A President’s embarrassments: Budget brawls, corruption stinks, northern stalemate
Rajan Philips-December 21, 2013, 5:21 pm
The last few weeks have been particularly remarkable for a harvest of embarrassments for the President. It began with a string of budget upsets in quite a few Pradeshiya Sabhas throughout the South. In the North, the TNA provincial government presented its first budget to Council with due decorum, but not much by away of revenues and allocations. Devolution is a shell game, only the NPC is exposing it. Worse, the President was severely let down by his Leader of the Opposition in the NPC. K. Kamalendran, who led the UPFA list in the NPC elections, and is now Leader of the Opposition, who could not attend the budget speech because he is in police custody over murder charges. So the new Northern Provincial Council has quite a cross-floor contrast: a former Supreme Court Judge as (TNA) Chief Minister and an accused murderer as Leader of the (Sri Lankan government) Opposition! Regardless, the unelected Governor of the Province is administratively handcuffing the elected Provincial government. He is under a public hallucination that he is the sole custodian of the Constitution in Jaffna, if not the whole country. So much for the peripheries!