The realities of the presidential race

The election campaigns of the SLPP and the UNP are designed to suit the people’s security concerns and their economic hardships caused by rising cost of living and unemployment. Both parties are trying to make the voter believe in the abundant promises they make, promises made to suit the expectations of the different groups of people they address – Pix by Shehan Gunasekara

Since independence we have had seven Presidential Elections in Sri Lanka, and again we are getting ready to elect the next president in November. After changing presidents and their governments seven times we have not been able to achieve a satisfactory level of development to ensure basic needs to all or peace and harmony in society. 

If you ask 10 Sri Lankans what they think about the present situation in Sri Lanka, a majority of them would reply ‘this country has been ruined by politicians’. There must have been something wrong in the way we have used our votes during the last 71 years. Maybe we have been carried away by our emotional attachment to a party or become indifferent to what was taking place in the country and not used our heads in deciding whom to vote all these years. 

Civil society groups and a few contenders believe in a complete system change to neutralise evil forces created by the two major parties that have ruled the country during the last 71 years. Unfortunately our society includes people who are unable to escape the slave mentality dictated by emotional attachment to a blue or green party or a family, and they are blind to reason and disregard their own welfare because of this genetic defect. 

I use the word ‘genetic’ as these affiliations have passed from one generation to the next since independence. A favourite assertion among us is: “Oh we have been UNP or SLFP/SLPP for generations.”  Besides we have a selective memory and we remember the atrocities of the opponent and do not remember the atrocities of the party of our choice. 

That is why at present the battle for the presidency seems to be more intense between the two main parties, the UNP and the SLPP, and the rest of the candidates have slim chances of winning, even if they seem capable and honest and their policies are more appropriate to address our problems.   

The election campaigns of the SLPP and the UNP are designed to suit the people’s security concerns and their economic hardships caused by rising cost of living and unemployment. Both parties are trying to make the voter believe in the abundant promises they make, promises made to suit the expectations of the different groups of people they address. 

The speeches delivered with the help of teleprompters or otherwise, are sometimes similar to the gamarala’s promise to take you to heaven by hanging on to the tail of the white elephant from heaven. They are well considered speeches to lead you up the garden path and ignite hope and happiness in those who are either slaves to the leaders in each party or those who are clueless. 

The past performance of the candidates, whether good or bad, is zeroed out from the memory of the voters who are dazzled by the promises. So you don’t remember who was good and who was bad. As a result, will Sri Lankans miss this last chance to elect the right person who would save the country by eliminating corruption, thuggery, poverty, communal violence, drug menace and injustice? 

Perhaps, one need not despair as the younger generation of voters is more intelligent and can use their brains to find out ways of arriving at the correct decision in picking the right candidate. If we are willing and use some grey matter in the head, we can figure out whether these promises would be delivered or not, by looking at what it takes to deliver these promises. 

Conditions to make the promises and policies feasible

The voters sitting on the fence and the educated young voters are capable of figuring out the truth. This group of voters is being wooed by all parties and Sri Lanka would be lucky if these voters carefully consider the feasibility and reliability of the policies and promises presented by the candidates and use common sense to make the correct decision that suits our expectations.  

