Saturday Aug 30, 2025
Saturday Aug 30, 2025
Saturday, 30 August 2025 00:05 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
The NNP Government has an unprecedented opportunity to strategically dismantle moribund conditions that stand against midwifing a liberating civic ethos
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”
— Antonio Gramsci
The National People’s Power (NPP) has initiated a promising pathway to rehabilitate Sri Lanka’s dysfunctional public service, a malignant system posing an existential threat to its reform agenda. Yet the regime treads a tightrope: a nuclear response risks catastrophic chaos and instability. There is no risk-free, resistance-free path to transformation. At the same time, excessive caution in draining the swamp will undermine public confidence, potentially validating detractors’ claims about the Government’s ineptitude, and invite the resurgence of the ousted cabal. The window for systemic change, though wide open, narrows with each missed opportunity.
The Government inherited a morass of graft and found itself, to maintain institutional memory and avoid unmanageable disruption, forced to begin reforms alongside compromised bureaucrats with connections to terrified ex-ministers desperately seeking to escape fines, asset forfeitures, and prison sentences. Mafia-style businesses, ruthlessly determined to preserve their parasitic grip on the system, exploit politicians and public servants—forming a syndicate for illegal concessions, approvals, access to public resources, and unlawful tax and customs duty reliefs, sustaining webs of corruption spanning public and private spheres. Sanctimonious international actors demanding public sector reforms—self-appointed guardians of good governance who are notorious for applying double standards to the global north and south—may find themselves unwitting accomplices in perpetuating the very syndicates they claim to oppose.
This toxic ecosystem resists reform because parasites have built careers on graft and desperately need the system to survive, further fuelled by citizens who decry corruption yet shamelessly exploit it to expedite tasks. This decades-old culture of “getting things done” will not change overnight or without public buy-in. Many public servants have courageously set an unprecedented example to dismantle the toxic culture of the public services—a change unthinkable among the current opposition government. But increasing the space of change must confront the forces that are interpreting Governments’ efforts to reform as revenge, slowing the speed of reform as due process, as its weakness, and punishment as unpatriotic.
Anatomy of a malignant syndicate
No amount of power can easily purge the system. Previous Governments, particularly since 1977, festered into a putrid cesspool—politicising and commodifying the public service, where bureaucrats grovelled before unscrupulous politicians, businesses, intellectuals, professional and religious authorities, selling their integrity and strangling the nation they are sworn to serve. It is inevitable that the complex web of transactions in this malignant syndicate, normalised for decades, is now being ruptured. The reaction? Complete fear and resentment, as they frantically seek every possible way to delay and dismantle reform, corrupted public servants remain their most potent weapon in this desperate war against change.
Public servants are metamorphosed from being the guardians of the public interests into mercenaries of power, their oath of service twisted into chains of political servitude. They lost their autonomy to use their intellect, imagination, and judgment according to rules, instead serving the dictates of politicians who crafted policies according to political rationality rather than public usefulness.
The pathology runs deep. Bureaucrats rubber-stamp imports of substandard, lethal medicines—knowing children will swallow poison and patients will die on hospital floors—for blood money. They sign damned contracts with vulture suppliers offering MRI and CT scans at predatory prices, stripping away maintenance clauses until the machines—overused, neglected, left to rot—become worthless scrap in underfunded hospitals. Doctors and prison officials metamorphosed prisons into personal businesses, housing powerful inmates in comfort while producing bogus reports to tamper with court cases.
The infection spreads everywhere. For businesses, obtaining pristine documents became effortless—accreditations flow, inspections pass, certifications of environmental sustainability and corporate responsibility are stamped by greedy hands, all easily accomplished when greased with bribes. Driver’s licenses were delivered to homes without following any procedures.
Public safety becomes a cruel joke. They amplify their masters’ lies, screeching hysterics about fabricated national security threats, or worse, resurrecting the barbaric myth of Muslim doctors stealthily sterilising Sinhalese women, feeding racist nationalism with expert sanction. Thus, they became complicit in how racist nationalism coexisted with an economy that rapidly collapsed into bankruptcy.
