Unravelling of presidents

Last week, Sri Lankans witnessed yet another glimpse of a head of State unravelling on television with President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s interview on German Television. 

The usually suave, collected and articulate Wickremesinghe was irritable, incoherent and bombastic when asked simple questions on accountability for the Easter Sunday attacks and the state of the country’s economy by the German journalists, questions which are legitimate, quite relevant to the current state of affairs and most predictable. There was hardly any reason for Wickremesinghe to lose his cool, insult the interviewer or threaten to walk away.

Wickremesinghe’s performance brought back memories of the now infamous “who is Lasantha” interview given to a foreign media by Gotabaya Rajapaksa at the height of power as the defence secretary. Rajapaksa never gave a single, one on one interview to foreign media after becoming President in 2019. 

It is clear that President Wickremesinghe is following in the footsteps of many of his predecessors who visibly morphed into unrecognisable avatars of their former selves after assuming Sri Lanka’s all powerful executive presidency. The powers vested in a single individual holding this office is akin to an absolute monarch. Constitutional means of ousting an Executive President is near impossible and has never been done for the last 45 years. The very fact that an unprecedented, island-wide mass uprising was needed to oust Gotabaya Rajapaksa after he had bankrupted the economy and dragged millions into poverty demonstrates the entrenched dangers of this office. It is for this very reason that the office of Executive President needs to be abolished and replaced with a more stable structure of governance that does not depend on a single individual.

An argument against the abolition of the executive presidency is that the presidency leads to stability. Proponents of the presidency say that in view of the political and economic challenges faced by a developing country such as Sri Lanka, a strong Government freed from the whims and fancies of the legislators, and which can take tough, unpopular decisions that are in the long-term interest of the country is needed. The fact that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa failed in governance, despite having overwhelming powers bestowed to him through the 20th Amendment (20A) and enjoying a two-thirds majority in Parliament, is testament to the abysmal failure of the institution of executive presidency.

Time and time again it has been proven that it is the nature of the presidency which is mostly at fault rather than any particular character flaw of its incumbents. The electorate has voted in liberals, affable village officials, and militaristic nationalists to supposed technocrats hoping that each would break this curse of the executive presidency only to be disappointed each time. It is long past time to realise that there is not going to be any benevolent autocrat who is going to deliver the country to a promised land of development and stability using the awesome powers of the executive presidency. Instead, the dependency on and hope for such leadership has taken Sri Lankan down a path which has delivered nothing but cronyism, nepotism, bankruptcy and chaos.

President Wickremesinghe has once again demonstrated why this system needs to change and why Sri Lanka cannot place all its trust on the shoulders of an individual who may not be completely of sound mind. It needs instead to find stability in institutions rather than in individuals.