In search of a leader with vision and moral courage

Robert Knox in his 1681 book An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon stated “it is a usual saying among them, that if they want a king, they may take any man of either of these two counties from the plough, and wash the dirt off him, and he by reason of his quality is fit to be a king.”

When Pallewatte Gamaralalage Maithripala Yapa Sirisena, the man who makes a virtue of the fact that his father was a colonist farmer from Polonnaruwa, took his oaths as the sixth elected president of our nation, many of us expected much from this man who we believed was a modest, unassuming and honourable human being. We expected he would prove the truth of Knox’s adage because he had the natural qualities to be a righteous leader of our nation.

How disillusioned we have been!

There is just over a month left before he has to leave office and hand over to a successor -- and most of us today are asking ourselves how this man who proved himself so adept at winning an election showed us how inept he was at governance. The high office to which we elected him sadly proved too much for such a man. We now realise that we expected too much from a man who was intellectually and morally incapable of delivering what he promised.

Too great an expectation often leads to great disillusionment. History will record that Maithripala Sirisena was a single term president – who ousted his predecessor, but subsequently sought to form an alliance with the very man he had ousted and berated from his electioneering platforms.

We remember how shortly after he was elected he promised that during his term in office he would abolish the office of Executive President and then retire to his home town of Polonnaruwa. In the past few months we have seen him trying every trick in the book, trying to strike a deal with first one presidential hopeful and then another to save his skin and continue to survive in the murky political world he has been occupying for the past thirty years.

We look around us and see how cronyism and corruption have flourished under his watch. In our country, we all know that going into politics is the quickest pathway to getting one’s hands on the resources of the state. For many aspiring politicians who have neither the riches nor the status which they think they should have, the business of politics is irresistible -- as is the desire to hang on to office as long as one can. While public servants have to retire when they reach the age of sixty, many politicians keep going on past their use by dates, well into their seventies and even into their eighties!

Over the last few years, there has developed a distinct disconnection between the political class and the people they govern. In Maithripala Sirisena, of course, we had a man who was not only out of touch with the people but was also woefully out of touch with parliamentary procedure, the rules of good governance and the basic skills required to run the country.

It is refreshing to see among the candidates who have put in their nominations for the November 16th election some new faces – not just the young son of one former president and the young brother of another ex-president but also decorated military officers l i ke General Mahesh Senanayake and multilingual enterpreneurs like Dr Rohan Palllewatte. These two are educated and competent men who have proved themselves capable and effective in their previous roles.

I am sure it will take a miracle -- or a massive wave of public enthusiasm as happened for Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine this year or for Justin Trudeau in Canada in 2015 or for Corazon Aquino in the Phillipines in 1986 -- to prevent Sri Lanka’s usual political parties from having their candidate elected next month.

I do hope, however, that some of the technocrats who have chosen to contest the presidential election will, if they do not achieve the miracle of getting elected president, see it fit to contest the next parliamentary election. We need people like General Senanayake and Dr Pallewatte as legislators in parliament rather than the political henchmen, the thuggish hangers-on and the “back-door” national list entrants who make up a large number of the members of our current legislature.

We can only hope that whoever is elected on November 16th, he will be a leader with vision and moral courage – and someone who will be worthy of our respect.