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Abolish
the PCs The President, voted just the other day by the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing as a Sri Lankan icon for being the leader who projected Sri Lankan values most, literally kicked democracy in the teeth, as she is occasionally wont to do whenever it serves her political agenda. She circumvented majority rule in the Provincial Council, by ordering the Governor to prorogue (discontinue without dissolving) the Council for three weeks - a move to buy time because she knew a no-confidence motion against her party's Chief Minister, put to vote, would see him out. So
much for Sri Lankan values. There remains, however, the larger issue of the role the Provincial Councils do play. We have pointed out, ad nauseam, that the Provincial Council system has proved to be a drain on financial resources, created confusion in local government administration and provided virtually no services to the people it is meant to serve. Introduced in 1987 by the then arm-twisting Indian Government as what was thought to be a 'fair-exchange' for the LTTE demand for a separate state, 18 years later it has become nothing but a white elephant to the country, having a life of its own but serving neither man nor beast, only its own officials in the process. In the north and east, where the system was primarily for 'power to the periphery' or 'devolution of power ' - neither has the Government been able to hold even one election, nor does the LTTE seem to want one. The merged North and East Council was supposed to be a 'temporary' exercise -- for six months in 1987 -- so as to appease the majority Sinhalese -- including the JVP and the SLFP which burnt buses opposing the system. Today, the JVP uses the same system to railroad its senior coalition partner, the SLFP, into submission in the chaotic politics of this nation. Saddled with such a system of provincial administration, successive Governments have opted to ignore the crucial question -- should we not abandon this form of governance, which nobody but the Indians wanted us to have? The merged N&E Council has travelled a long way over the years, and the LTTE has proposed the nearly doomed ISGA (Interim Self-Governing Authority) and now a Joint Mechanism (JM) -- the former as part of the peace process, and the latter, we are told, merely as a 'temporary' mechanism for tsunami relief work and aid distribution. This
brings us to the question as to whether forms of local government
such as the Provincial Councils -- forced down the throat of the
nation in the belief that it would solve one problem -- would turn
out to be a headache in the years ahead. If we are to return to the issue of Provincial Councils and the justification for their continued existence, we would urge those studying constitutional amendments to take into consideration the worth of these Councils vis-a-vis their services to the people. Take the issue of tsunami relief work, and see what contribution the Southern Provincial Council has made, if any. In the north and east -- there's no Provincial Council to talk of -- even if it was for them that the system was introduced. Take the issue of whether the Provincial Councils have been the nursery for the next generation of political leaders or whether they have become the mere breeding ground for wives, relations and political hangers-on. Then the matter of a President asking the Governor to prorogue a council simply because the Chief Minister was to lose a no-confidence motion containing such very serious charges against him including that of corruption. It's time, indeed long past time that the country's political parties woke up and took stock of the District Council system -- both as an administrative and economically viable alternative to the good-for-nothing Provincial Councils that operate in the country in the guise of devolution of power. True devolution of power would, in fact, mean a smaller unit, the size of a District Council. Last week's prorogation is another classic example of the fact that these Provincial Councils have become nothing more than political power houses -- nothing more and nothing less. The sooner they are abolished, the better for this country. |
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