“Politics is a dirty game – no one can correct a President”
There were those who “fertilised” the conflict between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe President Sirisena shed powers of his office – can’t see how he can vote for 20A Sirisena’s public berating of his PM culminated in souring of their relationship A Presi
Pressure was brought upon Maithripala Sirisena, then the President, to sack his Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, back in February 2018, just after the local government election which was a disaster for the administration and, in particular, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP).
“When we heard of it, another person, who was a legal authority of the state, and I went to the President and told him this should not happen,” said Austin Fernando, who was then Presidential Secretary. “We told him that this was against the law and that he will lose in court if his decision was challenged. He listened to us then. I learned that when the coterie who were clamouring to remove the PM came to him again and again pressuring him to act, he told them he had agreed with our reasoning.”
But the conflict between the two grew progressively worse after that. “There were others who fertilised this conflict beautifully,” Mr Fe r nando said. “In the end, the pressure on him became too great. I was about to leave for New Delhi to take up my appointment and was no longer an adviser to the President. But I watched what was going on.”
In his address to the nation on October 28 that year, after finally sacking the PM, the President said he had obtained legal advice beforehand. The expectation they had was that he would have got the advice from the Attorney General, as he was the official legal adviser to the President and the Government.
“But he did not say where the advice came from,” Mr Fernando reflected.
One of Sri Lanka’s longest-serving civil servants, Mr Fernando was Secretary to President Sirisena from July 2017 to July 2018. Before that, he served as Eastern Province Governor and Adviser to the President from 2015 to 2017. His association with Mr Sirisena goes back to 1975. He, therefore, has valuable insight into the former President and the workings of the Yahapalana Administration.
In 1975, Mr Fernando was Additional Government Agent for Polonnaruwa and Mr Sirisena was an SLFP cadre working with Mr Leelaratne Wijesinghe, the party MP for Polonnaruwa. He was just another citizen to Mr Fernando. Later, as Grama Sevaka, Mr Sirisena was his subordinate. When Mr Sirisena, as President, invited Mr Fernando to work for him, the roles were reversed.
Simmering tensions between President Sirisena and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe culminated in the ‘Constitutional Coup’ of October 26, 2018, when President Sirisena sacked his PM overnight one weekend surprising the entire nation, leave alone his Prime Minister and his Cabinet and installed the then Opposition Leader, Mahinda Rajapaksa, as his new Prime Minister. Mr Fernando pointed out how the President had alluded to the reasons during his subsequent address to the nation.
President Sirisena said there were so many differences between them (the President and Prime Minister) in terms of culture, personality, behaviour and in policy”. Mr. Fernando says, “I consider this explanation to be valid (grounds for the expulsion of the PM).”
“Mr Wickremesinghe comes from the so-called ‘Colombo 7’ elite circles, while President Sirisena is a former soldier’s son from the colonisation scheme and was a Grama Sevaka,” Mr Fernando said.
“Mr Wickremesinghe is an advocate of the Supreme Court whereas the other person is trained in agriculture and whose educational qualifications are not that great. Mr Wickremesinghe was very fluent in English. Mr Sirisena could understand English but he was not fluent in speaking it.”
“On the other hand, Mr Sirisena could speak for hours in Sinhala without even the slightest mistake, whereas Mr Wickremesinghe was not as fluent in Sinhala as he was in English,” he continued. “President Sirisena started politics with the China wing of the Communist Party. He later became an SLFP member. The SLFP was a socialist-oriented democratic political party, whereas Ranil Wickremesinghe hails from the same family as President J. R. Jayewardene, who was called ‘Yankie Dickie’ (for his pro-US stance). The party he represents is said to be more capitalist than any other party. All those things mattered in their relationships.”
Mr Sirisena was roundly criticised for taking up the SLFP leadership after contesting the Presidential election as the common candidate. Mr
Wickremesinghe once remarked that this was when he started distancing himself from the United National Party (UNP) and others that worked for the common candidate’s victory.
