A truculent President and a tame PM: Are they to be fired, or forced to work together?
Rajan Philips-March 3, 2018, 8:40 pm
Neither Maithripala Sirisena nor Ranil Wickremesinghe owes their current official positions to their popularity or politics. They are where they are by democratic default when a majority of the Sri Lankan voters said enough is enough to Mahinda Rajapaksa, his family, their cronies and their relentless power grab. That was in January 2015. A majority of the members of the present parliament also owe their parliamentary seats to the same January 2015 wave which carried them to parliament seven months later in August. The mandate the President, the Prime Minister, and the parliamentarians who supported them in January 2015 received from the people, was simple and clear: (1) expose, address and eradicate corruption in government; and (2) bring about constitutional changes to arrest and reverse the nearly 40-year trend of the concentration, personalization and the abuse of presidential power. The desire for national reconciliation was more than palpable but it is fair to say that it did not receive the same universal endorsement as did the revolt against corruption and the opposition to presidential power abuse.
Even the MPs who were elected on the SLFP/UPFA ticket, in August 2015, will not dare say that their mandate is to return to corruption or facilitate power abuse. And a good number of the SLFP/UPFA returnees, including those who were admitted through the national-list backdoor after losing in the elections, joined the Sirisena-Wickremasinghe (S-W) government. Quite a few of them are also ministers in the S-W cabinet that was expanded in size through a special constitutional provision just to include them. Some of them are alleged to be corrupt now as they were before, but even they will not dare say that they have a mandate to be corrupt.
How does any of this change after the February 10 local election? Nothing of the 2015 mandate does, or should, change as a result of the February 2018 election. The two are not mutually exclusive, only mutually reinforcing. The practical question is how do we reconcile the two, or how do we institutionally translate the message of 2018 to reinforce the mandate of 2015. The relevant moral imperative is to keep both 2015 and 2018 linked and in focus, and not to disconnect the two by contriving connections between 2018, on the one hand, and the old political milestones of 1953, 1956, 1964 and whatever else, on the other.
On February 10, the people unmistakably expressed not just disappointment but real anger at the poor performance of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government and the grand corruption of its own making. While the initial euphoria after the February 10 debacle targeting Prime Minister Wickremesinghe has somewhat subsided, the uncertainty about his position and the future of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government has not at all withered away. The much touted cabinet reshuffle was expected to put the derailed government back on track. But the reshuffle turned out to be a sham of a half-shuffle. It was truly a disgraceful spectacle of a national Sunday show. One can only feel sorry for the three service commanders in full regalia who were summoned to stand behind their commander-in-chief for nothing.
No Confidence in Ranil Wickremesinghe
The half-shuffle spectacle seems to have encouraged the resurrection of calls for either the resignation of, or a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Wickremesinghe. Calls have emanated from within the UNP and have found resonance not only in the Joint-Opposition but also the JVP. Even the SLFP that is still in government is not averse to supporting a no-confidence motion against the Prime Minister. After all it is the (SLFP) President who started the frenzy that he wanted Ranil Wickremesinghe out and to be replaced by another UNPer, or by anybody else other than Mahinda Rajapaksa. Then Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, safely returning from his sojourn in the US, publicly reminded everyone and the President that he could not be PM, because he is still a US citizen. Ouch! That damned 19th Amendment again. There is more, because there is no way that Gotabhaya Rajapaksa can muster majority support to be Prime Minister in the current parliament.
Looked at it from the other end of Kotte, is the 19th Amendment enough to save Ranil Wickremesinghe’s political bacon? All that the 19th Amendment does is to prevent the President from arbitrarily firing a Prime Minister who has majority support in parliament. As it is the Prime Minister has majority support in parliament, and he is not going to lose it unless at least a dozen UNPers break rank and support a no confidence motion against the Prime Minister. The JVP has qualified its support for a no confidence motion, indicating that it should be based on specific allegations of corruption or improper conduct and not just political calculations. That would be a high bar to cross for the SLFP Ministers and the SLPPers in the Joint Opposition given their own record on corruption and propriety. The TNA will most likely will stay with the Prime Minister as long as it could unless the Prime Minister gets stuck with some of the dirt from the bond scam.
While there is no question that Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe must assume hundred-percent political responsibility for the bond fiasco, no one knows except perhaps himself, if he did anything that could be construed as criminal offence. Ordinarily, in such a situation, even without any criminal involvement, a Minister or Prime Minister should tender his resignation. But Sri Lankan politics is in sub-ordinary times and not ordinary or extraordinary times. Singling out and getting rid of Ranil Wickremesinghe will not be anything more than a diversion from the 2015 mandate to root out corruption. Worse, it could make it easier for the old corrupt bandicoots to return home to prosper. There is no doubt that Ranil Wickremesinghe has himself contributed to making it easy for the old bandicoots to return home. For that he already stands condemned in history. The largely footnote question now is if he should be given a second chance to mitigate that historical stricture ever so slightly. That depends almost entirely on his party and its MPs.
The UNP MPs in parliament and other MPs who benefited from the anti-corruption wave in 2015 should keep in mind that their primary obligation to the voters is to accomplish as much as possible of the 2015 mandate in the remaining two years of the present government’s term in office. Is Ranil Wickremesinghe an irreparable hindrance to that task, or could he still be used even as a damaged instrument and serve out a full term as his last term? Is it worth the hassle of replacing him now, or is it more prudent to arrange for an orderly succession while letting him continue to finish his term on strict conditions? These are questions that only the UNP can answer, assuming that it has the resources to find answers that will be of benefit to the party and the government.
The relentless attention and attacks on Ranil Wickremesinghe have made him a tamed Prime Minister. He also shows almost a disingenuous capacity for disengagement. How else could one explain his flight to Singapore when his party and his part of the government are politically burning? In fairness, he is not the only flight risk in government. Almost all the leading SLFP Ministers were taking flight when their President was presiding over the charade of a cabinet half-shuffle. Some of them had threatened to leave cabinet if Ranil Wickremesinghe were to continue as PM. They have not left anything; they are only flying.
And the President, who seems to have got used to breathing fire at Ranil Wickremesinghe, cannot say boo to his SLFP truants. If the Prime Minister has been tamed, the President by extension has become truculent. He is behaving as if he has just been given a new eight-year term in office. Please don’t ask me, by whom? The Supreme Court has shown him the term limit. The people through the local government elections have shown him that he has no path open to him to win a second term. There is no way the UNP is going to sponsor him a second time after its first term experience with him. Even the avuncular TNA leader Sampanthan will have a hard time recommending a Srirsena candidacy to anyone a second time. If Mr. Sirisena is thinking that he could somehow get the Rajapaksas to grant him a second term ticket, someone must be dreaming egg-hoppers big time that no one else can figure out. Whether as sitting duck or lame duck, the President’s days are numbered.
But it is virtually impossible to get rid of the President before his term is over. It would be fantastic and absurd even to think about it, let alone try it. Equally, dissolving parliament in the current circumstances is not a solution but a cop out. It would be a clumsy, cumbersome and expensive one at that – to recall a manifesto phrase from an earlier era. Therefore, to come back to my recurrent theme, if the country and the government are institutionally stuck with a truculent President and a tame PM, why not find a way to force them to work together, rather than bothering to fire one of them and leave the other one hanging and twitching. The so called civil society agents who contributed to Sirisena and Wickremesinghe ending up where they are now, should step in to get the maximum out of them in furtherance of the 2015 mandate before their elected terms are over.
