Ranil awaits SLPP whirlwind with trump card up his sleeve
SUNDAY PUNCH - Rambukwella sacking vindicates SJB no-confidence motion
First the good news. The President had certainly taken his time to sack Keheliya Rambukwella as Minister of Health but when the sacking finally arrived on Monday morn, it was welcomed with great relief and made the nation rise in rapturous applause.
President Gotabaya had appointed him as Minister of Health in May last year. His qualifications to hold this post – as Minister responsible for the health of the nation – left much to be desired. He had acquired his basic training to become a chef at Hotel School and may have known the fine art of serving the best cuisine. Such credentials would have been an asset in the hospitality field but had no place in the esoteric air of the rarefied Health Ministry.
While others medically qualified such as Dr. Sudharshani Fernandopulle and Dr. Ramesh Pathirana - one sent to look after prison inmates, the other to look after plantations – languished in the SLPP ranks, Gotabaya’s inclination to fill his cabinet’s round holes with square pegs hastened not his end alone but brought the government medical sector crashing down as well.
The wrong appointment was to prove fatal. Such a gross lack of qualifications in any field of the medical sector, even a passing acquaintance as a temporary pharmacist’s assistant, would have made any other man decline the offer as being above his league. But no. Rambukwella was not the kind of man to run away from challenges. His arrogance replaced his lack of competence, disguised inferiority, falsely bolstered his confidence and made him believe that he was the chosen one who would enhance the nation’s health.
Instead, after one of the briefest stints of one year, five months and a week, Rambukwella has only succeeded in bringing the whole medical sector to its lowest ebb and leaves it this week in a disastrous state. His arrogance which had fed his belief he was the man for the demanding task had only made him make – as the chef he is – a pig’s breakfast out of the nation’s health.
His brief tenure of ministerial office has turned the ministry into a hornets’ nest full of corruption, indiscipline, negligence, irregularities and waste. He had defended the spate of defective drug deaths as the work of Karmic fate. His heartless, callous and insensitive remark coupled with his observation that there are many funeral parlours outside Colombo National Hospital since when people went in, they couldn’t be sure of coming out alive brought on his swollen head an avalanche of public outrage.
When it was revealed that he had gone to India alone in December last year, without an aide to call his own, with all costs for the trip at his expense, to hold one-to-one talks with an Indian pharmaceutical firm that was blacklisted in Lanka, he had said blacklisting was only a formality, one that would be automatically revoked once a firm lodges an appeal at his ministry.
He had wrongly claimed that there were no yardsticks to gauge if a drug was inferior or not and later said no inferior drugs had been imported. However, the head of the National Medicine Regulatory Authority, Professor S. D. Jayaratne declared on August 30, inferior drugs had been imported to the country and used at Government hospitals. He said: ‘We removed all those drugs from use. You may know that a patient died due to an allergy to a vaccine. It has already been ordered to send the medicine to TG Institute in Australia to check it.
With mounting calls demanding Rambukwella to be sacked, he grew desperate and sought validation in a hybrid group of experts he had chosen and appointed – at public expense – to determine ‘if the ministry was to be strictly blamed for defective drug deaths or if the patients’ own allergies were to blame’, and to forward the report to him. He released one paragraph which stated that the Expert Committee has determined ‘that five out of six deaths’ were due to ‘life-threatening allergic reactions’ but the rest of the report was withheld and not released to the public. Yet could the committee have ruled out with any certainty that it was the defect in the drug that made the patients turn allergic to the drug and not the drug itself that caused their deaths?
But this exonerating finding by Rambukwella’s expert committee does not seem to have laid to rest the cause of mystery deaths at state hospitals. Else why would NMRA chief tell news reporters on Wednesday that NMRA was ‘conducting an investigation on each of the mystery deaths that had occurred in hospitals during the last few months’?
With Rambukwella’s fate writ large even on his residential walls, his loving family too joined the nation’s choir that demanded he resign forthwith. His arrogant reply was to pompously say, ‘My wife and my daughter are asking me to resign but I won’t.’ Had he resigned as they advised, he would have gone with honour left, instead of leaving in disgrace, sacked by Presidential writ.
Arrogant tongue and insensitive heart cannot stand in for competence. Men who trivialise the sanctity of human life, and scornfully dismiss accidental or negligent hospital deaths as quirks of fate are unworthy to be in charge of the nation’s health.
But though Rambukwella had got his comeuppance, the President was left to brave the imminent fallout from the brewing SLPP whirlwind. Last month the SLPP had been jubilant and over the top in delight that they had easily defended their man who stood accused of damaging the nation’s faith in governmentrun hospitals.
A week before the no-confidence motion was taken up for debate, they publicly pledged to embrace Rambukwella in his hour of despair and need. They summarily dismissed the allegations made against their man as vicious lies, refused to admit that the medical sector lay in ruin, and, by shielding their blue-eyed English speaking wonder from javelins of truths, flew in the face of the people’s will. They sacrificed the public interest at the tinselled altar of a narcissist god.
As SUNDAY PUNCH commented on September 3: ‘The party that once claimed to be the voice of all Lanka, has now become the last refuge of hopeless failures, of the incompetents, of the corrupt, of scoundrels and convicts. A morally decadent party whose known sole strength is its majority in the House, whose power springs not from the fountain of a people’s goodwill but from hidden springs born in dark caverns that vaults its mysterious black wealth.’