Mr Fernando, however, said Mr Sirisena could not be blamed for choosing to establish a political identity. “You can’t tell a politician to forget about their party and their identity,” he pointed out. “He is a politician. And a politician must have a political identity. History has shown this is important to a politician.”
But Mr. Fernando acknowledged that taking up the SLFP leadership compelled President Sirisena to make uncomfortable decisions. For instance, he had to give Cabinet positions to some SLFP members who worked against him at the Presidential election (and later crossed over to the Yahapalana government).
The President also failed in his pledge to abolish the Executive Presidency. He had made a solemn pledge to do so before the Presidential election. (He later went around the world saying he was the only President in the world who had voluntarily sacrificed his powers through the 19th Amendment to the Constitution). Both, Presidents Chandrika Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapaksa had made the same promise before, only to renege on it later, Mr Fernando said.
However, as a non-lawyer and layman, Mr Fernando felt executive power was not the monopoly of the President. Article 4 of the Constitution states it’s the "executive power of the people,” including the defence of Sri Lanka, that shall be exercised by the President.
“The President is not the repository of executive power, people’s own power,” he said. “The President is only a conduit. Of course, we have understood it in a different way because his duties are huge. From Pre s i d e n t J. R . Jayewardene onwards, Presidents also have behaved in a monopolistic manner. Presidents, other politicians, especially lawyers and the judiciary, and the media, may interpret it differently.”
According to Chapter VII of the Constitution, the President is the “Head of the Executive”. This means there are other arms of the Executive. Chapter VIII is also titled; “The Executive” and explains one such arm. In it, Article 42 speaks of the Cabinet of Ministers which is “collectively responsible and answerable to the Parliament.”
It means that the Executive power of the People, as in Article 4( b), is shared in practice, Mr. Fernando maintains. Chapter IX, too, is titled; “The Executive” and deals with; “The Public Service”.
“Therefore, I believe the President, the Cabinet of Ministers, and the Public Service all fall under the Executive to specific levels,” he said. "Moreover, the sovereignty of the People rests on a tripod, consisting of the President, the Legislature and the Judiciary” Of course, with the 20th Amendment the status will change.”
In fairness to Mr Sirisena, he did choose to give up certain powers that “anyone would normally like to grab and keep to their hearts”. These included those powers relating to Presidential immunity. The prerogative over appointment of Supreme or Appeal Court Judges was handed over to the Constitutional Council (CC). He could only recommend names. The CC could turn them down.
“I know of two occasions where names he proposed to be appointed to the Supreme Court were rejected,” Mr Fernando recalled. “I think the CC refused to ratify these names for good reasons. Another name he proposed to the Appeal Court was also turned down.”
“The 19th Amendment was a good example of his willingness to give up those Presidential powers,” Mr. Fernando said. “Having done so, however, I wonder how he could now go and vote for something like the 20th Amendment that seeks to restore excessive powers to the President. But that is a matter for him.”
Despite the bad blood between the former President and the former Prime Minister, Mr Fernando said the only time he saw Mr Sirisena being nasty to Mr Wickremesinghe in public was at a meeting held after the Cabinet was sworn at the end of the 2018 Constitutional crisis and Mr Wickremesinghe was made PM again.
“I was not the President’s Secretary at the time but High Commissioner to New Delhi,” he said. “I saw from a video circulated online how the President spoke at the meeting, which was even attended by the PM’s wife, Maithree Wickremesinghe. He was very rough with Mr Wickremesinghe then. I would say that was the culmination of the souring of their relationship.”
Mr Fernando’s personal feeling was that Mr Sirisena’s public dressing-down of his Premier “should not have happened like that”. Presidents are also human being and lose their tempers, he accepted. He didn’t blame him for it.
“But, in most cases, these outbursts have been in private, behind closed doors,” he remarked.
