Tuesday 1st April, 2025

New laws will be made soon to facilitate the seizure of ill-gotten assets of the corrupt, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has said at a recent NPP campaign rally. The government has chosen to crank up its anti-corruption campaign again as the local government polls are drawing near. Laws with stronger teeth to deal with corruption cannot be overstated.

Hydra-headed corruption can manifest itself in various forms at different levels, which can be individual, political, corporate, systemic and cultural. It has become extremely difficult to rid Sri Lanka of corruption because of the prevailing culture of corruption. The focus of all anti-corruption drives launched by some governments including the incumbent one has been on tackling corruption at the individual level, as evident from the cases filed by the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption against politicians out of power and state officials.

Much is being spoken about allegations of bribery, fraud, nepotism, cronyism, embezzlement, etc., against former government leaders and their bureaucratic lackeys. There is no gainsaying that corrupt individuals have to be brought to justice, but corruption at the political party level must also be addressed. Successive governments have failed to tame the rice millers’ cartel owing to corruption. Wealthy millers have huge slush funds, part of which they dish out to political parties and politicians of all hues so that their interests will be served whoever comes to power. This quid pro quo has stood them in good stead. Curiously, even the JVP/NPP leaders who roared like lions before last year’s elections, vowing to take on the so-called rice Mafia and safeguard the interests of farmers and consumers, are now mewing.

The questionable green-channelling of as many as 323 red-flagged freight containers in the Colombo Port in January can also be considered an instance of corruption, for they are believed to have carried contraband. Big businesses bankroll election campaigns of political parties and politicians of their choice and receive favours in return. The sugar scam is a case in point. Following the 2019 regime change, the SLPP suddenly reduced the special commodity levy on sugar imports from Rs. 50 a kilo to 25 cents a kilo for the benefit of some of its financiers who had ordered a huge stock of sugar. The state coffers lost billions of rupees as a result.

The NPP government is under pressure to have former Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran extradited from Singapore to stand trial here for the Treasury bond scams. Strangely, those who are out for Mahendran’s scalp have stopped short of calling for a probe to find out how the UNP benefited from the Treasury bond scams. The UNP headquarters, Sirikotha, was struggling to pay its utility bills at the time of the January 2015 regime change. But it outspent its political rivals including the UPFA in the run-up to the August 2015 general election! It is believed that the UNP benefited from the largesse of the Treasury bond racketeers.

In Sri Lanka, which is known for the weak enforcement of campaign expenditure laws and a chronic lack of accountability, headquarters of political parties are believed to be built on foundations of undeclared funds, including black money.

The SLPP repaired its headquarters in record time following the 2022 mob attacks, which inflicted extensive damage on it. Where did funds for the construction of that place and repairs to it come from? Some Opposition politicians have alleged that the JVP is the richest political party in Sri Lanka, and cast suspicion on how funds were raised for the construction of its headquarters at Battaramulla. The SLFP, which was in penury for 17 years after its ignominious defeat in 1977, enriched itself after its comeback in 1994. The SJB has also spent huge amounts of funds on its election campaigns and social welfare projects. How has it raised funds?

It is believed that political parties are the ground zero of corruption in this country, given their undeclared funds, only a part of which they spend on their election campaigns. There is a pressing need to probe the assets of these parties, whose holier-than-thou leaders embark on anti-corruption crusades to garner favour with the public. That, we believe, will be half the battle in ridding the country of corruption.

Monday 31st March, 2025

The JVP/NPP administration has sought to handle crop-raiding monkeys exactly the way Sri Lankan governments deal with their political opponents—throwing them into prison. While the Opposition is complaining that some of its members are being arrested and remanded at the behest of the powers that be, the government has unveiled a plan to relocate monkeys in Kandy to some aits in reservoirs in the Central Province. Environmentalists and animal rights groups have already started protesting against this grand plan and questioning the feasibility of the proposed project. Will the monkeys to be taken to those eyots have access to food? Will they be left to their fate after being relocated?

The so-called monkey menace is far too complex to be tackled once and for all with the help of simple methods such as translocation. How does the government intend to deal with the monkeys in other areas, where there are no reservoirs/rivers with aits? Besides, the government had a hard time enumerating the monkeys the other day, and how difficult it will be to catch them goes without saying. One may recall that it took Wildlife officers about one whole week to catch and treat a wild jumbo that had lost one of its tusks in a collision with a truck on the Habarana-Maradankadawala road near Galapitagala recently.

What characterises the strategies adopted by successive governments to prevent depredation is that they are human centric, with little attention paid to the crop-raiding animals that are also victims. Their focus has been on preventing crop raiders from invading human habitats, and the methods used for that purpose include warding off wild animals, their translocation and controlling their populations.

