We in Sri Lanka have no great wall to keep our fellow citizens apart, we don’t have barriers that sets any of us apart from each other and we certainly do not have official sanction that permits anyone in this country to be inequitably treated. Yet, we the people of Sri Lanka, continue to be the victims of tricks and treachery practiced by fools who obviously have no brains to be honest.
Consider for a moment the conundrum with the 20th Amendment to the constitution. The government proposed that they wished to have all the elections on one single day. It certainly has merit. The highest court in the land held that the matter required a two thirds in parliament and a referendum of the people.
We were instead treated to a matter that the Minister in charge of the provincial councils and local government has admitted was given treatment in pursuance of ‘political expediency’. The Minister extolled the several virtues of the 30 something amendments brought in including the shining star of them all, the need to amend the system of voting to bring some order and semblance of sanity to a system that hitherto has seen ‘money talking’. Meaning that those with access to money no matter what their background, can safely project themselves into the provincial councils or indeed parliament.
Mr Faizer Mustapha has a persuasive argument: that the inevitable delay in calling for elections is the price one pays to amend the rules of the voting system.
Mr Vasudeva Nanayakkara articulates the position that it is democratic and only right, to have the elections on the dates that they are due; the new rules and the amendments can be played out all over again – even if it means expending funds on yet another set of elections.
Whilst that argument rages and some are preparing to battle in Court led by a former Chief Justice, himself controversial, other events have highlighted the extent of the treachery that went on during the currency of what we now almost fondly refer to as BONDGATE.
We have been treated to the somewhat bizarre information that the state banks were asked by the Minister of Finance (who else but at the time, Ravi Karunanayake) to bid low at the Treasury bond auctions because ostensibly he wanted the interest rates to come down.
Two things are immediately wrong with that. One is that the Minister of Finance on this paradise isle is not the Minister in charge of the State Banks and therefore has no business to meddle in someone else’s affaires. Secondly that he as the Minister cannot be on a solo adventure to bring down interest rates, something that necessarily must absolutely involve the Central Bank. And he was not in charge of the Central Bank either!
Taken into context whilst listening to the undeleted and recovered telephone recording between Arjun the bond boy and his CEO Palisena (who was asked by a Justice to at least make his lies believable) we can begin to fathom the treacherous intent of these few – that will eventually affect the many.
For even studying these events with the cold neutrality of an impartial judge, one will be led only to the one conclusion – that the entire gamut of events surrounding the Bondgate scandal in Sri Lanka was pre-meditated. It started off long before Mahinda Rajapaksa lost his office. The plans to have Mahendran were on the drawing board well before. The Sirisena victory merely put into action very much like pressing the play button. Thereafter the high flying banker that he projects himself must have advised Ranil Wickremesinghe on the best way to award bonds – as per his thinking. The all-auction system. Good in a wide open market but bad for a closed and tiny market such as in Sri Lanka.
The value of the monies made by the wonder-kid of the bond market in Sri Lanka, bestows shame upon all other entrepreneurs in this country. They employ hundreds of people, write out monthly cheques, pay their taxes, their statutory dues, borrow heavily from banks, risk so much and invest hours of their precious time to make what amounts to a meagre return in comparison to the monies reported as profits by Perpetual Treasuries.
Sadly for this country, while everyone else can see the treachery, the man who has spent 40 years in parliament, 23 years as leader of the United National Party, four times the Prime Minister of this land and who has led his party to over 22 electoral defeats, cannot for the love of God and everything else, cannot, see through the treachery. We fear that until the cows come home he will continue to maintain that “there is no evidence of wrong doing”. He will probably continue to parade Arjuna Mahendran and Ravi Karunanayake at every opportune event, simply because, he knows in his heart that he must. He possibly owes them that much. Or they know too much for him to drop them like a ton of hot bricks.
I have learned to hate all traitors, and there is no disease that I spit on more than treachery.
