Friday 2nd Junuary, 2026

The SJB yesterday called upon the NPP government to hold the much-delayed Provincial Council (PC) polls soon. Its call is bound to go unheeded, for the JVP/NPP is not ready for an election. Having suffered a string of defeats in the cooperative society elections during the past several months, the government is trying every trick in the book to postpone the PC elections further. The outcome of last year’s local government polls is not something the JVP/NPP can be really proud of; its efforts to sweep the polls did not reach fruition although it managed to bag a majority of local councils.

A midterm electoral setback could be the undoing of a government however powerful it may be. The fate that befell the Mahinda Rajapaksa government following the Uva PC polls in September 2014 is a case in point. The UPFA won the Uva PC, but the number of its seats dropped from 25 to 19. The number of UNP’s seats increased from 7 to 13. The JVP, which had only one seat in the previous council, secured 02 in 2014. President Rajapaksa, in his wisdom, advanced a presidential election, and lost the presidency to Maithripala Sirisena in January 2015.

So, it is highly unlikely that the NPP government will hold the PC polls anytime soon. The Opposition is not strong enough to pressure the government politically to take a huge electoral gamble by holding an election.

It is doubtful whether the Opposition is really keen to face an election at this juncture despite its rhetoric. The SJB and other Opposition parties have closed ranks and defeated budgets in a considerable number of NPP-controlled local councils and won cooperative society elections. But their fragile unity is not going to survive an election that they will have to contest separately. A split in the anti-government vote will stand the JVP/NPP in good stead. However, the situation is likely to change if the UNP and the SJB come together to contest future elections.

What enabled the UNP to improve its electoral performance in the Uva Province in 2014 and gain a strategic opening to topple the Rajapaksa government a few months later was a rapprochement between two factions led by Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa.

The SJB leaders who are demanding that the PC polls be held soon ought to tender an apology to the public for the role they played in postponing the PC elections indefinitely in 2017 while they were in the UNP-led Yahapalana government. The UNP and the SLFP, as Yahapalana allies, were wary of facing an election in 2017 and therefore amended the PC Elections Act to delay the PC polls. None of the political parties represented in Parliament at the time, including the UNP, the SLFP/UPFA, the ITAK, the SLMC, and the JVP, opposed the obnoxious amendment to the PC Elections Act. The current SLPP leaders were dissident members of the UPFA. The original amendment Bill was to provide for a quota of 30% for female candidates on the nomination papers submitted for the PC elections, but it was changed beyond recognition at the committee stage to facilitate the postponement of the PC polls. Article 78 (3) of the Constitution says, “Any amendment proposed to a Bill in Parliament shall not deviate from the merits and principles of such Bill.” But the aforesaid political parties took the bad amendment for granted; the PC polls were made to disappear, as it were.

The incumbent government has said the PC polls will be held under the Mixed Proportional (MP) system. The delimitation of electoral boundaries, which is a prerequisite for holding the PC polls under the MP system, will take about one year, according to the Election Commission. The only way to hold the PC election soon is to legislate for it to be conducted under the existing Proportional Representation system. If the SJB is serious about having the PC polls held soon, it should campaign for amending the PC Elections Act, in Parliament. Let it be urged to fish or cut bait.

Thursday 1st Junuary, 2026

The CID arrested EPDP leader and former minister Douglas Devananda last Thursday in connection with an ongoing investigation into a pistol issued to him by the Army way back in 2001 allegedly ending up in the underworld. It has claimed that information elicited from Makandure Madush, a notorious criminal, led the police to the weapon hidden in a shrub in Weliweriya.

Devananda is one of the battle-scarred ex-Tiger combatants who courageously stood up to the LTTE and helped defeat it. He survived several assassination attempts, including one inside the Kalutara Prison. Devananda’s predicament has gladdened the hearts of pro-LTTE groups beyond measure, as evident from their social media posts.

The pistol in question was reportedly issued to Devananda at the height of LTTE terror; Madush was arrested in 2019 and killed in October 2020, while in police custody. Curiously, the serial number of the weapon remained intact while it was in the underworld.

Madush is long dead, and there is no way the CID’s claims about the firearm at issue can be checked. The CID, which is under two members of the Retired Police Collective of the JVP/NPP, has become the JVP’s rottweiler. The police are all out to protect the interests of the JVP/NPP government; they suddenly ran out of breathalysers when a government MP caused a road accident the other day. A policeman, assaulted by a government MP and his backers recently for conducting a raid on a cannabis plantation, was arrested and interdicted! The police have not arrested a deputy minister and an NPP mayor, charged with fraud.

Now that the CID is busy probing Devananda’s pistol, let it be urged to launch an investigation into thousands of weapons issued by the Defence Ministry to politicians in the second JPV uprising in the late 1980s, and the arms seized by the JVP during that period.

In January 2019, the then Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando disclosed that about 4,700 9mm pistols and revolvers had been licensed, but there was no information about those who had obtained them and, worse, some individuals possessed as many as 15 small firearms each! In 2023, the then State Minister of Defence Premitha Bandara Tennakoon revealed in Parliament that the defence authorities had issued about 700 firearms to 154 politicians in the late 1980s, when the JVP went on a killing spree, but none of them had been returned. This figure, we believe, is a gross underestimate.

