President’s self-reflection on 75th Independence Day and the realities

President Ranil Wickremesinghe delivered an extraordinary statement of self-reflection for a country that celebrated 75 years of independence from colonial rule. “75 years ago, the esteemed ‘London Times’ newspaper carried an editorial stating that ‘it is our desire to see Sri Lanka become a Switzerland in the East, very soon’,” he noted. “However, what has happened to us today? Today, we are facing an unprecedented economic crisis, hitherto never experienced. Why have we to face such a situation? Who is responsible for such? Let’s be truthful,” says the President. 

This is indeed a welcome introspection into what has become of a country that had the potential to be at the very zenith of development, stability, and prosperity. According to President Wickremesinghe, “all of us are responsible for this situation. None of us can point fingers and blame each other. We made mistakes from the beginning. Efforts were made to rectify those mistakes, though it was not possible to correct them completely.”

This attempt to socialise and distribute blame by politicians who are ever ready to personalise credit is indeed where the analysis of the President falters. 

For a man who had been in executive office for the last 50 years, having inherited the leadership of the oldest and grandest political party that ushered in independence and who had within his power not once but on numerous opportunities as prime minister and president ability to steer the destiny of the country, it is rather disingenuous for the President to not accept his own significant role in the current predicament of the country.

He laments in his statement that “after independence we divided in terms of race, religion, and region. We were divided to a point of developing suspicion and animosity against each other. Various groups exploited this division to gain power and created further rifts among the people. Instead of rejecting such groups, we accorded power to these very same groups. In politics, lies were spread instead of the truth.”

Such absolute truths are lost in the glaring irony of his and his own party’s culpability in biting race, religion and other numerous divisions for decades to further their personal political agendas and also the numerous machinations used to simply gain and retain power at the cost of the greater common good.  A case in point is when Wickremesinghe betrayed the common consensus reached among opposition groups not to accept positions from the floundering Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration in mid-2022. It was a rare moment in history where there seemed to emerge a consensus for total system change. Had that moment been seized there could have been a significant political change that not only addressed the short-term economic needs but the long desired and much needed national question on power sharing with all communities in the country. That opportunity was squandered by the lust for power of one man who had no mandate to hold high office.

Today President Wickremesinghe presides over a regime which is filled with all sorts of miscreants that the people had rejected. He has become the very epitome of the failed system that had delivered nothing but ruin to the country. Rather than preaching about shared responsibility for the current state of affairs it would be far more genuine if President Wickremesinghe could reflect on his own role in bringing about this situation. He would at least at this late hour gain some respect if he were to do so.