Public servants’ official overseas trips are extended to kith and kin at public expense. The embassies pampered them, including entertainment and shopping. Corrupt foreign deals have bound the country in knots that the new government cannot easily untangle. Political appointees to top foreign missions—unqualified, incompetent, and prized as trophies by narcissistic elites- prioritise self-aggrandisement over diplomacy, bringing shame to the nation while sidelining seasoned career diplomats who are trained to safeguard the country’s global standing. This creates a shortage of competent diplomats.
Bureaucracy, driven by terror or bribes, facilitates converting public property into personal assets and businesses of their cronies, then helps them dodge taxes entirely. This is the blood-soaked machinery of systematic plunder: people elect politicians who promise to meet their needs, then these representatives hand contracts for public projects to their loyalist patronage networks. Mafia-like businesses compete for contracts based purely on influence and bribes rather than merit, while ‘experts’ provide official approval for these fraudulent transactions. The loot is shared from top to bottom—a meticulously organised criminal distribution system—with profits deposited in offshore banks or accounts under false names.
Corrupt political-business alliances illegally exploit government subsidies, forcing public servants to provide official sanction for these schemes. Such a vicious cycle is so deeply entrenched that it has become the state’s operating system: a self-perpetuating cancer that devours public resources, murders public trust, and transforms governance into organised crime. Each transaction feeds the beast, strengthening the chains that strangle the nation’s soul.
Export Development officials at the Divisional level systematically bleed small spice producers, steering them toward exploitative traders for personal kickbacks while national officials remain detached from realities on the ground. These parasitic bureaucrats jet off to international fairs with spice samples and hollow PowerPoint presentations, masquerading as industry representatives while actively sabotaging the value Sri Lanka could extract from its world-class spices. Their corruption doesn’t just waste public resources—it murders the livelihoods of farmers and destroys the nation’s agricultural reputation on the global stage.
Academics in public institutions sell their expertise as secret consultants for educational reforms, hiding their reports even from colleagues while pocketing blood money that compromises their professional integrity. Meanwhile, department chairs weaponise hiring processes, deliberately blocking talented candidates to reserve positions for their cronies returning from overseas or to appease their political puppet masters. These academic parasites don’t just betray scholarly ethics—they systematically destroy meritocracy, ensuring universities remain breeding grounds for mediocrity and political servitude rather than centres of genuine learning and research excellence.
The biomedical industrial complex bribes doctors to prescribe drugs and exploits their positions in hospitals to funnel patients into lucrative private practices. These kickbacks come as cash, foreign trips, and luxury items. They fabricate false medical reports of surgeries to keep loyalists away from prison. This manipulation of records extends to covering up treatment failures and creating fabricated evidence of successful procedures to protect corrupt networks from legal scrutiny.
Public servants with compromised integrity venture beyond their expertise in servitude to their political masters, regardless of the consequences to the country. Politicians heed their advice over real subject experts. For example, a prominent public services medical doctor advised a former president on an overnight organic farming revolution. The president heeded his false advice, which exposed the doctor’s stupidity, destroyed farmers’ livelihoods, and plunged the country into a severe food crisis. This toxic combination of professional hubris and political servility is endemic across many public institutions.
Paralleling this, agriculture experts in public institutions prostitute themselves as ‘consultants’ to the purely profit-minded agricultural industrial complex, hijacking the global demand for organic food while compromising national food security and farmer livelihoods. These experts are joined by the “visible hands” of economists in the public sector who, imprisoned in failed and misleading economic doctrines, solely blame political failures for the shortcomings of their policy prescriptions. They wield enormous intellectual and political power over almost all public sector functions according to the dictates of neoliberal institutions, undermining the sovereignty of public policymaking. Their consultant reports are not even available to their institutions or colleagues, but to the institutions they serve, and who impose power over the sovereignty of public institutions.
The disproportionate emphasis on job-focused education in the education system and the relegation of history and ethics to mere electives will cripple the public servant’s ability to understand how the present came into being, and to recognise the oppressive power and discriminatory agendas embodied in policies and directives that masquerade as “scientific,” “objective,” and “politics-free” knowledge imposed on them.
