Will Insatiable Greed Overcome The Democratic Impulse?
Emil van der Poorten
When one begins to step back and try to analyse the issues and problems faced by Sudu Banda, Rasalingam or Cader Mohideen in this country, after a while the penny drops and one is left with a whole bunch of uncomfortable “realities,” the primary one being the massive corruption that seems to have reached into every nook and cranny of Sri Lanka.
While corruption seems to have accelerated very dramatically during theRajapaksa hegemony, its roots seemed to have established themselves with the free-for-all that was the “open economy,” when I am sure that a man for whom I have never had any great respect, J. R. Jayewardene, seemed to have really meant it when he said, “Let the robber barons come!”
By all accounts, there was a desperate need, for national psychological reasons if for no other, to change course from the truly terrible economic stifling of the last years of the Sirima Bandaranaike coalition government. However, even though there might have been a case for some of the steps taken in terms of turning back many of the idiocies of import substitution by controls without precedent in this country, all of which were restricted to the “hoi polloi” and scarcely affected those in the seats of power and their friends, no provision had, obviously, been made for the most rudimentary of checks and balances, that would have ensured a more humane system than either the Bandaranaike/N.M.Perera one and J.R. Jayewardene’s “open economy had resulted in. Exacerbating “Yankee Dick’s” model was the fact that, inevitably, his invitation to the robber barons was gladly accepted by that pestilence in both their local and foreign versions!