Sri Lanka’s Former Presidents and the Current President- by Rajan Philips
Source:Island.lk
There is no transfer of state powers in Britain following the death of Queen Elizabeth and her succession by old Prince Charles as new King Charles III. The powers of the British State reside not at Buckingham Palace but in the British Parliament, and are exercised by a cabinet government with a Prime Minister as its head, who by convention is only the first among otherwise equal ministers and MPs.
There is no risk of the vast powers of the state being passed from proper hands to wrong hands, or from bad hands to worse hands. British Monarchy doesn’t even need any checks and balances to ensure good behaviour. All that the modern royals have to do beyond their routine roles, is to pay their share of taxes (may be times two) for the properties they have amassed over centuries through acquisition and inheritance, to compensate for their costly upkeep by other taxpayers.
Everything turns upside down in other countries when upstart politicians become elected presidents and start pretending to be kings. And they keep pretending even when they are no longer presidents, and join the club of former presidents to enjoy never ending perks and privileges, more so in Sri Lanka than anywhere else. The country with a crashing economy now has a growing club of former presidents and offers its members a unique range of post-retirement benefits which are outrageously more generous than in other countries. Why should they be given a house in Colombo where they had none before? It is fine to pension off retired presidents, but not if they continue to be in politics as MPs, Ministers or even a Prime Minister. Like Maithripala Sirisena, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and now even Gotabaya Rajapaksa?
3,000 Arrests
The ex-presidential club in Sri Lanka had three members and the number increased to four overnight with the daylight return of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, two moons after he furtively flew away in the dark of night. And it may become five sooner or later: Sooner, if another Aragalaya were to get Ranil Wickremesinghe to go home and complete the vicious Ranil-Rajapaksa circle. Or later, as and when Mr. Wickremesinghe realizes that he cannot be President till 2048 to deliver in person his version of Saubhagyaye Dekma to the country.
Unlike in monarchical Britain, the Republic of Sri Lanka has to periodically go through power transfer spasms every time there is a change of President after a presidential election, with parliament as a sidelined spectator. In July, the military was called in to protect the brick and mortar of parliament allegedly from a mob of protesters. But no one cares when parliament is sidelined during presidential transfer of powers between elections, or after a president resigns from office. Ranil Wickremesinghe, as Acting President, requested the army to protect the parliamentary precincts. As interim President he has been making all the right gestures towards parliament, while wielding presidential powers to a far greater extent than Gotabaya Rajapaksa did after the start of aragalaya protests.
Aragalaya was able to get rid of an elected president, but it has since been smothered by an unelected interim president. Over 3,000 aragalaya protesters have been arrested according to a statement by Champika Ranawaka. President Wickremesinghe made a show & tell of not extending the emergency rule beyond its first month, but then he silently gave the green light for arrests to continue under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which everyone was made to believe was at the point of being rescinded by the Rajapaksa Administration.
By way of mitigation, Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena announced in parliament that no one arrested under PTA will be charged under it. If so, the arrested people should have been discharged immediately. On the contrary, there are rumours that it is the Prime Minister who might be relieved of his post. If true, is it because he has run afoul of the SLPP for changing the government’s position on the use of PTA?
To be sure, President Wickremesinghe will not countenance any ploy to get rid of Prime Minister Gunawardena. Not only the two men go too far back, but it is also true that it was Dinesh Gunawardena who gave Wickremesinghe significant credibility among lawmakers when he was candidate for President. Basil Rajapaksa had his SLPP toads lined up to vote for Ranil Wickremesinghe, which gave him victory but not credibility. Dinesh Gunawardena will do his job as PM and will have no further claim on the President. Not so with Basil, who is virtually holding the President to ransom and there seems to be no way that the President can put an end to it. In fact, there is a way out, but Mr. Wickremesinghe will not take it.
The way out
The Sunday Island in its editorial last week neatly summed up President Wickremesinghe’s difficulties in governing while on an SLPP, rather Basil’s, leash. The title, “Hobbled President and jumbo administration,” could not have been more apt. The editorial went on to bemoan that “until he is constitutionally enabled to dissolve parliament early next year, President Wickremesinghe will remain hobbled.” I would argue that President Wickremesinghe finds himself hobbled not only because of the antics of Rajapaksas and Basil’s machinations, but also because of his own cynical ploys and the self-serving choices he has been making.
My hunch is that President Wickremesinghe will not dissolve parliament even when he is enabled to do as early as next year (after March 2023), simply because dissolving parliament at this juncture will not help his case to extend his tenure as President beyond November 2025. There is no question that he means well when he speaks of progressive political reforms and a process of economic recovery that will keep moving forward until its total fruition in 2048. One might even grant that other than Ranil Wickremesinghe there is no one else in the current parliament who is capable of articulating a comprehensive diagnosis of the country’s ills and suggesting remedial measures for them. Granted, Champika Ranawaka could be an exception, but he has more political enemies than personal friends.
As for Ranil Wickremesinghe, there are fatal flaws in his premises and in the trajectory that he is projecting. First, even as his visioning is sweeping in its scope it is bereft of realistic and demonstrably achievable goals and targets. The reason for this, and therein is the second flaw, is that he is quintessentially a one man band. Not merely by virtue of his being the lone National List MP for the UNP, but also seemingly to the manner born. His public and political life over 45 years amply attests to this. For all his sweeping vistas he cannot cultivate durable political loyalty in anyone other than those who are beholden to him.