Efficient civic service depends fundamentally on accurate data and transparent information—yet government data producers falsify official reports and mislead all governance stakeholders. They launder fraud into policy, and anoint theft with the seal of the state, sabotaging efficient policy decisions. Unscrupulous social media amplifies this dissemination of false data, creating echo chambers that normalise corruption and silence dissent. Those who resist are silenced, punished, or broken—replaced by obedient puppets who enforce the will of their political overlords. This toxic anatomy is not incompetence; this is not governance; it is criminal syndication—a culture of fear, complicity, and calculated betrayal strangling the last remnants of honesty in public service.
It is collusion—a cold, deliberate strangulation of the public good. The public itself sustains this syndicate when they celebrate their connections, influence, bribes, and transactional deals to bypass established procedures as evidence of their power and ingenuity—many of these being the very same citizens who voted for the government to dismantle the syndicate. Sole Religious authorities invoke blessings and protection on syndicate leaders in return for “righteous donations,” challenging them sacrilegious and unpatriotic. System change is a metaphysical challenge, indeed.
The Opposition’s cowardice and deliberate sabotage
Opposition politicians, terrified of accountability, feed on the decay of public institutions as they know bureaucratic rot works in their favour—that resistance to reform will fuel public frustration, turning sentiment against the Government. Yet these same voices refuse to acknowledge their role in creating and maintaining this monstrosity: a civil service poisoned by politicisation, racial division, and corruption. The bureaucracy’s resistance is not an accident; it is a silent coup motivated by self-preservation, and unless broken, it will strangle any chance of change.
Some are paralysed by fear, knowing their former political masters could ruin them. Officials cling to their lethargy, addicted to the perks of a broken system. A single phone call could blackmail them. Others, hardline loyalists, actively sabotage policy, wielding inertia like a weapon to protect their allies. They fight reform not from principle, but from terror—knowing that transparency will drag their decades of plunder into the light and deliver the justice they have escaped for so long.
Yet the Government faces a brutal dilemma. These entrenched bureaucrats hold the keys to institutional memory—their expertise, however tainted, keeps the machinery lurching forward. Purge them recklessly, and the system collapses; leave them in place, and reform suffocates. The only way out is surgical: remove the rot without dismantling the structure, replacing collaborators with competence—swiftly, decisively, and without mercy. Unlike its predecessors, the NPP cannot resort to purging dissenters without due process—yet enforcing public compliance is non-negotiable if the Government hopes to dismantle entrenched rot and rebuild institutions with integrity. Quick purges as well as unwillingness to take risks could become opposition traps to turn public servants against the Government, caving into the syndicate’s ruthless attempt to derail reform and dodge accountability through their calculated strategy of vindication by obstruction. In this malicious game, they profit from paralysis and will crush any threat to their remaining parasitic stranglehold on power.
Seniority and credentialism cults cripple competence
The entrenched hierarchical structure of Sri Lanka’s public sector is a crippling obstacle to reform, fuelled by narcissistic egos among senior officials who perpetuate a seniority cult that prioritises tenure over competence. Power and legitimacy within these institutions are tied to rigid pecking orders, where leadership is less about competence and more about asserting dominance. Senior officers view their positions as personal entitlements, dismissing collaboration and treating juniors as threats rather than partners. This toxic culture, reinforced by corruption networks, creates a system where authority is brutally enforced rather than earned, and inclusive approaches are savagely scorned as challenges to the established seniority cult.
The hierarchy is reinforced by an economic system that ties salaries, perks, and influence to rank rather than performance, creating vicious self-interested resistance to change. Senior officers, conditioned by decades of authoritarian decision-making, equate flexibility with loss of control; thus, they ruthlessly suppress junior staff and dismiss merit-based contributions as challenges to their fragile authority.
Credentialism weaponises this dysfunction, transforming formal qualifications into instruments of control rather than markers of competence. When credentials become sources of gatekeeping power, they enable narcissistic leaders to justify their dominance while systematically strangling capable individuals who lack the “right” papers. Malignant credentialism, combined with the seniority cult, creates a double barrier to efficient public service where time served, and degrees held, matter more than actual performance or innovative thinking.