• These promises and policies are feasible and could be delivered only if the following conditions are there.
• The first condition is that funds are available to the Government to meet their costs. There should be sufficient funds to give free handouts like fertiliser etc., write off loans, build universities and technical collages in a short period of one to three years to admit every student with 10 years of schooling, set up funds for various purposes. At present Government has to keep raising loans to finance existing projects and programs, and raise taxes to run the Government. At present universities have the capacity to admit only about 6% of those who qualify for admission and the rest are either doing odd jobs or unemployed. The Muslim university or technical college in Kattankudy was started in 2014 and after nearly six years, it is still not completed. So how many years will it take to give university admission to all the A/Level students who are unemployed or doing odd jobs at present and the new batches coming out from schools in the next five years?    
• We can believe in these promises to some extent if; the candidate’s past in public life has proved that he has been committed to the welfare of the masses and not to perpetuate his family name and his power; has not depended on groups, very often led by men in yellow robes or promoters of Wahhabism and Arabisation who propagate racial and religious hatred; has not used his power to reward his cronies and has not engaged in cronyism; appointed the right person to the right job and not suppressed dissent by using force. In the absence of these conditions it is very unlikely that the candidate will suddenly become the godfather to the suffering people and deliver all these promises once elected. Beware, after the election it is possible that we might find the person we voted in, is not actually a saviour, but a predator. The best way to avoid such a situation is to examine the past performance of the candidates to see whether they have displayed their commitment to uplift the masses and respect individual freedom 
• The third condition that makes these promises realisable is that the implementation of these promises does not adversely affect the other service and economic sectors vital to the public. The Government cannot move forward if the other sectors are deprived of funds as there will be chaos. Education has to continue, hospitals have to go on, transport services, industry etc. need to be continued. They all affect the day today life of the people. These sectors have to be provided with funds to maintain services, productivity and employment at least at the same level to avoid problems and lopsided development. If not we will have a public transport sector without busses in running condition, hospitals without medicines. This implies that these promises cannot be delivered by reducing resources available to other sectors in the economy and it is imperative that additional funding has to be found. The best that could happen after the election is that these free handouts might be given to a selected few for a short while and quietly phased out without anybody’s knowledge

The issue on funding

The winning candidate and his Government will be compelled to find additional funds either from increased taxation (both direct and indirect) or from foreign loans or from both. It may be possible to find some funds by cutting down government expenses. 

All three sources of generating funds have their limitations. Increased taxation will only make our lives more miserable and taxation also depends on the ability to pay. If taxes go beyond the level of the ability to pay, there will be no savings for the local entrepreneur to invest in their industries, agricultural ventures, businesses etc. In such a situation there can be labour layoffs. Therefore there is a limit to taxation.

No international lending agency or Colombo plan country or any other country that gives concessionary loans give loans to finance free handouts. We will have to look for loans in the open market where the interest is very high and the payback period is very short.  

This will lead us to a debt trap. In this context of financial constraints, it looks very insincere and deceitful when one promises to reduce taxation by a specific percentage. Making the tax system simpler may improve the tax administration but it can hardly enlarge the tax base without hurting the middle and the lower-middle class including the poor. 

There is some validity in the argument that some funds could be found by cutting down unnecessary expenditure. This requires time and effort to identify the areas where savings could be made without harming the overall effectiveness of the organisation. Also it needs a huge attitudinal change among the public servants to adopt cost effective management systems. 

The late President Premadasa visited ministries to see how efficiently office space was being utilised at the beginning of his rule and he improved the efficiency of the public service by personally monitoring the implementation of projects big and small. Cutting down costs requires not only an attitudinal change on the part of the public service, but also political leaders who follow the same rules. Decision-making and inter-agency discussions in the public sector has evolved into a system characterised by expensive conferences in five-star hotels and resorts. In comparison huge companies and governmental organisations in other countries do these consultations and discussions on a low key level and often through teleconferences incurring minimum expenses. 

Just look at the seating arrangements in the British Parliament and the seating arrangements and the set up in our Parliament and Provincial Councils! The British MPs and PM sit shoulder-to-shoulder on long benches with back rests. They pay for their own food. 

In Sri Lanka even a Provincial Councillor’s chair costs six lakhs. Is the difference you see in the two countries due to the fact that Sri Lanka is richer than Britain? Can any of the candidates stop this extravaganza in the public sector to find money to give free handouts?    

Of course we can save a larger sum by downsizing the Cabinet and doing away with all the perks and pensions and security escorts given to politicians. We do things with a flare. We graduated from 30 to 90 government ministers to manage our affairs, thanks to the leaders who had to do that in order to get a majority in the Parliament and keep them with the leader by giving them ministerial posts. 

