By Vishwamithra –

“When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves.” ~Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

When does politics end and genuine governance begin?

It is a deceptively simple question, one that has confounded political philosophers, historians and ordinary citizens for centuries. Almost every man or woman who has ascended to supreme political office—through the ballot box, revolutionary upheaval or military coup—has claimed that the ultimate purpose of acquiring power was to serve the people.

Some may even have believed it.

During the first years of office, many leaders display genuine energy, considerable enthusiasm and an almost missionary determination to fulfil their promises. Government machinery is mobilized, reforms are announced, and the public is assured that a new political age has dawned.

Then something begins to change.

The privileges of office acquire an intoxicating familiarity. Criticism becomes increasingly unwelcome. Loyalists replace independent minds. Political survival gradually displaces public service as the administration’s central preoccupation.

The leader who once sought power to change the country begins changing the country to preserve his power.

And somewhere along that journey, governance quietly surrenders to politics.

The Seduction of Power

Power does not necessarily corrupt every individual who possesses it. History offers sufficient exceptions to reject such a simplistic proposition.

But power creates conditions in which corruption of judgment becomes dangerously easy.

The President no longer waits in queues. Ministers seldom experience the frustrations of ordinary public administration. Security personnel clear roads, officials anticipate preferences, and political subordinates discover that agreement is generally more rewarding than dissent.

Gradually, the distance between the ruler and the ruled becomes almost immeasurable.

The most dangerous consequence is not necessarily financial corruption.

It is intellectual isolation.

A leader surrounded by people whose careers depend upon his approval may eventually lose the ability to distinguish honest advice from calculated flattery.

The government begins believing its own propaganda.

And the public begins paying for that delusion.

The World Has Seen This Before

The twentieth century provides abundant evidence of how movements founded upon liberation can eventually become preoccupied with retaining power.

Robert Mugabe emerged from Zimbabwe’s struggle against white-minority rule as a celebrated liberation leader. His early administration expanded education and healthcare. Yet the later decades of his rule were marked by repression, economic dislocation and increasingly entrenched political authority.

The tragedy was not merely that a leader changed.

It was that a liberation movement increasingly identified its own survival with the survival of the nation.

The distinction became almost impossible to maintain.

Elsewhere, the experience of Nelson Mandela offers a contrasting lesson.

After spending twenty-seven years in prison and becoming South Africa’s first democratically elected President in 1994, Mandela voluntarily stepped aside after one term in 1999. His departure did not solve South Africa’s enduring inequalities or guarantee the integrity of his successors. But it demonstrated that political authority could be surrendered without surrendering one’s commitment to the country.

That distinction is fundamental.

The ability to acquire power demonstrates political skill. The willingness to limit it reveals something about political character.

Sri Lanka’s Unfinished Experiment

Sri Lanka’s political history offers an especially revealing study of this dilemma.

J. R. Jayewardene entered office in 1977 with an overwhelming parliamentary mandate and an ambitious program of economic transformation.

The opening of the economy altered the country’s economic direction. Major development initiatives, including the accelerated Mahaweli program, reshaped substantial parts of national life.

These were consequential achievements.

Yet JRJ also presided over a profound concentration of executive authority.

The constitutional changes initiated in 1977 and consolidated in the 1978 Constitution created an executive presidency whose powers would influence Sri Lankan politics for generations.

The contradiction was striking.

A leader determined to modernize the economy simultaneously helped establish a political structure that made the individual President exceptionally powerful.

The 1982 referendum, which extended the life of Parliament without a general election, remains an especially revealing illustration of political expediency overtaking the ordinary democratic process.

One may acknowledge JRJ’s administrative vision without overlooking the institutional consequences of his political choices.

Indeed, that is precisely what serious historical judgment requires.

From Premadasa to the Rajapaksas

Ranasinghe Premadasa brought a different conception of leadership.

His emphasis upon housing, poverty alleviation and direct administrative intervention reflected an energetic, often intensely personal approach to governance.

But his presidency also demonstrated the dangers associated with concentrating political authority around the personality and methods of one individual.

The Rajapaksa years produced another revealing contradiction.

The military defeat of the LTTE in 2009 was a decisive event in Sri Lanka’s history. Yet the post-war opportunity to strengthen reconciliation, institutions and accountable government became entangled with the consolidation of family influence and executive power.

The Eighteenth Amendment of 2010 removed presidential term limits, while the Twentieth Amendment of 2020 subsequently restored extensive presidential powers after earlier constitutional restraints.

Eventually, the country experienced the economic catastrophe of 2022.

It would be historically careless to attribute that collapse to one individual or one administration alone. Fiscal weaknesses, debt accumulation, damaging policy decisions and external shocks all contributed.

But the disaster exposed a deeper political failure: institutions had proved insufficiently resilient against decisions made at the highest levels of government.

