X’mas comes early for MPs sent on mandatory holiday
Christmas has come early this year for the political class of Lanka. Shortly before the President’s own departure in the wee hours of Monday morning to Singapore on a two day private visit with his wife, he prorogued Parliament, sending its 225 members on a compulsory 5 week holiday till January 18 next year. The President and wife returned on Wednesday morning.
But hours before the First Couple’s arrival home, Minister of Finance Basil Rajapaksa had packed his bags and left the country on Tuesday late night with his wife on a private visit to the United States. According to a Daily Mirror report, 60 members of both sides of the House have taken the cue and are set to leave to Britain, America, Australia and other world hotspots to spend the merry Christmas season in the bosom of their families, resident abroad.
Some pukka sahib MPs, forced to stay put at home, planned to don their sweaters and scarfs and make a beeline to Lanka’s Little England, to the mist covered hills of Nuwara Eliya, and savour, second hand, a taste of England’s colonial past at the 19th century British built English country house, the General’s House, now the Government owned up country retreat for all Parliamentarians, having had the foresight to book well in advance.
Not even the ghost of an English lady found dead in one of the rooms, said to haunt the manor walls in the dead of night, seems to have chilled their ardour to enjoy the quaint trappings of English colonial life at a heavily subsidised MP rate of just Rs. 4500 per day.
But one final chore had to be done before cabinet minister could hang their ministerial hats and let their hair down and brave the assault of the mystery female apparition after a busy night at the General’s Bar in the hills - as SJB MP Nalin Bandara recounted 5 years ago of how one night at around 2 o’clock he had been coming out of the bathroom in a room he was occupying near the ill-fated Room 16 at General House, when he was pushed by a ghostly presence, so forcefully that it sent him reeling to bang the wall, wounding his chin.
The business that awaited the Ministers on the same day that Parliament was prorogued was to attend the cabinet meeting that evening at Temple Trees. In the absence of President Gotabaya, the ignominious task of presiding over the surrender of the Lankan Government to a Chinese company by the payment of US$ 6.7 million as damages for rejecting its Erwinia ridden fertiliser shipment, fell upon the Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa who presented the outlandish settlement plan to the cabinet as acting on the advice of the Attorney General.
Surprising, for its the same Attorney General who had, as per the Sunday Times report on October 24, told the Commercial High Court on October 23 that even though the Chinese company was required to ship sterile organic fertiliser under the contract, it had admitted in its shipping advice that the consignment may contain microorganisms; and that the National Plant Quarantine Service had confirmed its presence as harmful. Ah, but even the south west monsoon must give way to the north east in December.
Firmly supported by the Chinese Embassy in Colombo, the Chinese owned Seawin Biotech had gone to extraordinary lengths to gain their unwarranted pound of flesh. The Company had pursued its claim relentless, bolstered by the knowledge that it was a matter of time before the government caved in, being as it was in the merciless grip of China’s iron fist. But to pay a Chinese supplier for contaminated goods rejected and never used, vividly illustrated the alarming extent to which this government had let the nation turn into a vassal pseudo- state, subservient to China’s vested interests.
The Government’s capitulation to Seawin with its decision to hand over 6.7 million dollars of the people’s money to appease its Chinese Dragons raises questions:
■ Were the negotiations so misconducted and the terms of the contract so botched up that the Attorney General advised the Government it had no leg to stand on in any arbitration proceedings brought against it but to throw in the towel and pay up?
■ If so who is responsible for the 6.7 million dollar blunder? Is it the Agriculture Minister Mahindananda alone to blame? Or must the entire cabinet assume collective responsibility?
■ What is the penalty for failure? Since the resignation of a minister alone will not suffice – no cabinet minister’s axed head is worth 6.7m dollars or 1.5 billion Lankan rupees of the people’s money – shouldn’t failure of this magnitude be punished by a financial penalty?
■ Does the decision to pay Seawin circumvent the Commercial High Court order granted on October 23 and further extended on December 3 to the Government owned Ceylon Fertiliser Company preventing the Government owned People’s Bank from paying any sum to Seawin for the same contaminated fertiliser cargo, Lanka’s statutary authority, the National Plant Quarantine Service, rejected thrice?
■ Since government decision to settle involves expending public money, shouldn’t it be first presented to Parliament, which controls public finance, and its approval obtained?
Thankfully for the Government, Parliament has been sent on an extended holiday and the egg on the government face will not be visible to its members to censure and decry and will, no doubt, fade away by 18 January when it meets again.
And while the political crust break bread holidaying abroad with family and friends or revel in the hills and dales of home, cloistered in privileged comfort and wrapped in cotton wool, ‘far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,’ the forlorn, forgotten, fatigued masses continue to trudge, toil and tear, overwrought facing the same familiar struggle to keep the wolf from the door.
And the only ghosts they will encounter this Christmas season are not the colonial upper class sorts MP Nalin Bandara had a brush with one night at General’s House in Lanka’s little England but the newly risen Ghosts of the Past, Present and Future, each pushing them further against the wall with rising prices, food shortages and now, spooky gas explosions in the kitchen to blast them to kingdom come to meet their maker sooner than expected.