Responsibility of the voter and integrity of the mandate impact governance

The so called system change that people have been clamouring for after the ‘aragalaya’ does not seem to be forthcoming in the short term. The absence of agreement or consensus as to what form such system change should take among political parties, civil society and the citizenry at large makes it unlikely to happen in the near future.

Although a change in the system of governance must take precedence if the country is to get out of the rut it has fallen into, there does not seem to be any hope that any changes will take place before the forthcoming Presidential and Parliamentary Elections. Ideally abolishing the Executive Presidency and reform of the electoral system should have been given priority. However, since this has not happened the country will have to work within the current system at least for the next couple of years or so.

In such a situation a big responsibility vests in the political parties to ensure that the candidates they present to the people at an election are qualitatively an improvement to those who contested at the last elections. Additionally the voter cannot afford to take lightly the responsibility cast on him or her at the polling booth. An uninformed or unthinking choice made by him or her can have disastrous consequences for the country as seen by the results of the last elections.

While making such critical decisions at election time, the voter needs to understand the context correctly and not be misguided by sweeping characterisations that do not correctly reflect the experience of the past and present.

For instance the narrative that the 75 years after independence have been an unmitigated disaster is factually incorrect and is fed to the public for political reasons rather than to reflect the real situation. While it is true that during the post independence era bad decisions have been made and at times governance has been found wanting, there are also many achievements to the country’s credit.

The social indicators have surpassed those of many countries in Asia. For instance it was the strength of the Public Health system that saw the country through the COVID-19 pandemic even though there were mistakes made by those in authority at that time.

While the education system and the universities lag behind when compared to advances in other countries, the products of the country’s education system are still able to hold their own with their counterparts in other parts of the world. In fact the country’s doctors and engineers are still very much in demand all over the world.

It would be an unjust indictment of those who governed the country in the past to lay the blame on them for the new low that the country is currently facing. The difficulties faced by the people and the struggle to rescue the economy must be laid fairly and squarely on the rank bad governance and maladministration of the post 2019 period.

Another myth propagated by some is that all 225 Members of the current Parliament are bad and should be replaced. While not denying that there are many bad eggs in the legislature such a sweeping description of parliamentarians does not do justice to the many who are honourable men and women of integrity and who have valiantly carried out the responsibilities entrusted to them by the voter.

It is also true that the voter has to take a large part of the blame for making wrong choices. This has not happened only in recent times but has been a deteriorating trend which started many years ago.

A classic example of this was the outcome of the elections in the Ratnapura District in the late 80s. When the results were announced the candidates who had topped the polls on the United National Party list for Ratnapura were the two who were accused of killing the Sri Lanka Freedom Party youth leader Nalanda Ellawela.

The point is that those who wished to support the United National Party at that election did have the option of voting for other candidates with no black mark in the UNP list but chose otherwise.

This type of voter behaviour has been compounded by the actions of political parties and voters in more recent times contributing to the general deterioration of governance.

For instance the misbehaviour of some parliamentarians in the well of the legislature during the time of the 52 day constitutional coup in 2018 has gone unpunished. They ran riot and desecrated the sanctity of the Chamber in many ways including throwing chairs and chillie powder at each other and it took the courage of then Speaker Karu Jayasuriya to continue the work of the house despite such disruption.

Unfortunately no action was taken to arraign the miscreants before the law which had been clearly breached by the errant parliamentarians. What is worse they received nominations from their political parties to contest the subsequent elections. Making a bad situation worse voters voted for them in large numbers and returned them to Parliament after which many were rewarded with ministerial appointments.

Another disturbing feature of the current political system is the absence of accountability for the actions of Parliamentarians. During the time the Westminster system prevailed in the country there were Parliamentarians who crossed over to a party other than the one from which they were elected.

However, before such parliamentarians crossed over there was the salutary tradition in accordance with which they made a statement in the well of the chamber setting out the reasons for crossing over. The value of such a process was that the whole world including the voters who elected the parliamentarian would be made aware of the reason for the cross over. The voter had the opportunity thereby to take such reasons into account at the next elections when casting his or her vote.

Today no such practice exists with the voter kept in the dark without the benefit of a statement from the Parliamentarian whom they elected when he or she crosses over. In fact in the face of the frequently shifting alliances of some parliamentarians they would be hard put to know which party their parliamentarian was supporting at a particular point of time.

Adding insult to injury when a parliamentarian crosses over to another party and by his actions has shown that he had distanced himself from the party from which he had been elected, he would still claim in court that he still belonged to the political party from which he was elected merely to ensure that he was not unseated by a decision of the court.

It is this type of mockery of the system that has contributed to poor governance in recent years. Unless a concerted national effort is made to change the system in which integrity and the sacredness of the voter’s mandate is preserved, the country will have a long struggle to come out of the pit it has fallen into.