With corruption pipelines now severed, many officials view reform as an existential threat, leading to desperate obstructionism. The effects are catastrophic: talented junior staff are marginalised, credential-obsessed gatekeepers reject innovative solutions, and the public suffers from poor services delivered by those who climbed hierarchies through tenure and papers rather than proven capability. Honest officers face suspicion as potential whistleblowers threatening the collective prosperity of corrupt colleagues. They never build new leadership, often leaving a vacuum when they retire.
Political parasites and patronage dynasties
Political appointees, by serving partisan interests over the public good, result in policy incoherence and demoralisation among competent career officers. This disrupts institutional memory and succession planning, creating a vacuum where short-term political gains override long-term governance. These appointees often lack the technical knowledge to lead complex institutions, yet their political connections make them untouchable, creating parallel power structures that undermine meritocratic governance. Many bureaucrats view accountability measures, such as performance tracking, as threats to their comfort, leading to passive-aggressive sabotage, deliberate delays, and information hoarding. At the same time, reform-minded officers face fierce resistance from colleagues accustomed to a lethargic work culture.
Many officials are holdovers from previous regimes—beneficiaries of a patronage system that rewarded loyalty over competence. These networks extended beyond mere employment: relatives won lucrative board positions in state enterprises, children gained access to higher education and jobs through influence over merit, and associates were awarded government contracts worth millions without competitive bidding. The culture became so entrenched that entire ministries functioned as family businesses, with decision-making concentrated among connected clans who treated public resources as personal wealth.
Now stripped of these perks, their resistance manifests in deliberate delays, “procedural obstacles,” and manufactured incompetence—serving to derail reform while validating opposition critiques. These corrupt officials have a vested interest in maintaining opacity. Those who once thrived on political patronage now weaponise bureaucratic inertia to sabotage reforms that could restore public trust in governance.
Expert gatekeepers in silos
For decades, subject-matter experts have been imprisoned within narrow bureaucratic silos, their professional judgment subordinated to political expediency and territorial gatekeeping. Fear and bias stifle dissent, while fragmented departmental structures undermine interdisciplinary coordination—creating dysfunctional mazes where no one grasps the bigger picture. These credentialed gatekeepers display arrogant contempt for knowledge from practitioners, community leaders, and field workers, falsely assuming their expertise exists in a political vacuum.
Democratic and inclusive consensus-based decision-making faces resistance when seen as obstacles to career advancement. The revolving door between government agencies and private industry corrupts this system. Meanwhile, media outlets selectively platform compliant specialists driven by editorial politics, systematically silencing challenging voices to create echo chambers where credentialed authority becomes unquestionable dogma. This accountability vacuum ensures failed policies persist unchallenged, while innovative solutions from outside the establishment are dismissed without consideration. The toxic nexus transforms public service into self-serving fiefdoms that suppress talent, crush innovation, and perpetuate systemic failures at public expense.
Absenteeism and the theatre of non-work
The consequences are a work culture devoid of accountability. Offices operate on a farcical rhythm—late arrivals, extended tea breaks, card games masquerading as workdays, and early departures from the office—all tacitly sanctioned by supervisors who themselves partake in the dysfunction. Office spaces resemble social clubs more than professional workplaces, with officers conducting personal business, entertaining visitors for hours, and treating public resources as personal conveniences. Files gather dust while officers engage in lengthy political discussions, personal phone calls, and elaborate lunches stretching into the afternoon.
Sexual favours and illicit exchanges further entrench the rot, making disciplinary action unthinkable. Ghost employees—graduates secured through patronage—treat government jobs as sinecures, vanishing into private ventures (tuition classes and driving cars) while shielded by political ties. Their impunity demoralises ethical officers, who risk reprisals for enforcing rules—those attempting accountability face coordinated resistance. Maintaining the status quo becomes safer than pursuing excellence; mediocrity is rewarded while competence is punished, and professionalism is seen as rebellion.
