Escalate citizen pressure to change attitude of politicians and the public

In response to my recent letter to the Editor titled ‘Cure this vehicle mania of politicians’ that appeared in the press, an engineer friend of mine stated as follows: “They do what they want. Citizens are helpless and suffering. They will provide answers at the next election.” 

Similar responses were given by many of my friends and colleagues while some didn’t even bother to reciprocate. Therefore, I thought of sharing my response to them with the public through your esteemed newspaper.

Changing a party in power every five years is like changing the pillow to get rid of a headache!

Instead, we have to continue escalating citizen pressure to change this corrupt and unproductive electoral system by bringing genuine and decent professionals who have the country at heart into Parliament by replacing the disgusting Preferential Voting System (which compels one to shoulder a huge financial burden to muster personal votes by hook or by crook!), with a merit-based, robust party nomination list. With such change, many professionals who have the country at heart will surely come forward to render a professional service to the country.

It is evident that, although slow, changes are taking place gradually. The initial effort of Paffrel through the March 12th Declaration brought in partial results. The 19th Amendment engineered by the late Ven. Sobhitha Thero too brought results though limited, after much haggling in Parliament. As we know, the Opposition didn’t allow the passage of the much-maligned ‘Crossover’ clause.

Therefore, I repeat that civilian pressure should continue to be applied to bring about this paradigm shift in the attitude of both politicians and voters in order to change the existing unproductive and inefficient political system.

For instance, why should we continue the high-cost politicisation of the local government machinery with political intermediaries who merely add to waste and corruption without much cost-benefit? I saw in the press that under the new mixed voting system the number of local politicians, which already stands at 4,486, will increase by another 2,000, adding insult to injury. Thus, the depoliticisation of the local government elections is the answer though not the ideal one. 

Why? Our present experience shows that many local bodies are running quite efficiently without them! The remedy therefore lies in making the not-so-efficient 1.5-million-strong public service more productive by developing their soft and hard skills through training. 

The RTI Act, which is now in force, should no doubt compel the public service to become more efficient. In fact, it will to a great extent replace the present intermediary role played by local level politicians. 

If there is a bona-fide political will, the time is ripe to conduct local government elections to elect apolitical, socially-oriented, honest and respectable individuals preferred by the people themselves to act as independent facilitators solving people’s issues at the local level. Then this layer of political intermediaries can be phased out, leading to a lean, cost-beneficial political administration system.

On the other hand, in this era of vast advancements in communication technology, decentralisation itself can become redundant in a small country like ours. 

However, due to the internationalisation of our ethnic issue, we have to carry the cargo of the provincial council system! Given this compulsory element, let us make these white elephants more productive and useful to the country through a genuine process of restructuring, reengineering and rationalising.

In my view only a Government committed to ‘Yahapalanaya’ can take up this challenge and the mass media can play the crucial role of bringing about the aforesaid paradigm shift or attitudinal change.

Bernard Fernando

Moratuwa