Thoughts from London

The National Con Award, was it?
If I may adapt the words of Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, that made my day. There was this picture of a beaming president virtually jumping out of page 2 of this newspaper last Sunday.

Not President Bush of the United States, you silly. It was our own leader, President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.

There she was with one of her winsome smiles holding something like the leaning tower of Pisa with a ball on top. Looking at the picture one wasn't quite sure whether she was accepting it or giving it away. Knowing her one could be certain that she subscribes to that old saying that it is more blessed to give than to take, an adage that, of course, matters little to those who are on the take.

In the picture was a man with a more diffident smile holding on to this object as though it was a priceless Ming vase. For a moment I thought that perhaps it was some sophisticated weapon meant for the Wanni discovered among those several containers of tsunami aid lying in some corner of our port, unattended and desolate.

Or could it have been a model of the new President's House whose construction was to have started some time back. Little is heard these days about what some mistakenly call President's Palace as though attending Royal College elevates the occupant to royalty, though some delude themselves they do.

Anxious to find out exactly what it was I read the accompanying caption and the news story that followed. Only then did I know that President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga was about to receive the award for the "Leader with Sri Lankan values." To make it doubly sure I read it again. There it was quite plainly - leader with Sri Lankan values not the leader that Sri Lanka values. A marked difference between the two, you would doubtless agree.

Not having heard of such an award before I was naturally curious to find out who had undertaken this gargantuan task and how they arrived at this momentous decision. It was the work of the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing, known by the abbreviation (SLIM) and this is the first time they held what is called the National Icon Awards (NIA).

Were they really after a national icon or was it some national con? After all one cannot put it beyond these marketing chaps to come up with all sorts of gimmicks to market themselves and their products. That after all is part of their job, or is it?

Anyway there was this fuzzy old philosopher in ancient Greece named Diogenes who went round the market place in broad daylight carrying a lantern looking for the truth. Naturally he did not find it. Who goes to the market place seeking the truth.

Having read some philosophy at the Peradeniya campus (whenever I could find the time, that is) I thought I should pursue this further but without the help of a lantern, seeing that oil prices rise again. So what are Sri Lankan values they found in our beaming leader and how did they arrive at them?

"Honesty, transparency and being uncorrupt" were some of the qualities for which the president had won the award. But these were only a thimbleful of qualities for there were more to come according to a past president of SLIM and NIA chairman Nalin Attygalle.

Living up to its name, SLIM seems to have produced a slimmer set of qualities such as selflessness, reliability and sincerity. That makes six qualities. Obviously the president has more valued qualities but SLIM is too modest to mention all of them and about other award winners in case the papers run out of newsprint and TV and radio newscasts need to be extended.

So does it mean that Sri Lankan people do not consider accountability, human rights, independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press, anti-cronyism, a level playing field, to name a few, important values that should be nurtured and upheld?

If you think that the fat cats of SLIM and NIA sat down and decided to make President Kumaratunga the first national icon, you'd only be conning yourself. No such shortcuts for this marketing institute as Attygalle explains.

"The unique aspect of this awards ceremony is that all the award winners are decided on research-based opinion polls, conducted islandwide, across a substantial cross-section of society."

This islandwide opinion poll did not include the north and east -- one third of the country that SLIM has surgically removed, but insists on saying islandwide, a serious misnomer surely. So how did SLIM discover the persons with these multiple qualities that should soon enough qualify them for sainthood?

An independent market information company called TNS Lanka (Pvt) conducted polls interviewing 2610 respondents, between the ages of 8-65. Unfortunately, the news item does not given any information on what questions were asked, the basis on which questions were formulated, whether they were open-ended questions with multiple choices etc.

Nor does SLIM reveal whether the only name for Leader with Sri Lankan values that emerged was of President Kumaratunga. What percentage of the respondents actually selected her?

If she was the only one in which the public saw these qualities is it not a telling comment on Sri Lanka's political and entrepreneurial elite?

Equally importantly, how and why did SLIM arrive at the conclusion that honesty, transparency and incorruptibility are Sri Lankan values. Our society has become so dishonest, opaque and corrupt that to parade these as Sri Lankan values is surely an act of midsummer madness.

These might be qualities that Sri Lankans value and yearn for. But to confuse that with Sri Lankan values, is dishonesty or sophistry. These very values have been stood on their head by politicians and sections of the business community that thrive on political patronage and corruption. To ignore that is to turn one's back on reality.

Interestingly the poll has questioned 8-year olds. What percentage of the respondents was of the age group of 8-10. Are they seriously expected to answer questions about transparency, incorruptibility and all the political and business shenanigans going on in our society?

I suppose they expected an 8-year old boy in Buttala, asked about transparency to say "Well now that you ask me, how much tsunami aid did we actually receive and how much of it was in the form of monetary donations. It would also help achieve transparency in our fiscal and monetary policies if the public is told whether to expect a second tranche from the IMF and how many public utilities we need to privatise so foreign capitalists from the donor nations could reduce us to penury by arbitrarily raising the prices of essentials.

Of course, not that it will affect the price of vegetable in my father's chena now that politicians have cut down all the valuable trees, but it will help us to assess the transparency and accountability of our political leaders."

Let SLIM organise more national icon awards and give every minister his own leaning tower of Pisa. This might be time consuming, given the numbers involved but it is surely worth it. Meanwhile, would SLIM please send me a set of the questions and something of the methodology?

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