Fifth columnists: When yesterday’s loyalists become today’s saboteurs
The bureaucracy remains packed with officials appointed by past regimes; their careers built on patronage. Now deprived of these spoils, their resistance manifests in deliberate delays and manufactured obstructions, sabotaging reforms to validate opposition critiques. Officers view systemic change as an existential threat—not only to their corrupt practices but to their legacy, shaped by decades of patronage culture. Change represents the terrifying prospect of being evaluated on merit rather than connections, potentially exposing their professional inadequacies and rendering their political networks worthless.
They deploy a sophisticated arsenal of obstructions: misplacing critical documents at crucial deadlines, giving incomplete and distorted briefings to new leadership, obstructing interdepartmental coordination, and spreading disinformation about policy impacts to create confusion and doubt. Such officials live in constant anxiety about exposure, banding together with political patrons, mafia businesses, social media, and even drug lords, their only hope of escaping accountability. Those officials willing to adapt to the new culture of governance that the Government purports to cultivate are overwhelmed and burnt out with workloads.
Sovereignty subdued by the unholy trinity
The NPP inherited a situation where the economy was bound by the dictates of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO—the unholy Trinity, and subservient to foreign powers. Local bureaucrats became willing agents of these interests, prioritising foreign approval over national needs. Past Governments did not just mismanage the economy—they systematically sold off sovereignty, binding public institutions through structural reforms, loan conditions, and “technical assistance” favouring creditors. Years of subservience to these lenders gutted Sri Lanka’s policy sovereignty, leaving a bureaucratic shell where foreign consultants hold more sway than elected leaders. Foreign actors are deeply entrenched in institutions, with policies vetted by external agents, establishing shadow governance unaccountable to citizens.
The unholy Trinity enforces doctrines of free markets and liberal democracy on poor countries, while remaining silent as its hegemonic patrons violate these principles with impunity—a hypocrisy that underscores how such ideals have never been lived reality for the global majority. The state must critically evaluate these “reform” demands—often predatory schemes disguised as progress, which concentrate power among a wealthy few, who reap rewards while blocking real progress of reforms, which would be possible only with enlightened public servants willing to take calculated risks for change.
The fear of freedom in reform
The inherited culture has created a profound fear of change among bureaucratic ranks. Fear becomes a powerful catalyst for resistance, as uncertainty about new systems threatens the predictable comfort of familiar dysfunction. Paulo Freire’s observation in Pedagogy of the Oppressed resonates here: “The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.” This paradox defines Sri Lanka’s bureaucratic resistance to change. Legacy officers clamoured for the downfall of the old regime. Yet, recoil from the autonomy reform demands—because true freedom risks the familiar hierarchies that guaranteed their safety. Like Freire’s oppressed, they (as well as the public) conflate liberation with chaos and certainty, clinging to the devil they know. This fear-driven resistance serves the syndicate’s agenda perfectly—sabotaging meaningful change while masquerading as calculated caution.
Reform is not just policy change—it’s a psychological revolution. Every call for accountability demands exemplary leadership and resolve to rebuild. When top politicians lead by example—demonstrating public service over self-enrichment, the country takes a crucial step forward. Paralysing fear—the silent engine of stagnation, must be broken, not indulged. Until leadership by example permeates the system, even visionary reforms will be sabotaged by those clinging to the gilded cages of the past over the uncertain promise of freedom. Breaking free from bureaucracy’s psychological paralysis is half the battle—sustaining systemic change demands transforming public consciousness and radically redefining what citizens expect from power.
The interregnum’s stark choice
Antonio Gramsci’s observation that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”—captures Sri Lanka’s paralysed moment with chilling precision. The bureaucratic bottlenecks stalling change are not mere inertia but the agonised death throes of a collapsing system. Legacy officers cling to eroded authority; political appointees sabotage reforms to revive patronage networks; and the public, conditioned to equate progress with consumption, fears and resists transformation.
The interregnum will not last forever. Pressure from neoliberal institutions and geopolitical actors against public sector reforms will continue. Yet the NNP Government has an unprecedented opportunity to strategically dismantle moribund conditions that stand against midwifing a liberating civic ethos. The choice is stark: manage the transition now with courage, or face upheaval as the old bureaucratic-political-mafia syndicate implodes.
