Egos writing cheques taxpayers cannot cash

Last week addressing a ceremony felicitating the Asia Cup winning cricket team, President Ranil Wickremesinghe commended them for setting an example to the rest of the country. “They did not get discouraged even after losing to Afghanistan. They kept their faith and fought on and achieved victory. This is a good lesson for all of us. Today we are worse off than Afghanistan, but if we revolt against all odds, I am certain we can reach victory too,” the President said.

It was not the first time that the President had been candid with the precarious financial situation in the country. A few weeks ago, addressing a gathering of professionals the President claimed that at one point he was richer than the Republic of Sri Lanka. On that occasion Wickremesinghe joked, “I need not tell you how bad the economy is. At one time just as I became the minister of finance, I found that I was richer than the Republic of Sri Lanka as far as foreign exchange was concerned because, on that day we (Sri Lanka) had nothing, and I had $ 1,000 at home which I had saved from a trip.”

President Wickremesinghe is now in London representing this bankrupt nation at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. Only a handful of heads of state will be representing Commonwealth nations that do not belong to the ‘realm’ which had Queen Elizabeth II as their sovereign. With the visit not being a State Visit at the invitation of his counterpart or an official visit on the invitation of the Prime Minister of the UK, President Wickremesinghe will not be granted any pomp and pageantry normally associated with such a high-level visit or more importantly have an opportunity for high-level meetings. Especially at a time when the whole of the UK is in mourning for their dead monarch, there will hardly be any constructive opportunity to engage the government of the UK.

It is for these reasons that it is very curious why President Wickremesinghe deemed it necessary for himself to personally represent Sri Lanka at the funeral of the Queen. It can only be attributed to the devotion some of Wickremesinghe’s generation holds for our former colonial masters and its monarchy. It is no different to former President Maithripala Sirisena being overwhelmed a few years ago with the perceived honour that he received from the Queen when she shook his hand without wearing gloves. Wickremesinghe’s maternal uncle and former president J.R. Jayewardene was also known to have been very keen to secure a State Visit to the UK during his tenure that would have involved all the trappings of the pomp and pageantry associated with such a visit. It is recorded in the memoirs of the then High Commissioner to Colombo David Gladstone how President Jayewardene lobbied extensively for this rare ‘honour’ which he never received.

When president Ranasinghe Premadasa was killed in 1993, Queen Elizabeth as his counterpart Head of State of the UK did not attend the funeral. For that matter the Prime Minister of the UK, the Foreign Minister or even a junior minister was not present, and the UK was represented by its High Commissioner in Colombo. Reciprocity matters in diplomatic relations. Forgetting all history and protocol, the precarious situation of the domestic economy which has been so eloquently presented by President Wickremesinghe himself should have been reason enough to skip this unnecessary ego trip which seeks validation by association. 

President Wickremesinghe has demonstrated again that he is a leader out of sync with the people of this country. He belongs to a generation that represents less than 5% of the total population who may have a memory of pre-republican Sri Lanka that had a degree of veneration to a foreign monarch. Unfortunately, this ego trip sans tangible benefits in the political or economic realm will have to be borne by the taxpayers of Sri Lanka.