There has been a persistent campaign for physically eliminating depredators as a quick fix. Much is also being spoken about the need to erect electrified fences, etc., to prevent wild elephants from invading villages. The desperation of cultivators, politicians and officials to deal with the ever-worsening problem of crop losses might make such measures look like lasting solutions, but they alone will not yield the desired results in the long run.

Hence the need to adopt a holistic approach to the problem and examine all dimensions thereof, especially the adverse impact of human activity on animal habitats. While short-term measures may be compelling, they will not help eliminate the root causes of the problem, paving the way for a sustainable solution.

The success of any strategy to prevent depredation hinges on the elimination of the factors that drive wild animals to invade villages and ravage the crops. Some methods employed in other countries to overcome the problem include establishing protected areas for wild animals, restoration of degraded habitats, promoting sustainable agriculture, reducing animal habitat fragmentation and creating corridors to allow animal movement among fragmented habitats.

In Sri Lanka, post-harvest losses are reportedly around 40% due to temperature and humidity, lack of infrastructure, storage facilities, and technology, and poor handling practices. If these losses can be minimised significantly, it may be possible to reduce the amount of land currently used for agriculture and prevent the opening up of more land, especially ecologically sensitive areas like peripheral forests, for cultivation at the expense of animal habitats.

One of the main reasons for the failure of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government was that it had too many experts who undertook tasks they had little knowledge of; some medical doctors determined that administration’s agriculture policy, and made a mess of it, the disastrous organic farming initiative being a case in point. A minister of the incumbent government has given his expert opinion about a recent Sri Lanka Air Force trainer jet crash, attributing it to a pilot error even before an expert probe committee submits its report on the accident. So, the task of tackling the problem of crop raiders should be left to real experts; politicians and others should confine themselves to playing a supportive role.

Saturday 29th March, 2025

University students who campaigned very hard to ensure the JVP-led NPP’s victory in last year’s elections, may have thought they would be able to conduct a peaceful protest in front of the Health Ministry in support of a group of Allied Health Sciences graduates, without being arrested and hauled up before court. But they were in for a rude shock, yesterday, when the police swooped on the protesters and arrested 27 of them including several Inter University Students’ Federation (IUSF) members for violating a court order that banned their agitation.

Time was when JVP used to let out howls of protests when the police descended on protests, after obtaining court orders against them, at the behest of previous governments. It condemned police action based on court orders, as draconian tactics employed by dictatorial regimes bent on suppressing the people’s right to protest. It also launched numerous protests against the previous governments in violation of court orders, and even tried to march on the Presidential Secretariat only to be dispersed by the riot police, who used teargas, rubber bullets, and water cannon liberally. At present, the police do as the NPP government says and go all out to obtain court orders banning protests, which they crush, the way they did in the past.

Opinion may be divided on public protests which make already congested urban roads even more chaotic, much to the inconvenience of the public. Police action against protesters may therefore resonate with many people. However, successive governments have not cared to tackle the root causes of public protests––chronic grievances and injustices. The current NPP administration has failed to be different from its predecessors.

The Students’ Union of the Allied Health Sciences Faculty of the University of Peradeniya launched their protest on Thursday, demanding that the government do away with the requirement for its members to sit an examination to join the state health services. The fact that the medical graduates of national universities are recruited to the health service straightaway may have prompted the protesting Allied Health Sciences graduates to make the aforesaid demand. The protesters’ talks with the Health authorities failed yesterday, and they decided to intensify their agitation, coupling it with a fast. The police moved in, made arrests and pulled down a makeshift hut the agitators had put up for their fast. Some student leaders were heard, on television, cursing the NPP leaders they had backed.

The incumbent government should have addressed the grievances of the Allied Health Sciences graduates before they took to the streets. After all, the JVP/NPP made an election pledge to give the graduates of state universities priority in the public sector recruitment. Representatives of the unemployed graduates, at press briefings and in television interviews, play a video of JVP/NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake making the above-mentioned promise during his presidential election campaign last year. In an audio clip, JVP/NPP stalwart and former IUSF Convener, Sunil Handunnetti, is heard telling an unemployed graduate who telephoned him in the run-up to last year’s general election that they (the JVP/NPP leaders) would have to secure their jobs first—meaning election to Parliament—before resolving the issue of graduate unemployment. The members of the unemployed graduates’ association insist that their efforts to contact Minister Handunnetti have since been in vain.

The JVP leveraged its ability to mobilise flash mobs and hold protests to weaken previous governments in defiance of court/police orders. It drove students and workers to agitations, in their thousands, to advance its political agenda, condemning the past governments for using the police and judicial orders to suppress the people’s right to protest. Now, it is employing the same methods as its predecessors to crush protests instead of heeding the grievances of protesters. It ought to get protesters around the table and give them a patient hearing and do its best to solve their problems. That is the least it can do for those who believed its promises and worked tirelessly to ensure its impressive electoral victory last year.