They took the President’s seeming apathy to remove Rambukwella from the Health Ministry as evidence of his complete support and took for granted presidential endorsement for all of Rambukwella’s sins. They failed to realise the President was biding his time to give the axe. But this Monday morning they discovered that their celebratory dance on SJB’s no-confidence grave, had been a Pyrrhic victory that had not lasted six short weeks.
Embarrassed to the core to find the presidential rug abruptly pulled beneath their feet, the SLPP sought to hide their blush and to convince the people that they were still the domineering force that held the President to ransom with their Parliamentary majority.
SLPP Secretary Sagala Kariyawasam sent advance notice of a possible countercharge on Monday. Addressing a news conference regarding Rambukwella’s dismissal, he said: ‘We got the President his post. We maintain his power in Parliament. We give him the strength to govern. As a party, we are depressed and in deep pain over his actions. He should not have done this. He is wrong to have done. If even the President does wrong, we are not afraid to say he’s done wrong.’
Rich, isn’t it? For a party that had turned a blind eye to all the wrongs Rambukwella had done to Lanka’s medical sector and which it had, with their strength of numbers in Parliament, secured his short-lived victory, to say they’re unafraid to attack a wrong wherever found, even if it’s at the presidential office?
On Wednesday strode the Rajapaksa scion in-waiting to teach grandpas how to suck eggs. Namal Rajapaksa, after telling TV news reporters that he did not intend to give a lesson to the President who had done politics with his father, proceeded, nevertheless, to give a tutorial to Ranil Wickremesinghe in the art of making coalition governments successful.
He said:
The “changing of portfolios and positions” does not allow for such a system to be implemented, nor does it resolve any of the country’s issues.
The President’s responsibility is to create a system beneficial to the country’s citizens. There is a due responsibility to consult all political parties affiliated with the coalition government when making such decisions.
Electricity bills have increased, water bills too, are expected to be increased, taxes have been increased, and there is also talk of new taxes being introduced. No effort is taken to reduce the cost of living. And the people blame the Pohottuwa for all this.
The President openly admitted to increasing electricity tariffs following discussions with the IMF. If he is going to make political decisions based on discussions with the IMF, instead of with the related political party, then that is his way of governance. But the end result is the fact that the people of this country are the ones who are left affected.
If he thinks that such discussions and measures would resolve the country’s health crisis, or help drag Sri Lanka and its citizens out of this economic crisis that they have been forced to face, he is wrong. We are glad he accepted the presidency when we offered it to him, The Maithripala-Ranil coalition failed because the two fell apart. It led to instability. It led to a threat to national security and the people suffered. As a seasoned politician, he should understand coalition politics and the need for discussions with his coalition partner prior to taking decisions.
We cannot wait for 2048 to dawn to give school children a midday meal or to develop the nation. If so why do we need a government now? We shall wait and see what relief is offered to the people in November’s budget, and then we will consider our position.
But did Namal, who since of late has publicly assumed the mantle of ‘Podi Sinhaya’, roar a deafening mousy squeak that may have rattled the presidential bones? Not likely. Ranil Wickremesinghe probably would have put it down to Simba’s immaturity to deliver threats he could not keep. The President would have dismissed it with a secret smirk, for in this high-stakes poker game, he held in hand a winning deck and up his sleeve an Ace to boot.
If the SLPP dared to deny its voting strength to pass this year’s budget, the President has the untrammelled power to dissolve the House and call for general elections immediately. It would only expedite SLPP MPs’ life of long exile from the Diyawanna fount of riches, privileges, perks and endless scope to make good gains, two years before its destined time.
Most of them haven’t the faintest hope of ever returning from the political wilderness they face after elections. The hot air they expel is nothing more than puerile bluff unless they foolishly wish to commit hara-kiri on the parliamentary floor. The President has only to show the trump card up his sleeve to make them all fall into line and once more come to heel.
The people couldn’t care less about their coalition government. All that concerned them now was the good news that Rambukwella had been sacked, the cheerful news that state-run hospitals were finally rid of bad rubbish.
Now the bad news: Alas, like a non-biodegradable ‘silly-silly’ bag that’s hazardous to the environment, the people wake to find that Rambukwella -- like a recurring nightmare -- has turned up as the new man in charge of Sri Lanka’s environmental health.
If Rambukwella had been sacked for being an utter failure -an incompetent buffoon -- at the Ministry of Health who had ruined the Government medical sector and left it ridden with corruption, indiscipline, negligence, irregularities and waste, isn’t it a mockery of cabinet appointments to make him the nation’s Minister of Environment.
Already the environment is under threat. Indiscriminate tree felling on land, and industrial effluence released to rivers, seas, and air have left its fragile biodiversity threatened. Left its fauna and flora endangered. The perennial human-elephant conflicts have this year alone claimed over four hundred elephants.
At the Health Ministry, Rambukwella had wielded sole power to override strict quality checks on drugs imported to Lanka on the grounds of expediency under section 9 of the NMRA Act which had led to defective drugs flowing into governmentrun hospitals. As a result, there has been a spate of drug deaths in government hospitals.
At his new Ministry of Environment, he will enjoy similar unfettered powers to approve or disallow massive development projects at his sole discretion.
Wasn’t it unwise to have appointed one who has shown such gross disregard for rules and regulations while being the Minister of Health as the new Environmental Minister, is the perplexing question on the people’s lips.
Such a shame when good news is soon eclipsed with bad.