Peril on the power ethics road ahead to rebuilding Sri Lanka

There are many dangers on the road ahead as regards ‘rebuilding’ Sri Lanka. 

These are not the challenges facing state and citizenry as well as other stakeholders in the national interest. But rather the traps into which any of us could fall. 

And one of these is that in the oncoming rush of the so-called season, we might easily miss both the reason for a suitable way to celebrate it – if at all we do so – this year, and the rationale not to neglect a more appropriate commemoration than usual. 

No need or call to dwell on this first platitude as it is a personal, moral and ethical choice for everyone concerned.

On the other hand it is possible to entirely neglect the plight of so many of our fellow islanders in their time of the most grievous suffering.

My concern in this piece however is for some of those, particularly in places of power and privilege passing as responsibility, who may take an even unhealthier interest in supposedly building back better.

Might I humbly offer some thoughts on the matter in the spirit of recognising – as H. L. Mencken once insightfully observed – that quite often, the desire to right the world is the ambition to rule over it.

Wisdom trumps worship

In times of crisis, people tend to idolise their ‘good Samaritans’. 

Be they fellow citizens as first responders or the state as a slower second off the mark, the rescued place search and relief efforts on a pedestal in the full flood of the grateful rush and adrenaline high.

But while neighbours arrive with hot wet tears and dry rations, the cool handy ropes of official helpers could hang you higher than Haman if you’re not careful.

Because not every Governmental plan is good for the electorates the people’s representatives claim to serve.

A road map to secure the national recovery trajectory over the ensuing decades may well be full of traps and pitfalls.

It behoves the beneficiaries of top-down plans being trumpeted as the holy grail of rebuilding Sri Lanka to investigate governmental and non-governmental intentions with the hermeneutic of suspicion.

In the past we closed our minds to anything but open economies. Fell prey to political messiahs promising the sun, moon and stars Singapore-style but strangely evasive about social justice. And still worship political pundits posing as elder statesmen who subscribe to theories of institutional development rather than bow the knee to a theology of democratic inclusivity.

And now, lest we fall into the sin of apostasy as regards the common and collective good: beware plans, projects and programs that push through the agendas of the powerful and the privileged at the expense of the poor and the voiceless.

A regime is not the republic nor does a corporation represent civil society.

Demographics in developmentals

The first phase of extricating our climate-wracked island from a cyclone’s grip is nearing its end.

With rescue and relief being put into place by state as well as civilian actors, Sri Lanka’s post-Ditwah praxis must now make room for reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts.

These may well often embrace practices of realignment, relocation and resettlement of people and their possessions together with the peripherals of their livelihoods. 

It would be adding serious insult to severe injury if the process were to be executed without sufficient weightage being afforded beyond mere courtesy or lip service to the victims and the wounded.

To recoin a sentiment that demands inclusion as an axiom in the work of Rebuilding Sri Lanka, ‘consultation alone is not tantamount to consensus’. Because committees comprising of highfalutin principles are not communities composed of hurt people. 

The devastation caused by Cyclone Ditwah cannot be clothed as a sorry excuse to cover the nakedness of rapacious corporates or unscrupulous NGOs or INGOs that skulk like wolves among the fold of the weak.

Sri Lanka needs shepherds now not scurrilous exploiters of reeling economies.

If ‘depopulation’ is ever smuggled into the discourse of resettlement and rehabilitation, then civil society is called upon to shout out security, consent, compensation and livelihood continuity and rights from the rooftops.   

Community first over any committee

Shall we do our smattering of readers a discourtesy and repeat the emphasis of the truisms above? Or yield politely to the conventional wisdom to keep the sermons short, sweet and to the point of insipidity? By no means.

A newspaper is a nation talking to itself. And sadly, unlike in days of old when editorials were written by men of letters and read by everyone, today they are written by just about anybody and read by none.

Must we labour the point to the extent of boredom, vexation or condemnation? It would seem necessary in a milieu where maps drawn up under previous dispensations deifying such false gods as ‘development corridors’, ‘mandatory concentration’ and other imported ideologies are being rolled out again as a post-cyclone panacea.

So far from being an ideal plan, such much vaunted plans based on ‘corridor ideology’ are recipes for future disaster to say nothing of present body blows to a bleeding populace.

Under the guise of conservation – read corporate strategies to boost business profitability in the name of sustainability – there is a risk that depopulation policies will disenfranchise already affected communities. Especially in fragile central highlands and other ecologically vulnerable areas.

While uprooting endangered islanders from their present hazardous habitats may be the need of the hour, relocation without political representation or resettlement sans societal agreement cannot be allowed to become the order of the day.

A Government-led process – no matter how well-intentioned (while at the same time, perhaps deceptive and disingenuous) – cannot guarantee social justice if the forcibly removed populations bear the brunt of a plan they had no part in shaping.    

(The author is Editor-at-large of LMD)