Ignoring all the domestic counsel and going for foreign advisors
TSUNDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2017
he inability of successive Governments to implement a plethora of reports on financial matters has now resulted in the advent of a permanent foreign anti-corruption adviser to the Cabinet of Ministers, on offer by a foreign Government that has put Sri Lanka in the basket of most corrupt countries in the world.
Despite nearly 70 years of Independence, Government after Government, though quick to appoint Commissions of Inquiry and have mechanisms in place, continued to show scant respect for homegrown advice, though opting for anything a foreign ‘expert’ has to say. While foreign expertise in areas where there is a genuine deficiency must be accepted, counsel provided domestically on matters of Government finance has only been ignored for decades due to the lack of political will.
We have often quoted a statement made in Parliament by former President J.R. Jayewardene when he was Leader of the Opposition in relation to the annual reports of state corporations. These were regularly tabled in the House long after the year in review. He said discussing these reports was “a waste of time, waste of money and a waste of tongue”. When he became President he invited the private sector audit firms to assist the Auditor General and speed up these reports, but even so, the net result was the same. Nobody in Parliament bothered to analyse them.
It is one thing to say that Parliament is the final repository of public finance, but another when the numerous and voluminous reports of its oversight committees such as COPE and Public Accounts Committee end up with the ultimate beneficiary – the “bottle-man”, the man buying wastepaper.
The Auditor General has quite rightly pointed to the “degrading” statement by the US State Department following an international conference on Asset Recovery in Washington DC, saying it was giving the Sri Lanka Government a resident legal adviser.
In the flush of the 2015 victory of the incumbent Government, there was a song and dance that the World Bank – and the US had sent teams to assist to help flush out the ill-gotten monies siphoned out by the high and mighty of the previous Government. They were to engage in ‘Asset Recovery’ i.e. to chase behind that cash and bring it home to the state’s General Treasury. Some information was provided by the US on corrupt activities on its own soil by Sri Lankan diplomats, politicians and officials a long time back – but nothing else has come to pass in realistic terms.
Part of the inaction to prosecute these wrongdoers is because this Government has played politics with that information. The delay in the enactment of the National Audit Bill (which was promised within 100 days of the new Government taking office in January 2015) is a textbook example of the Government’s reluctance and lack of political will to take home grown advice. But a Tax Bill drafted by the IMF on the Ghanaian model is already law. The UN’s International AntiCorruption Day was marked worldwide on December 9 but here in Sri Lanka, it is just another date to make token reference to in the case of the country’s anti-corruption bodies.