Sri Lankan governance in the true Dutugemunu style

(August 19, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) During an era when management styles, principles and practices are being perfected and refined by the day, with a myriad of them put out by researchers and experts in civilized and democratic societies on the subject, we have the spectacle of the most barbaric form of management practiced by a minister in the Sri Lankan government. He puts to shame whatever studies have been made on the subject over the years. He cannot be wholly blamed, for modern concepts of management are western in conception, whereas in the present Sri Lankan environment it is fashionable to debunk every aspect of western practice and culture, with only cricket remaining. Cricket, however not spared, has been made out to be a miserable apology for the legacy of British colonialism and that its inventors should be beaten in their own game, is being exploited and manipulated, as a very useful escape valve to enable the ordinary Sri Lankan to turn away from the misery of their daily life.

Escaping to the days of the world of king Dutu Gemunu, who ruled over Sri Lanka 2300 years ago, having defeated the Tamil King Elara, who had ruled Sri Lanka for more than forty years, is the other popular pastime. Now, ruling the underworld, is a person who claims that he is the direct descendant of this great king. Under Dutu Gemunu, flourished Sinhalese culture, Buddhism and always malaria. For the Sinhala polity, the Dutu Gemunu regime is still the epitome, benchmark of good administration and management, good governance and the centre of excellence.

The practice, or rather the style of management in question, we aver to, is the recent treatment of a public servant by a deputy minister and Member of Parliament who thought it apt to participate in the day to day administration of the affairs of his electorate. He ties up a public officer to a tree for being absent at a seminar held on the eradication of the Dengue fever, caused by a mosquito now becoming endemic in Sri Lanka, having claimed many lives. Every minute that is wasted in such drama controlling this killer parasite will be at the cost of many more lives. In his enthusiasm to make a show of eradicating this menace especially in his electorate as if to prevent more deaths he had organized a seminar at which the public servant in question was absent due to the illness of his two year old child, his first loyalty and rightfully so.

In the ignorance of the principles, norms and protocols of modern management practices, and understandably so, the deputy minister assumes the responsibility in choosing to act in the manner that appeared to him to be the best possible way as conceived by him to deal with the situation, a reflection of the shameless regression of the system of governance in Sri Lanka. He gets his victim, a member of a minority community, tied up with a massive rope, usually used in tug of wars, and abuses him in public while abusing his office with no opportunity afforded to the officer to defend himself. In Parliament, in his explanation, he makes out his victim to be a masochist claiming that the officer himself had voluntarily brought in the rope to be tied up and abused in this fashion. As lying in the Sri Lankan parliament, the highest assembly is common place he will just get away with impunity.

The Dengue fever is apparently the slow successor to the Malaria which our descendant of king Dutu Gemunu is frantically trying to eradicate, perhaps to preserve the unblemished reputation of his illustrious ancestor. Fair enough. It would be recalled, that a former minister for the environment in the first Rajapakse government claimed that he envisaged an environment as would have prevailed under Dutu Gemunu: serene, peaceful with no pollution. To this, we had pointed out in this column, that the deaths by the epidemic of malaria caused by mosquitoes resulted in such kings shifting their capital continually from time to time until they reached Kotte, on the outskirts of Colombo when the Portuguese arrived in the year 1505. Malaria, however, despite the dedicated campaign by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party during the British regime was not effectively eradicated until the 1950s. When an environmental policy, if there was one, which was a failure even 2000 years ago is advocated, it is ludicrous and insane to follow the same in the 21st century.

We are informed that this clown, a loose cannon, has been temporarily relieved of his responsibilities, due to the pressure from public servants and others. It must be remembered, that while he was a minister he used his office and influence with the underworld to destroy and disturb public meetings and democratically organised gatherings unpalatable to his masters just to please them.

While we do not want to credit him by calling him a maverick, we certainly know that he is a master of the art of blackmail having refined it in all its Sri Lankan forms. He is certain to resurface into public life, reincarnated for higher and better things, for he would be a greater menace from without than within the establishment.

The point that we are trying to make is why the Tamil people who have been clamouring to be governed separately by themselves as a nation should be mixed up to be subjected to the governance of such clowns and jesters of the so called Sri Lankan royalty.

(The writer, Editor of the Eelamnation)