The third and the biggest flaw, in my view, is his insatiable presidential ambition. It would be far fetched to suggest that when Ranil Wickremesinghe decided to become the UNP’s sole national list MP in parliament he was already scheming to succeed Gotabaya Rajapaksa. However, when chips started falling and Gota’s short lived presidency foundered through incompetence, and the chance opened for him to become a crisis Prime Minister, it is reasonable to suggest, Mr. Wickremesinghe’s long-game mind started ticking.
It is my contention that everything that Ranil Wickremesinghe has been doing after he became Acting President has been geared to realizing a single-minded objective of his: to remain President till November 2025 and to be elected President thereafter for one full term, for one last hurrah. The same singlemindedness, to contest the 2019 presidential election, coloured Mr. Wickremesinghe’s entire tenure as yahapalanaya Prime Minister from 2015 to 2019. Yahapalanaya is now water under a broken bridge, but what Mr. Wickremesinghe is doing now or, more pertinently, what he is not doing now, is what is before us for analysing the inconsistencies between his words and actions, and the clever obfuscation of his true intentions.
Let us take Mr. Wickremesinghe at his word that he accepted Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s offer of crisis premiership and then became acting president only for the sake of the country and that his all-party government intentions are genuine. Then why did he not involve the opposition MPs in all the arrangements he made with Gotabaya Rajapaksa from the beginning, when Gotabaya Rajapaksa was agreeable to practically everything except resigning as President prematurely? Whatever arrangement the two men made between them backfired and Rajapaksa was forced to resign within two months of Ranil Wickremesinghe becoming Prime Minister.
Stand tall or stay hobbled?
After Gotabaya Rajapaksa left, was there anything to stop Ranil Wickremesinghe, as acting President, from reaching out to the opposition MPs rather than to the SLPP? At that point Mr. Wickremesinghe owed nothing to any of the Rajapaksas, but he owed everything to the Aragalaya protesters. The Acting President then did an about turn. He abandoned the protesters and gravitated to the Rajapaksas.
For all his talk about youth parliament, endless promises about committees and fundamental reforms, he never sent any credible emissary to engage the protesters. Instead, he sent the police and the army to expel them from occupied public places, while promising to set up special zones for protesting. This is a new development for urban planning – from zoning for land use to zoning for protests. The UDA, which the Rajapaksas had under the Defence Secretary, can look after Colombo’s protest zones.
All of this invariably led to Mr. Wickremesinghe relying on Basil Rajapaksa and his SLPP contingent to secure victory in the election by parliament of a successor to GR’s balance term. Mr. Wickremesinghe won quite handily with 134 votes. But he lost his credibility yet again. And Basil Rajapaksa is collecting his IOUs. He wanted SLPPers appointed as State Ministers before he left for the US, his home away from home. President Wickremesinghe had to and did oblige, appointing State Ministers including MPs who are convicted felons.
The President apparently refused to appoint Namal Rajapaksa to anything, but compromised by appointing Shasheendra Rajapaksa, Namal’s cousin and son of Chamal Rajapaksa as State Minister. The appointment of 37 state ministers flies in the face of all the President’s lofty promises and lecturing about political reform. This political hypocrisy at home will not go unnoticed abroad at the IMF, among Sri Lanka’s creditors, and at the UNHRC which has started yet another session on Sri Lanka.
The power of dissolving is the ultimate weapon a Prime Minister has over all MPs in a parliamentary system. This is not a power that should be granted to the President in a presidential system, or a semi-presidential system like Sri Lanka. But in Sri Lanka the President has restricted powers to dissolve and there is no better time to use it. Since Mr. Wickremesinghe’s election by parliament as Interim President, the SLPP has gone through some splits and the current number of Basil Rajapaksa loyalists is said to be around 100. That is, the SLPP is not the majority party in parliament anymore.
If Mr. Wickremesinghe wants to dissolve parliament before March 2023, he should get the support of all non-Basil-SLPP MPs to support a resolution for dissolving parliament. He will not do it because it will upset his personal calculations to remain as long as President, not so much to salvage Sri Lanka as to keep his options open to be a presidential candidate in 2024. Like Trump in the US, but far less obnoxiously. On the other hand, if he chooses to continue his reliance on Basil, via Zoom to USA, he will not get the support of opposition MPs to do anything positive in parliament.
The only way President Wickremesinghe can get all-except Basil’s MPs’ support in parliament is by committing to dissolve parliament after an agreed upon interval – say between six months to a year. The JVP and the SJB have been saying this all along. And the only way Mr. Wickremesinghe can restore his credibility in the country is by announcing that he will not continue as President after the remainder of the term that he inherited from Gotabaya Rajapaksa is over in November 2024.
Two years (2022 to 2024) is more than enough for the President to finalize agreements with the IMF and external creditors, to implement electoral reforms, to establish a new roadmap for positive changes to address the growing list of concerns at the UNHRC, and to even prepare a referendum question for changing the presidential system by removing direct election by the people and providing for election by parliament. The referendum question can be put to the people at the next parliamentary election, and the new parliament can act on the people’s verdict after the election. This is the opportunity for President Wickremesinghe to stand tall, offer selfless service and leave with dignity. The alternative is to remain hobbled until is forced out like the Rajapaksas.