The National Commission against the Proliferation of Illicit Small Arms, appointed by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga in 2004, dealt extensively with the issue of illegal weapons in circulation in Sri Lanka, as we pointed out in a previous editorial comment. Its survey report contains valuable information, which, however, needs to be updated. Defence authorities should study this document thoroughly and commission a fresh survey on illicit firearms.

The police must go all out to find the illegal firearms used by the JVP during its second uprising. Most of the JVP’s arms caches have not been traced. SJB MP Dayasiri Jayasekara told Parliament on 27 February 2025 that more than 2,000 firearms seized by the JVP between 1987 and 1989 had not been recovered. One may recall that the JVP attacked several police stations and military camps and grabbed many weapons. In April 1987, it seized the arsenal of the Pallekele army camp. Now that the JVP-led NPP has formed a government and launched a campaign to eliminate gun violence, the Defence Ministry and the CID may be able to ascertain information about the firearms used by the JVP in the late 1980s.

Hardly a day passes without incidents of gun violence. Two shooting incidents were reported from the Western Province yesterday. The proliferation of illicit firearms in Sri Lanka can be attributed to several key factors, according to researchers; they include gunrunning, illegal operations carried out by rogue elements in the police and the armed forces, local arms manufacturing, and criminals gaining access to arms caches of the LTTE and the weapons that went missing in the late 1980s.

The police produced 12 suspects before the Colombo Chief Magistrate on March 22, 2019, for having supplied weapons retrieved from some buried LTTE arms caches in Kilinochchi to criminal gangs elsewhere. The LTTE seized firearms from the police, the armed forces and the rival militant groups like the EPDP. It is incumbent upon the police to make a serious effort to trace all illegal firearms. Let that be their New Year resolution.

Wednesday 31st December, 2025

The health sector has long been free from the clutches of the likes of Keheliya Rambukwella and his bureaucratic lackeys, but it continues to be plagued by various rackets and frauds, as evident from the shocking Ondansetron scandal. The corrupt survive regime changes and continue their sordid operations, enabling politicians and officials to enrich themselves at the expense of patients.

The National Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA) has become a metaphor for serious lapses and malpractices. No wonder this country is a dumping ground for substandard and falsified medicines. The absence of proper drug testing facilities has benefited corrupt officials and their political masters alike. Hence successive governments have chosen to allow the status quo to remain while bellowing rhetoric and promising to safeguard patients’ rights and eliminate corruption.

The issue of poor-quality and unsafe drugs has become overpoliticised in this country. The Opposition uses it as a bludgeon to beat the government in power and gain some political mileage. During its Opposition days, the JVP/NPP would bash the then rulers for endangering the lives of patients by allowing substandard or fake drugs to be imported. Today, the boot is on the other foot; those who were accused of striking corrupt pharmaceutical deals are taking up the cudgels for the rights of the sick and inveighing against the JVP/NPP politicians and their loyalists. Partisan politics has thus eclipsed the real issues that need to be addressed to eliminate bribery and corruption in the health sector and ensure drug safety.

The need is not for rhetoric and moral grandstanding. A respected medical professional analyses the issue of poor-quality drugs in Sri Lanka, in an article published on the opposite page today. He has pointed out what needs to be done urgently to find a solution. Dr. B. J. C. Perera has stressed the need for a state-of-the-art laboratory to test medicines. He says drugs must be tested properly before they are released for use, besides being subjected to proper random post-marketing surveillance. At present, the health authorities have to go by manufacturers’ own certification in granting approval for imported pharmaceuticals. There are many other medical professionals, academics and other experts who have studied the issue at hand and provided valuable insights. One can only hope that the government will care to ascertain their views and take steps to ensure drug safety.

Meanwhile, another scandal in the health sector has come to light. Dr. Rukshan Bellana has claimed that he was removed as Deputy Director of the National Hospital of Sri Lanka (NHSL), Colombo, recently, because he sought to have a reagent racket probed by the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption and the CID. Stocks of substandard or contaminated reagents have been procured at the expense of the state coffers for the NHSL laboratory, Dr. Bellana has alleged. This serious allegation must be probed thoroughly.

There is more to the reagent issue than the fraudulent procurement practices. Calls for a pricing formula for reagents to prevent the suppliers from keeping the prices of those products unconscionably high have been ignored. It must be made mandatory for the import prices of all reagents to be revealed so that massive profit margins cannot be kept at the expense of the public. Successive governments have allowed importers to increase the prices of reagents according to their whims and fancies and drive the cost of testing up. Health sector trade unions have alleged that corrupt practices among politicians and officials who control the procurement process are also responsible for the extremely high prices of reagents.

The health sector is a swamp that must be drained as a national priority without further delay if the interests of patients are to be safeguarded. The JVP/NPP, came to power, claiming that the country had been under a 76-year curse and promising to break it. But going by the sheer number of corrupt deals reported from various public institutions, the politicisation of state institutions, especially the police, and the government’s despicable efforts to appoint one of its cronies as the Auditor General, one wonders whether the ‘curse’ has been extended by one year.

If the government is serious about eliminating corruption in state-run health institutions, first of all, it should develop a proper understanding of the multi-faceted nature of the issue. Only a special probe, presidential or parliamentary, will help grasp its enormity and determine how best to tackle it.