understood the difference when this was pointed out to her.

(Excerpted from In Pursuit of Governance, the autobiography of MDD Pieris)


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Features

Ranking public services with AI — A roadmap to reviving institutions like SriLankan Airlines

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2026/03/13

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Efficacy measures an organisation’s capacity to achieve its mission and intended outcomes under planned or optimal conditions. It differs from efficiency, which focuses on achieving objectives with minimal resources, and effectiveness, which evaluates results in real-world conditions. Today, modern AI tools, using publicly available data, enable objective assessment of the efficacy of Sri Lanka’s government institutions.

Among key public bodies, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka emerges as the most efficacious, outperforming the Department of Inland Revenue, Sri Lanka Customs, the Election Commission, and Parliament. In the financial and regulatory sector, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) ranks highest, ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, the Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the Sri Lanka Standards Institution.

Among state-owned enterprises, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) leads in efficacy, followed by Bank of Ceylon and People’s Bank. Other institutions assessed included the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Ceylon Electricity Board, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, and the Sri Lanka Transport Board. At the lower end of the spectrum were Lanka Sathosa and Sri Lankan Airlines, highlighting a critical challenge for the national economy.

Sri Lankan Airlines, consistently ranked at the bottom, has long been a financial drain. Despite successive governments’ reform attempts, sustainable solutions remain elusive.

Globally, the most profitable airlines operate as highly integrated, technology-enabled ecosystems rather than as fragmented departments. Operations, finance, fleet management, route planning, engineering, marketing, and customer service are closely coordinated, sharing real-time data to maximise efficiency, safety, and profitability.

The challenge for Sri Lankan Airlines is structural. Its operations are fragmented, overly hierarchical, and poorly aligned. Simply replacing the CEO or senior leadership will not address these deep-seated weaknesses. What the airline needs is a cohesive, integrated organisational ecosystem that leverages technology for cross-functional planning and real-time decision-making.

The government must urgently consider restructuring Sri Lankan Airlines to encourage:

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

=Collaborative strategic decisions on route rationalisation, fleet renewal, partnerships, and cost management, rather than exclusive top-down mandates

Sustainable reform requires systemic change. Without modernised organisational structures, stronger accountability, and aligned incentives across divisions, financial recovery will remain out of reach. An integrated, performance-oriented model offers the most realistic path to operational efficiency and long-term viability.

Reforming loss-making institutions like Sri Lankan Airlines is not merely a matter of leadership change — it is a structural overhaul essential to ensuring these entities contribute productively to the national economy rather than remain perpetual burdens.

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

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Features

Why Pi Day?

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11 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

The approximate value of Pi (π) is 3.14 in mathematics. Therefore, the day 14 March is celebrated as the Pi Day. In 2019, UNESCO proclaimed 14 March as the International Day of Mathematics.

Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians figured out that the circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times its diameter. But they could not come up with an exact value for this ratio although they knew that it is a constant. This constant was later named as π which is a letter in the Greek alphabet.

Archimedes

It was the Greek mathematician Archimedes (250 BC) who was able to find an upper bound and a lower bound for this constant. He drew a circle of diameter one unit and drew hexagons inside and outside the circle such that the sides of each hexagon touch the sides of the circle. In mathematics the circle passing through all vertices of a polygon is called a ‘circumcircle’ and the largest circle that fits inside a polygon tangent to all its sides is called an ‘incircle’. The total length of the smaller hexagon then becomes the lower bound of π and the length of the hexagon outside the circle is the upper bound. He realised that by increasing the number of sides of the polygon can make the bounds get closer to the value of Pi and increased the number of sides to 12,24,48 and 60. He argued that by increasing the number of sides will ultimately result in obtaining the original circle, thereby laying the foundation for the theory of limits. He ended up with the lower bound as 22/7 and the upper bound 223/71. He could not continue his research as his hometown Syracuse was invaded by Romans and was killed by one of the soldiers. His last words were ‘do not disturb my circles’, perhaps a reference to his continuing efforts to find the value of π to a greater accuracy.

Archimedes can be considered as the father of geometry. His contributions revolutionised geometry and his methods anticipated integral calculus. He invented the pulley and the hydraulic screw for drawing water from a well. He also discovered the law of hydrostatics. He formulated the law of levers which states that a smaller weight placed farther from a pivot can balance a much heavier weight closer to it. He famously said “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Mathematicians have found many expressions for π as a sum of infinite series that converge to its value. One such famous series is the Leibniz Series found in 1674 by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, which is given below.

π = 4 ( 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – ………….)

The Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan came up with a magnificent formula in 1910. The short form of the formula is as follows.

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

For practical applications an approximation is sufficient. Even NASA uses only the approximation 3.141592653589793 for its interplanetary navigation calculations.

It is not just an interesting and curious number. It is used for calculations in navigation, encryption, space exploration, video game development and even in medicine. As π is fundamental to spherical geometry, it is at the heart of positioning systems in GPS navigations. It also contributes significantly to cybersecurity. As it is an irrational number it is an excellent foundation for generating randomness required in encryption and securing communications. In the medical field, it helps to calculate blood flow rates and pressure differentials. In diagnostic tools such as CT scans and MRI, pi is an important component in mathematical algorithms and signal processing techniques.

This elegant, never-ending number demonstrates how mathematics transforms into practical applications that shape our world. The possibilities of what it can do are infinite as the number itself. It has become a symbol of beauty and complexity in mathematics. “It matters little who first arrives at an idea, rather what is significant is how far that idea can go.” said Sophie Germain.

