The catastrophic end to the OceanGate saga that held the world enthralled for the better part of the past week offers many lessons for our own political leadership that appears to be hell-bent on taking the country on an equally-risky journey.
For starters, it appears that the senior management of OceanGate was made aware of the vulnerabilities of the vessel by its own technical staff years ago, but instead of addressing those concerns, the gung ho CEO borrowed a page from Sri Lankan politics and chose to get rid of the messengers. It has now been revealed that some of the senior staff who pointed out serious issues concerning the safety of the vessel are purported to have resigned in disgust when their advice continued to fall on deaf ears. Sound familiar?
In Sri Lanka we had a leadership that consistently refused to heed the advice of experts, despite having in its ranks dozens of such ‘experts’ as well as supposedly autonomous bodies, and the end result was a nation that was reduced to bankruptcy.
The present leadership appears to be no better, steamrolling its way through independent commissions and other statutory bodies whose specific duty is to advise the government of the day as well as create the necessary checks and balances to Executive and ministerial oversight. By riding roughshod over these important bodies, the leadership is taking the same route as the CEO of OceanGate, who incidentally was the pilot of that ill-fated submarine.
This general allergy to constructive criticism as well as conformity with fundamental principles of good governance and constitutionally-mandated oversight that must necessarily allow for checks and balances is also true of even the country’s main Opposition party, which continues to blunder its way through what should have been a cakewalk to the country’s leadership.
Last week one of the party’s diehard loyalists, an outspoken former lady MP, alleged that the party’s leadership was averse to constructive criticism and was more comfortable with yes-men who were planning strategy with the Party Leader during daytime and wining and dining with his nemesis during night time, while those who were loyal to the leadership were either being ignored or sidelined. It would indeed be a shame if the country’s alternate leadership is stillborn owing to its immaturity and inability to recognise the age-old tactic of manipulation and deception within its own party ranks.
Moving on, the problem with leadership on either side of the political divide is that they tend to be more focused on splitting hairs on everything other than what is absolutely and urgently necessary for the immediate recovery of the country. Overcome by State propaganda, it is easy to forget that this is still a nation that is in the throes of a debilitating economic crisis. Continuing to literally ignore the ‘elephant in the room’ and focusing on the irrelevant sideshows will only buy so much time before the country reaches the point of no return.
That is why it is critically important that both the Government as well as the Opposition get the formula for the Anti-Corruption Bill right. There is no room for error as far as this country is concerned because this is probably the last opportunity it will have to get this critical law right.
And why do we say that? It is because the regime and its leadership continues to bury their collective heads in the sand and pretend that things are on the mend on the economic front when the actual dashboard is still very much flashing red. It has now come to light that Sri Lanka’s public debt increased by a hefty $ 6.8 billion in just the first three months of this year, due to domestic borrowing. According to the Finance Ministry, total existing debt jumped from $ 84.7 billion to $ 91.5 billion in a space of just three months. Therefore, it is clear that the perceived normalcy has been brought about by putting this nation further into debt.
Sri Lanka’s economic crisis that brought the country to its knees and the people on to the streets was essentially caused by flawed policy resulting in debt unsustainability. In fact, it was the IMF that pointed out that it was Sri Lanka’s corruption susceptibilities that were at the root of the country’s economic problems. Having identified the issue, the IMF took the yet-unprecedented step of making Sri Lanka the first country in the world where it even instituted its Governance Diagnostics.
Despite this severe indictment on the failure of the governance mechanism in place in general and the anti-corruption apparatus in particular, the regime has thought it fit to fix this broken system with an Anti-Corruption Bill which appears to be compromised by its own fine print. While most of the provisions of the bill are in fact necessary and an improvement on the existing Bribery and Corruption Act, it has two failings that will potentially render all that’s good redundant.
The first provision, or the lack of it, is to identify and punish those responsible for corruption in the recent past or, in the alternative, at least those responsible for making this nation bankrupt. The second is the inclusion of a provision to ‘punish’ those found to have made a false allegation. The burden of proving whether an allegation is true or false will therefore fall on the shoulders of the Police Department, which in itself is among the most corrupt institutions in the country. Therefore, the all-important question of the efficacy of this act requires very little imagination.
The leadership of this nation must at least now understand that corruption is the single biggest issue that is ultimately the cause of every other issue in this nation. If one were to assume that this cancer which has eaten into every aspect of governance can be eradicated overnight by the introduction of this law in its proposed form, it is sadly mistaken.
The regime must understand the necessity of not only cutting down the branches of the massive tree that is corruption in this country, which is what the bill in its present form will likely do, but more importantly destroy the roots as well, for otherwise it will only be a matter of time before new branches spring forth. If the roots are to be destroyed, then it is necessary for the regime to incorporate the amendments submitted by the main Opposition, which includes retrospective effect.
World-renowned Judge Christopher Weeramantry stated in the preface of his book ‘The Law In Crisis’ that “Sri Lanka is embarrassed by the richness of its laws and not by the lack of it,” citing a perennial problem in this country, where laws spring up like mushrooms from time to time but are rarely implemented, other than when it is politically convenient to do so.
Notwithstanding these ground realities, the circumstances in which the new Anti-Corruption Bill is being presented is rather irksome for the simple reason that it is the same regime that stands accused of corruption and running the country to the ground that is also presenting the new law. While the apparent motivation for the new law appears to be to appease the likes of the IMF and UNHRC, it will likely suffer the same fate as the bulk of the laws in the statute books as pointed out by no less a personality than Judge Weeramantry, for the simple reason that the accused cannot be the prosecutor as well.