It is a quid pro deal between the leader and these patriotic PMs. What was the cost of this for us? Sizable savings could be made if all these ministerial posts are limited to 30 Cabinet ministerial posts.    Now the question is which candidate is likely to do this? We will win if we can identify the candidate who would dare to do it. Of course the voters have an obligation to strengthen that candidate’s hands by giving him a comfortable majority at the General Elections.

One could assume that the Government can set apart funds for the free hand-out for a short period from its revenue collection provided all new programs and projects the development plans could be implemented with foreign aid or foreign investments. 

This can happen provided the programs and the policies are capable of addressing the development constraints and the funding agencies/investors have confidence/trust in the Government and its policies and there is no corruption. Unfortunately the candidates do not educate the voter on their policies to address the problems in the country.  

The mindset of voters

The supporting groups try to exaggerate the eligibility of their candidate and spread falsehoods about the opponent. Some of the professionals in various organisations tax their exclusive knowledge and skills to educate you on the value of a candidate seasoned with American or other foreign experience or education and teach you how to look at things in the way that suits their purpose. 

All this put the voter in a confusing situation. The best option available to the voter is to ignore all these promises and the presentations of these experts and concentrate on the past performance of the candidates as regards serving the masses and select the candidate who is more sympathetic to the ordinary people. Perhaps it would be easier for the voter to identify the two most important issues the country has to address in order to solve the critical problems we are facing now, and use them to decide which candidate and his team would be capable of addressing these two issues more effectively.

Two most important issues of the country

Let us identify what these two most important issues are. The two main concerns we are worried about are economic problems and security problems. To solve our economic problems, we need to fast-track development in all the sectors in order to increase income generation, increase employment and improve services. 

We need to put in place plans and programs to obtain new technology, skills and markets to facilitate the development in all the sectors of the economy. We need to improve the efficiency of the public sector. It is also important to achieve a better distribution of income to empower the poorest of the poor. The issue here is we do not have sufficient resources within the country for all this to fast-track development to the desired level.

In regard to our other concern, namely security, we need to understand what security means. Security does not mean only the prevention of terrorist attacks. It includes economic security and security against intimidation by politicians and thugs as well as anything that takes away our freedom. 

To feel safe and not vulnerable to economic deprivation (not being thrown out on to the street) we should have some means of living and a house. People living on the streets or on other people’s property have no security. To feel safe economically, we need some means of earning a living (a job or business) and a place to live.

Even if there is national security against any form of terrorist attack, we do not have personal security if the streets are not free of drug dealers and there are drug lords in the Government. There is the danger of your child or your husband who is the bread winner in the family becoming a drug addict and your family becoming destitute, if the Government tolerates or gives protection to drug lords. Your security or your child’s security is at stake if the Government is supported by child abusers and rapists.

To feel safe from intimidation we need an independent Police and Judiciary and politicians who do not interfere in the work of the public service, particularly the work of the Police and the judicial system.  For protection against terrorist attacks we need well trained, well equipped Tri-Forces and Police, with their respective intelligence units and a mechanism to coordinate the activities of all these forces and their intelligence units. 

We had all these in place, but the political interference from the top for personal reasons prevented these agencies to function the way they should have and the 21 April attack could not be prevented. The blatant interference in the work of the public servant and the politicisation of the public service particularly since 2000, compromised our systems of governance. 

Government procedures, regulations were bent and checks and balances weakened for the benefit of the politicians. For these reasons Muslim extremism and Arab dollars came into Sri Lanka and a foreign funded Muslim university sprang up in the east without the authorities noticing it. This breakdown in governance created the necessary environment for Muslim extremism to take root.

In regard to security from terrorist attacks, we should try to understand why these attacks took place in the first place and why such attacks can happen again irrespective of who is in charge of security and how much we have modernised the security system. The youths belonging to all three main communities took to violence. 

The Tamil youths in the north took up arms. Then the Sinhala youth in the south took to violence followed by extremist Muslim youth. They were voices raised against the establishment. The causes for the first two terrorist attacks were economic marginalisation of a section of the population and denial of their rights caused by racism, cast or class system and the unequitable distribution of wealth.  