Mathematics fans are intrigued by this irrational number and attempt to calculate it as far as they can. In March 2022, Emma Haruka Iwao of Japan calculated it to 100 trillion decimal places in Google Cloud. It had taken 157 days. The Guinness World Record for reciting the number from memory is held by Rajveer Meena of India for 70000 decimal places over 10 hours.

Happy Pi Day!

The author is a senior examiner of the International Baccalaureate in the UK and an educational consultant at the Overseas School of Colombo.

by R N A de Silva

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Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

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1 day ago

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2026/03/12

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A combined US-Israel attack on Iran.(BBC)

The recent humanly costly torpedoing of an Iranian naval vessel in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone by a US submarine has raised a number of issues of great importance to international political discourse and law that call for elucidation. It is best that enlightened commentary is brought to bear in such discussions because at present misleading and uninformed speculation on questions arising from the incident are being aired by particularly jingoistic politicians of Sri Lanka’s South which could prove deleterious.

As matters stand, there seems to be no credible evidence that the Indian state was aware of the impending torpedoing of the Iranian vessel but these acerbic-tongued politicians of Sri Lanka’s South would have the local public believe that the tragedy was triggered with India’s connivance. Likewise, India is accused of ‘embroiling’ Sri Lanka in the incident on account of seemingly having prior knowledge of it and not warning Sri Lanka about the impending disaster.

It is plain that a process is once again afoot to raise anti-India hysteria in Sri Lanka. An obligation is cast on the Sri Lankan government to ensure that incendiary speculation of the above kind is defeated and India-Sri Lanka relations are prevented from being in any way harmed. Proactive measures are needed by the Sri Lankan government and well meaning quarters to ensure that public discourse in such matters have a factual and rational basis. ‘Knowledge gaps’ could prove hazardous.

Meanwhile, there could be no doubt that Sri Lanka’s sovereignty was violated by the US because the sinking of the Iranian vessel took place in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. While there is no international decrying of the incident, and this is to be regretted, Sri Lanka’s helplessness and small player status would enable the US to ‘get away with it’.

Could anything be done by the international community to hold the US to account over the act of lawlessness in question? None is the answer at present. This is because in the current ‘Global Disorder’ major powers could commit the gravest international irregularities with impunity. As the threadbare cliché declares, ‘Might is Right’….. or so it seems.

Unfortunately, the UN could only merely verbally denounce any violations of International Law by the world’s foremost powers. It cannot use countervailing force against violators of the law, for example, on account of the divided nature of the UN Security Council, whose permanent members have shown incapability of seeing eye-to-eye on grave matters relating to International Law and order over the decades.

The foregoing considerations could force the conclusion on uncritical sections that Political Realism or Realpolitik has won out in the end. A basic premise of the school of thought known as Political Realism is that power or force wielded by states and international actors determine the shape, direction and substance of international relations. This school stands in marked contrast to political idealists who essentially proclaim that moral norms and values determine the nature of local and international politics.

While, British political scientist Thomas Hobbes, for instance, was a proponent of Political Realism, political idealism has its roots in the teachings of Socrates, Plato and latterly Friedrich Hegel of Germany, to name just few such notables.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no getting way from the conclusion that coercive force is the deciding factor in international politics. If this were not so, US President Donald Trump in collaboration with Israeli Rightist Premier Benjamin Natanyahu could not have wielded the ‘big stick’, so to speak, on Iran, killed its Supreme Head of State, terrorized the Iranian public and gone ‘scot-free’. That is, currently, the US’ impunity seems to be limitless.

Moreover, the evidence is that the Western bloc is reuniting in the face of Iran’s threats to stymie the flow of oil from West Asia to the rest of the world. The recent G7 summit witnessed a coming together of the foremost powers of the global North to ensure that the West does not suffer grave negative consequences from any future blocking of western oil supplies.

Meanwhile, Israel is having a ‘free run’ of the Middle East, so to speak, picking out perceived adversarial powers, such as Lebanon, and militarily neutralizing them; once again with impunity. On the other hand, Iran has been bringing under assault, with no questions asked, Gulf states that are seen as allying with the US and Israel. West Asia is facing a compounded crisis and International Law seems to be helplessly silent.

Wittingly or unwittingly, matters at the heart of International Law and peace are being obfuscated by some pro-Trump administration commentators meanwhile. For example, retired US Navy Captain Brent Sadler has cited Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides for the right to self or collective self-defence of UN member states in the face of armed attacks, as justifying the US sinking of the Iranian vessel (See page 2 of The Island of March 10, 2026). But the Article makes it clear that such measures could be resorted to by UN members only ‘ if an armed attack occurs’ against them and under no other circumstances. But no such thing happened in the incident in question and the US acted under a sheer threat perception.

Clearly, the US has violated the Article through its action and has once again demonstrated its tendency to arbitrarily use military might. The general drift of Sadler’s thinking is that in the face of pressing national priorities, obligations of a state under International Law could be side-stepped. This is a sure recipe for international anarchy because in such a policy environment states could pursue their national interests, irrespective of their merits, disregarding in the process their obligations towards the international community.

Moreover, Article 51 repeatedly reiterates the authority of the UN Security Council and the obligation of those states that act in self-defence to report to the Council and be guided by it. Sadler, therefore, could be said to have cited the Article very selectively, whereas, right along member states’ commitments to the UNSC are stressed.

However, it is beyond doubt that international anarchy has strengthened its grip over the world. While the US set destabilizing precedents after the crumbling of the Cold War that paved the way for the current anarchic situation, Russia further aggravated these degenerative trends through its invasion of Ukraine. Stepping back from anarchy has thus emerged as the prime challenge for the world community.

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