By Gehan Gunatilleke Let me apologise to building managers in advance. Imagine entrusting a building to a manager who is dishonest. To one’s horror, one discovers dishonesty is not a problem confined to one particular building manager, but an affliction common to all building managers. There is a serious dilemma. The building needs managing, and the building’s owners neither have the time nor the skills to manage buildings. So owners may have little choice but to rely on dishonest building managers. One option is to keep looking for that one miraculous building manager who is honest. But until then, the building will have to be managed by the dishonest. The other option – the one I am going to propose in this article – is to operate on the assumption that all building managers everywhere are going to be dishonest. So then the owners must prepare themselves for that inevitability, and try to mitigate the damage of dishonesty, while keeping the building and its contents intact. It is obviously not true that all building managers are dishonest. But there are some basic truths we cannot escape. The sun sets in the west. Prices rise. Politicians lie. We Sri Lankan citizens do not look to the east to see a sunset. We are not surprised when the cost of living rises each year. Yet we never cease to be shocked when politicians betray us. Perhaps the current crisis in Sri Lanka is an opportunity for us to reflect on our predicament. We are all cut from the same cloth, but only some are cut out to be politicians. Active politics, like building management, is not for everyone. We should not assume ordinary citizens could simply become politicians; and we should not assume that the few who could become politicians would remain honest. We are then faced with a terrible dilemma: We need politicians to govern the country, but politicians are liars. This dilemma is perpetuated by the very fact that lying politicians are often believed, and therefore succeed in politics. So how do we challenge the status quo? In this context, I wish to propose two ways in which Sri Lankan citizens should “reconfigure”. Reconfiguration 1: Always disregard what they say to us If we think building managers are generally dishonest, we will probably pick them based on their track records, rather than on how well they fair at an interview. Why? Because dishonest building managers lie during interviews. If politicians lie consistently, we citizens should consistently disbelieve what politicians say. This is a fairly simple reconfiguration, but the reconfiguration clarifies how we should engage politics. Judge a politician purely on what is done, and not on what is said. If a culture of rampant scepticism emerges as a result, the power we cede to politicians to break promises diminishes over time. If we can somehow build a culture of scepticism, perhaps politicians will be compelled to prove themselves through their actions. Words will mean nothing to us, until they translate into action. This reconfiguration is a potentially powerful way of picking politicians at elections. We do not pick them based on their election promises. Instead, we look at their track records – what they have done, and what they have failed to do – and we judge their worth purely in those terms. Reconfiguration 2: Choose competition over concentration Imagine giving all the keys to a building to a single dishonest building manager? It is far more sensible to give different building managers the keys to different floors, so that no one building manager can potentially steal all the contents of the building. The owners could then set up a system of rigorous and regular performance review – where building managers are ranked and retained by how much they do, and how little they steal. The system should be designed, as far as possible, to prevent dishonest building managers from working together against the building’s owners. If politicians are liars, we should, at all costs, avoid concentrating power in one of them. That is an incredibly foolish risk to take. In a world where all politicians lie, it makes sense to divide power to the greatest extent possible, and to set up institutions that incentivise competition for power. That competition between lying politicians may be the balance we need to prevent major damage being caused by any one of them, or by a few of them acting in concert. We should build our political institutions on this simple logic. The executive presidency – as we have learnt – is the antithesis of this logic. No one lying politician should have the power to appoint or remove another lying politician unilaterally. The system should vest as little power as possible in individuals, and as much power as possible in institutions that can remain reasonably independent of particular individuals. Of course, such a system will often lead to policy paralysis. But it will also safeguard us citizens against the worst abuses of power. For these are the abuses we are confronted with today. Containment before cure Politicians will probably govern this country for the foreseeable future. They are, for now, a necessary evil. But we need not accept the terms of the politics they offer. There is no reason to be gluttons for punishment. We must seize control of our destinies, and treat politicians precisely for what they are – dishonest creatures that crave the concentration of power. If these are the fundamental features of politicians, let us reconfigure how we engage in politics. Instead of believing what they say, let us judge them by their actions alone. Instead of trusting power in a few of them, let us compel them to compete for power. Politicians lie – often pathologically. We hold this truth to be self-evident in the wake of the long list of broken promises, crossovers, and blatant falsehoods we have endured as citizens. Pathological problems need clinical solutions. But when there is no viable cure in sight, containment is the only sensible option. So the prescription in this case is some simple reconfigurations. These reconfigurations may help us take the problem we are confronted with more seriously, and contain it to the extent possible. They may help us make wiser decisions about whom we should entrust power to, and how much of it we should entrust. Perhaps then we might avoid the worst kind of building managers – the ones who would not hesitate to bring it all crashing down.