In the case of the terrorist attack by the extremist Muslim youth, the reason for it was not economic marginalisation, but racism and Muslim extremism promoted from outside and from within the country. It is seen that racism and class differentiation played an important role in breeding and nurturing terrorism on all three occasions. Then we should use our heads not to vote for a party that condones racial violence by Buddhist monks or leaders of any other community.  

From the above it is clear that for national security, what we need is a head of State who is unlikely to interfere in the work of the security forces and the public service, the Police department in particular, and a leader who commands the trust of the international community to find the funds and opportunities to provide the necessary training, state-of-the-art equipment and technology to the security forces. We need a leader committed to protecting the economically vulnerable, protect the society by eliminating the drug menace and prosecuting child abusers and rapists. 

An ideal leader or party

A leader or party that does not respect international agreements, human rights and freedom to disagree is unlikely to win the trust of the international community and find financial aid at concessionary rates to develop our country. 

Whoever wins the election has to get funds from outside to finance development and upgrade the security forces. If that is so, we need to consider which candidate and his party has the greater chance of obtaining foreign funds as grants and soft loans (not loans at high interest rates, but low interest rates less than 2% with long repayment periods) from foreign governments and international agencies and bring foreign investors into the country. 

It is worth reflecting that even if an iron man becomes the president, unless he eliminates communal hatred and violence through legislation and solve the grievances of the minorities through constitutional reforms and engage in nation building through social reforms including elimination of drugs and child abuse, there will be uprisings just like the French Revolution and the more recent upheaval against Marcos in the Philippines.

If you consider only the candidates of the two main parties, a simple way to come to a reasonable decision in selecting the candidate is to guess who would be in the Cabinet of each candidate. Remember that all the leading supporters shouting on the stage and sign MoUs will have to be rewarded with ministerial posts. That is their return on investment in terms of time and effort and campaign contributions as well as bringing votes. Consider which evil is less harmful to the country.      

Failure of the voters

Having said all that about candidates, it is reasonable to say something about the voters too. Sometimes we fail to do our duty by the country. Most voters do not think rationally. This is a reality that every candidate has to face. This is why they resort to making these promises to impress the voter. 

It is this type of voter who is easily influenced by his emotions and has no interest to compare policies of contenders to make his decision. Intelligent and honest debate has no place in Sri Lankan elections because of such behaviour on the part of the voter. 

We have not realised the potential we have in changing the composition of the Government and the Opposition by using our vote. We can use our vote at the General Election not to vote for corrupt individuals and also pressurise leaders of the party not to give nominations to such individuals by the public expression of protest. 

We can pressurise media institutions that disregard cultural values and disseminate misinformation to mislead us deliberately, by not watching their shows. Although we tend to blame the politician for the mess we are in, the blame needs to be attributed to ourselves as well. 

Misleading voters due to unexpected events

There could be unexpected events that could disturb us and force us to align ourselves to a particular side and vote without knowing the truth. We have to be aware that these things happen due to manipulations by certain parties.         

Sometimes situations are created by extremist groups to prevent a voter from making his choice independently based on facts. These situations are created to give advantage to the party supported by these extremists. The voter is made to forget reason and his own welfare and vote for that party purely guided by his raw emotions and fears stirred up by these unexpected events. 

The misinformation campaigns of some supporters of political parties are so vicious that they have not only misled the voters, they have done irreparable damage to the image of some political leaders and their parties as well as social reformers engaged in honourable work. 

Some campaigners do not spare even non-political social reformers who preach nonviolence, ethics and promote ethnic harmony and peace; if they consider such performances could prevent them from using racial violence to gain the Sinhala Buddhist vote for the masters they support. 

It may be that the actions of these extremists are not condoned or condemned by the political masters. These extremists are looking for issues to get into the limelight for their own survival. But unfortunately they impact the presidential race as some voters are vulnerable to the fear that Buddhism and their own safety are threatened. It is imperative that voters ignore the activities of such groups and think intelligently so that the country can rise from its ashes and move forward.