BY NEVILLE DE SILVA

It was not too many moons ago that the loquacious Rajitha Senaratne, minister and cabinet spokesman, claimed that the condition of some of our roads demanded that ministers and others of such elevated status straining every sinew to serve the people, need to have comfortable (not to mention expensive) vehicles to perform their sacred duties.

Don’t get me wrong. Minister Senaratne is an honourable man. So are they all, all honourable men (and women, naturally). So if he says the roads are bad, especially in the hilly, estate and wooded areas of the country where he and others of his ilk have planted their political stakes, they must be bad.

What some of them were doing while serving-faithfully one assumes -- in the previous government for many years without getting those dilapidated roads repaired and restored remains unanswered but does cast some guilt on their own performance.

It would have been much easier to have had this remedied then by getting the relevant ministerial colleague or other honourable district politicians to pass on tenders to kith and kin to make the existing roads even worse so that more tenders could be granted to the same kith and kin to repair them time and again. Minister Kiriella must surely know about the tender touch as something about colleague Daya Gamage did make the news quite recently. That is by the way of course.

That the roads had not been done shows not the lack of kith and kin to gain from profitable ventures but others more politi-