By Lasantha Pethiyagoda –

Prof (Emeritus) Lasantha Pethiyagoda

Sri Lanka is now like an ageing prostitute with fewer and fewer options to consider for her survival. Many have abused her sexually, and not paid for her services. A few uninvited “clients” even manage to ask her to cook them their meals and wash their dirty laundry. Never before in Sri Lanka’s modern history have so few owed so much to so many, by way of default and extraction. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent of the population, as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of their emancipation on their laps but they will refuse you with a curse and remain shackled.

You have to live in Sri Lanka to see it for yourself to believe it. Every day, millions of workers wake up at dawn and stand in dirty, crowded buses, get off at their masters’ posh business houses and then virtually clean the floors, wash the dishes, weed the garden, feed their rich masters’ children, massage their feet, wash their limousines, all for a pittance. Doing any job actually boils down to this kind of slavery. I can never envy the rich in the United States of America or other powerful country. They have no such slaves there. So, they cannot even begin to understand what a good life can be like, in a poor country like Sri Lanka, where half the population is officially malnourished and one third of the population are now under the poverty line.

Sri Lanka is a country where the main political parties connive to deceive the public, while performing public drama in television media conferences, parliament and talk shows. They have even seemed to connive to cause a tragedy with hundreds being slaughtered merely to gain political traction as saviours, in their game of taking turns at governing.

While major crime like the central bank heist and the Easter bombings remain unsolved, every week there is some small issue the media takes up and blows out of proportion to create a new controversy. The increasingly volatile and irritable public attention is drawn to it. The electronic media plays it out on prime-time television while print media gives it headline status. And the YouTubers run with it to gain viewers (and an income in foreign hard currency, a source of jealousy for the CID).

While the sedated public is being thus entertained, Sri Lanka’s prize national assets are on sale without public consent (not at their proper value either, but for the commissions that could be had for the sycophant negotiator). The forest reserves have continually been illegally cleared for major cronies to plant, causing irreparable harm to flora and fauna; rivers have been sand-mined subjecting them to future ecological disasters. The narcotic trade is flourishing under the protection of authorities, with the major king-pins operating out of parliament itself. The politicians and bureaucrats are stealing from what is left in the national coffers depriving people of daily maintenance medicines, emergency procedure apparatus and diagnostic services. And the most precious assets, the skilled workers and professionals, are fleeing the country by the plane loads.

Strangely or predictably, nonsensical issues like substituting Mahatha to Matha, calling a relic a labber, referring to the child of ancient Indian king Suddhodana as “the small fellow”; arresting journalists who are merely witnessing events and dragging them to courts to avenge them for speaking the truth about rankly corrupt policemen, and other dramas are performed in the pettiest and most unethical and illegal manners while everyone in the game conceals larger agendas of looting and abuse that are taking place behind closed doors.

An academic recently wrote a book about corruption at the temple of the tooth relic in Kandy. He alleged criminal activity by the chief custodians of temple property and those with political connections. He was not arrested for defaming a sacred precinct’s reputation as he would potentially have greatly exposed to the public at large, the truth that these criminals dread. Yet, some dispute over an archaeological site in Mullaitivu district has all the attention of the politicians and their ethnoreligious nationalist backers. These constitute much of their bread and butter. Maintaining sectarian tensions simmering, thus ensuring communal politics’ continuation are central to these criminals’ survival. Distraction from burning national issues is thus feasible, as the public are no different to starving dogs who will run behind a casually thrown bone.

Sri Lankans quickly erase the relevance of a litany of crimes that are deliberately committed against them. These quickly become “history”. On the eve of the 2010 Presidential Election, the Central Bank under the Governorship of Nivard Cabraal, eased all restrictions and limits of transferring money out of the country for a few days. Once the Rajapaksas were re-installed, restrictions were reimposed. No one seems interested in questioning these acts.

In a classic exchange of state power, just after the 2015 presidential election, the new president Sirisena alleged some four billion rupees were taken from the Central Bank and given to the Irrigation Department and there is no trace of what happened to the money thereafter. The police are not interested. If one goes back further, there is a multimillion deal, the bribe paid to Prabhakaran and the liberation tigers to stop people in the North voting at the 2005 presidential election. There is no investigation into what happened to the missing 2004 Asian Tsunami relief funds.

Then there was the almighty Bond Scam. The current president Ranil when asked about it in parliament, jokes and says the culprit has gone away to attend a wedding. Any news as to what happened to Gota’s inquiry about Nirupama Rajapaksa’s millions revealed in the Pandora Papers? The multimillion-dollar graft accusations over the Airbus deal was reported in the UK and a local charged. However, no one was charged in Sri Lanka. The widely reported Rajapaksa family trip to San Marino and question marks over the private jet from Uganda, the LTTE gold taken into custody after the war ended in 2009, where Gota got 17 million rupees cash from, which he forgot to take with him when he decamped. Among other scams, the palm oil import scam, the garlic scam, the temporary sugar tax reduction to 25 cents scam, antigen import scam, Covid vaccine scam, fertilizer scam, stand out.

Instead of the media hounding the officials and the police on these, and faithful to their masters who are cronies of one of the two major political camps they merely brawl over the rotting bones thrown at them by the enablers behind all this corruption.

The people are sedated like lotus eaters in an English literary work. Most voters are strugglers, daily braving the traffic, injustices and hardships, starvation and malnourishment, death of loved ones due to “karmic” lack of medicines or health sector staff or equipment and a very hopeless future that neither they nor their children can look forward to. So their daily lives are influenced by cheap entertainment that the electronic media churns out in the form of sensational and controversial events that have very little to do with their own lives.

The loss of their national wealth to greedy criminal politicians and their administrative staff, the rabid behaviour of an utterly corrupt and criminal police force, the loss of their basic human rights on a daily basis, the unreliability of a judiciary that is beholden to political influencers, the giving away of prime land to creditors like China or India, the lack of compensation for world-class marine disasters like the contamination from the X-Press Pearl container ship, the control of national energy like cooking gas, petroleum and electricity by external parties or creditor nations who will call the shots in any future dispute, the total lack of accountability by almost all elected officials of government. The impunity with which the powerful kill off the poor has now become the norm, accepted or tolerated as inevitable or driven by destiny and fate as the people increasingly turn to quacks like Samantha Badder or Jerome and other such cult movements in desperation, only to be raped and defiled again and again.

If Sri Lankans want a better future with some hope of a decent life, they must shed their differences and unite against their oppressors. There is no time to lose.

*Prof (Emeritus) Lasantha Pethiyagoda