Provincial White Elephants And “Saddantha” White Elephants In Colombo
By Austin Fernando -July 3, 2013 |
Austin Fernando
Recently our former colleague President’s Secretary Lalith Weeratunga has twittered that (a) administratively the 13th Amendment is a white elephant; (b) it must be viewed from the citizens’ angle (c) devolution should be to the lowest possible level; and, (d) at sub-national level Provincial Councils (PCs) have not served the purpose. He is not alone in saying so.
A President’s Secretary may declare so to initiate a dialogue; or to ‘drop’ the PCs, and motivate people to meet midway to devolve power to the districts which are bureaucratically centre-aligned or to the Local Authority level. Whatever the preference is, it is clear the intention is to reduce the size of the “devolved unit”. What the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) demands is to increase the size of this unit by merging two provinces. It proves that there is a magic in the size!
Secretary Weeratunga is an experienced public officer. Therefore, I do not ignore his analysis as isolated personal impression, because of his intimate proximity to political powers. Unfortunately, he cannot as a bureaucrat satisfy the genuine and needy political requirements due to government’s uncertainty on the 13thAmendment.
‘White-Elephantness’ of PCs