The lesson was devastating.

A country can possess elections, constitutions, ministries and courts while still suffering from a profound deficit of governance.

Trump and the Politics of Permanent Campaigning

Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump’s presidency raises another version of the same question.

Trump’s political appeal has rested substantially upon his ability to portray himself as an outsider confronting an entrenched establishment.

Yet the presidency is not a permanent campaign platform.

It is an institution charged with governing a large, complicated and deeply divided republic.

Campaigning rewards confrontation, memorable slogans and the simplification of complex problems.

Governance requires negotiation, administrative competence, institutional continuity and an acceptance that legitimate disagreement cannot always be eliminated.

Trump’s supporters see his confrontational approach as a necessary challenge to institutions they regard as unresponsive. Critics see in his highly personalized style a danger to constitutional restraints and the independence of public institutions.

The larger question transcends either interpretation.

Can a political leader continue treating every disagreement as another electoral contest without diminishing the responsibilities of government itself?

A President may win applause by attacking institutions.

But governing requires ensuring that those institutions function.

AKD and the Historical Test

This brings the argument inevitably to Anura Kumara Dissanayake.

AKD’s election in September 2024, followed by the NPP’s extraordinary parliamentary victory in November, represented a substantial rejection of Sri Lanka’s established political order.

The NPP secured 159 seats, a two-thirds parliamentary majority.

That mandate created an unusual opportunity.

It also created an unusual danger.

The opportunity lies in dismantling the habits of patronage, impunity and excessive concentration of authority that have damaged successive governments.

The danger lies in allowing the possession of an overwhelming parliamentary majority to produce the familiar conviction that the governing party alone understands the national interest.

AKD’s administration has placed considerable emphasis upon anti-corruption investigations, administrative discipline and economic stabilization.

Those priorities are significant.

But the ultimate test of the NPP’s promise of system change will not be determined by the number of former politicians investigated or the number of government announcements made.

It will be determined by whether institutions become more independent, public administration more competent and the exercise of power more accountable.

Will the government welcome criticism when it becomes uncomfortable?

Will constitutional reform reduce the powers available to the present President himself?

Will appointments increasingly depend upon professional competence rather than political allegiance?

Will the same standards of accountability apply when allegations concern members of the governing party?

These are not questions designed to diminish AKD.

They are the questions any administration elected upon a promise of fundamental reform must be prepared to answer.

The Opposition’s Responsibility

There is an equally important responsibility resting upon the opposition.

Opposition politics cannot consist indefinitely of waiting for the government to stumble.

Nor can politicians whose parties previously exercised power assume that public dissatisfaction automatically restores their credibility.

A serious opposition must offer coherent alternatives on taxation, investment, education, constitutional reform, reconciliation and the cost of living.

It must challenge government policy without treating every administrative difficulty as evidence of national catastrophe.

And it must defend institutional independence even when independent institutions produce decisions politically inconvenient to itself.

Otherwise, opposition becomes merely another campaign for the restoration of lost privileges.

That is politics.

It is not governance.

The Moment Politics Must End

Perhaps the distinction between politics and governance is not chronological after all.

Politics does not end on the evening election results are announced.

Political judgment remains indispensable to government. Public policy necessarily involves competing interests, conflicting priorities and difficult choices.

The real transformation must occur in the purpose for which power is exercised.

A politician asks: How will this decision affect the next election?

A statesman asks: How will this decision affect the next generation?

Both questions may occasionally produce the same answer.

But when they do not, the character of leadership is revealed.

The difficulty is that electoral success is immediate and measurable, while good governance may require sacrifices whose benefits appear only years later.

A new hospital may take years to complete.

Educational reform may require a generation.

Independent institutions may one day investigate the very people who established them.

And constitutional restraints may diminish the authority of the leader responsible for introducing them.

That is why genuine governance demands something considerably more difficult than political victory.

It demands the willingness to surrender advantages that power has placed within one’s grasp.

The Final Measure

Sri Lanka has spent nearly eight decades searching for the leader who will finally rescue it from its political disappointments.

Perhaps the search itself has been misguided.

No country should depend permanently upon the wisdom, generosity or personal integrity of one individual.

The purpose of democratic government is not to discover an incorruptible ruler.

It is to construct a political order in which the shortcomings of rulers cannot so easily become national disasters.

AKD has an opportunity to contribute to that transformation.

But the same principle applies to every leader, every party and every generation.

The true measure of governance is not the eloquence of promises, the magnitude of electoral victories or the duration of political survival.

It is whether those entrusted with power leave behind institutions stronger than the personalities who temporarily occupied them.

Politics begins with the ambition to acquire power. Governance begins when those who acquire it understand that the country does not belong to them.

And the final proof of that understanding comes when they are prepared to relinquish power without fearing what happens next.

*The writer can be reached at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com