Mr Fernando says Yahapalanaya began promisingly. But the infamous Central Bank bond scam led to a major conflict between the President and PM. President Sirisena appointed a Commission headed by former Supreme Court Justice K.T. Chitrasiri to investigate, although the Central Bank was under Prime Minister Wickremesinghe. This would have frustrated Mr Wickremesinghe. “But” he said, “President Sirisena was right to appoint a Commission”.
Mr. Fernando says he sometimes felt sorry that President Sirisena got a bad name due to policy conflicts initiated by Prime Minister Wickremesinghe. Take the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between India and Sri Lanka in April, 2017. The relevant Cabinet paper was submitted by the PM. Mr Fernando, as President’s Secretary, helped draft President Sirisena’s observations on it. As the MoU involved so many ministries, it was essentially to obtain the concurrence of relevant Ministers before agreeing to it and to inform Cabinet of their views.
This did not mean the President was against the MoU, Mr Fernando insisted. He was for it. But he wanted the observations of the relevant Ministers to be recorded. Since Mr Wickremesinghe was due to leave for India soon, the Cabinet did approve the proposal. However, Ministers Arjuna Ranatunga and Chandima Weerakkody later submitted their observations on the proposed MoU.
Finally, the MoU that was signed had clauses that contradicted the observations made by the two Ministers, Mr Fernando said: “That was a big policy issue. It shouldn’t have happened that way.”
When he later analysed the MoU, Mr Fernando found that, while it was supposed to have covered subjects like technology, education and agriculture, what was signed contained a substantial section on Trincomalee oil tanks. The intentions, therefore, were questionable.
There was a similar issue with regard to the State Land (Special Provisions) Bill. Mr Fernando was Eastern Province Governor at the time. “The President was not agreeable to some of the proposals made in the bill and he wrote a letter to the PM. I still remember we drafted the letter for him. He made only one or two changes before sending it.
“And then he wanted us to go and speak to the PM. We met the PM and we told him what the President wanted. He said he will make the amendments he requested but I don’t think many of the amendments he proposed were made.”
There are allegations certain forces outside the Government influenced the President against the Premier. There were indeed people who helped the previous Government in an unofficial capacity, including lawyers, Mr Fernando said. But he could not say whether some of them turned the President against the PM.
He denied that Cabinet papers were submitted under the name of President Sirisena without his knowledge. But Mr Fernando admitted that President Sirisena wrote to the Chief Justice seeking a clarification on whether his term lasted for five or for six years, without his knowledge.
“With all due respect to the President (Sirisena), I must say it shouldn’t have happened,” he said. I take my hat off to Presidents Chandrika Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapaksa. When they sent letters to the Chief Justice, they made sure that copies came to the Constitutional Affairs Section of the Presidential Secretariat. All those letters are on file.”
“This particular letter was never sent to me or to my branch,” he elaborated. “I checked up on this after I learnt the letter had been sent, to see if it had arrived at the branch without my knowledge. But it was not there. It is not on file. I don’t think it is on file even today, unless someone got hold of a copy after I left and put it there.”
Meanwhile, Mr Fernando faced issues from “fake hangers-on” who carried tales against him to the President and sought his removal. None of them had the guts to confront his directly.
When he took up the position of Secretary, in July 2017, he was already 75 years of age. He did not want to take it up because he felt it should go to a younger person.
“The other reason I was reluctant was that I knew these conflicts were going on between the President and the PM,” he said. But Mr Fernando told Mr Sirisena he will take the job for a short period since he had to consider his own health and the pressures of the position. That turned into one year.
“When I also found that there were people around him making complaints against me, I thought, ‘Why should I be there?’ I didn’t want to hang onto a job which I never wanted,” he said.
“Politics is a dirty game,” he concluded. “These things happened from President Jayewardene’s time and will continue to happen in the future. I look at it dispassionately, as an old man, because you can’t correct them. No one can correct a President, whether you are his Secretary, Prime Minister or a Minister. They think they have the power and they behave like that.”