‘Mahadanamutta’ politicians will not give up their perks

We applaud Dr. A. C. Viswalingam for his comments on abuses in the Sri Lankan polity in a recent letter that appeared in a daily paper.

I have a correction to make regarding credit given to our leaders for defeating terrorism. The President certainly deserves much credit. But what he has done is only to pull the nation out of the mess created by the SLFP government of Mr. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, which denied Tamils a human right – the right to use their language in their own region.

The kind of governance we have now can best be described as the “Mahadanumutta” kind. The exhortations of the likes of CIMOG and the Friday Forum and other individuals have fallen like water on a duck’s back. Those Mahadanumutta politicians in the government cannot be expected to rebel or resign like the former minister Gamini Jayasuriya and Presidential Adviser Hema Nanayakkara. The Mahadanumutta politicians enjoy perks and privileges and Army escort three years after the defeat of terrorists. These are too attractive for them to give up.

There is a requirement in the government’s financial regulations and in agreements made with aid donors that capital projects must be subjected to feasibility studies and cost benefit/ effectiveness analysis. Such donorfunded projects are approved by the Cabinet only if there is a positive return.

It appears that Chinese governmentaided projects have not been screened with the same rigorous criteria. Many of the projects being implemented in the South with Chinese aid, at abnormally high interest rates, are economically unproductive, inefficient, and of a dubious nature. If the Treasury Chief can recover money wasted by Mihin Air, and the colossal amounts wasted on sports complexes and other unproductive projects, he will be able to pay the university teachers their salaries ten times over and be left with savings, and he will be able reduce the indirect taxes we all pay.

It is up to the public-spirited senior public servants to sound the alarm. They will not be asked to resign if they only raise objections whenever spurious loan-dependent capital projects are conceived/ approved/ launched. Politicians have never punished public servants by depriving them of their pensions, perhaps because they enjoy pensions only after five years. Leo Fernando

London