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Who the hell does he think he is, whoever it might be? Asking our first Marxist-Leninist president, who struggled to achieve some national status and now presumably international too, how much he, his chums and his hand-picked intellectuals spent on ‘kottu roti’ at some place near to his childhood home is nobody’s business.

It is a disgraceful bag of information that has been sought, as though every citizen of this lovely country has the right to belittle our national leader, who shot into unexpected prominence, by asking how he spent the people’s money—or what is left of it—by taking his comrades for a little bit of song and dance and a meal or two and a quick trip around our state, now awaiting a politico-cultural turnover, hopefully unlike the buses on our streets.

If somebody came along asking me to explain how I spent some money I gained by genuine means, why should I tell all to hear not only how I got it but also how I spent it? With all sorts of drug peddlers hawking their goods around schools, government offices and other places of disrepute, it would be far more understandable if our public chased after that lot by sneaking information on them rather than our 24-carat political do-gooders who want to turn the country on its head like what has been done to our ‘B’ grade politicians.

One can quite understand chasing after a former president of the country and dragging him before the law lords and asking what he was doing in Wolverhampton two or three years ago when he should have been at home minding his country’s business instead of abroad minding his wife’s affairs. One would think we were in Hitler’s Germany and Heil Herr Hitler or Goering or even Goebbels.

But right in this country, which, before long, would be a lovely nation instead of a Stalinist Gulag, people are dragged along the streets or hauled inside a Gulag waggon. Shame it is, I would say, reminding me of an elected member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council armed and chained for having passed a solicitor’s exam in London so that he would convince his father of his success.

Now everyone and his second cousin has heard of a law called the Right to Information and is using it to expose somebody’s past, present or even future and asking them to read out even their horoscope on the threat of being told what the hell they have been doing in the government service or some hole in the wall.

And why should they tell what they did or are doing or are likely to do if they get themselves some job after speaking in someone’s ear? Of course, we have been told that jobs will be offered only on meritocracy. The hell it is.

We are expected to believe Battaramulle Kana Kota sat an examination to test his competence and how many bullets he can fire a minute before he can hit ‘Allapugedera Sima’ and down him before eliminating the drug king of the area.

Now if he can do that and pass his meritocracy test, he gets the job as special bodyguard to the chief bodyguard of our worthy minister for monthly surveys of monkeys and other innocent wildlife, including the minister’s neighbour, who does ice deals now and then, which appears to affect his economic well-being.

It is this kind of overzealousness that gives our country a bad name in the international political arena. Those who engage in jiggery-pokery in their own countries without having to be dragged to places of abode with excessive iron bars and no friends in high places must surely think that our bigwigs cannot now enjoy their biththara appa in a nearby hopper joint without some half-baked YouTuber poking his head through a curtainless window and playing investigator like the crack sleuths in other nations.

Take the great United States of America, which might not be as united as in the days of Bill Clinton, though perhaps not so with his wife even if he tried to make her the country’s first woman president.

Okay, so they wanted to emulate our great nation, which elected mothers and daughters as heads of our beloved Sri Lanka. Now, of course, things have changed, with some nation-turners having taken power and decided to throw even the women out of the state homes despite all the current nonsense about how they will perch our young women on the murunga aththa. As any Sinhala and Tamil person knows what happens when you are on a murunga aththa, bearing a heavy load of overfed females.

All this is rubbish, just to win over the other sex, to judge by public utterances now and then emanating from our new thinkers. It is said that men and women are not separate sexes; they are all one people. That is all balderdash, or in the native lingo—which they have not tampered with so far—is “okkoma ekai”.

That is indeed funny. I am still to see our president or foreign minister in a saree even at soirees during their very frequent visits abroad. That could be a dangerous thing—or pastime, as critics of the NPP/JVP call it. Perhaps they are thinking of the future.

Remember it took a few years to haul Ranil Wickremesinghe, six-times prime minister, recent president and, in the view of many thinking people, the person who dragged Sri Lanka out of an economic hellhole.

Still more curious is that in those electioneering months NPP campaigners, particularly AKD as he used to be portrayed, were threatening to throw the IMF and its economic plans into the Beira if they happened to sit on the governance pile.

As the days passed and the elections came closer, that NPP/JVP threat of what would happen to the miserable IMF turned out to be more subdued and more friendly, to the point that the IMF was seen as a helpful partner in sorting out the economic mumbo-jumbo that Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s intellectual maestros of something called the viyathmaga finally abandoned poor Gota, atharamaga.

And all this RTI nonsense would not have happened, and Ranil would have been free to travel to Wolverhampton and enjoy a hearty lunch in decent company, or poor AKD could have enjoyed a jolly kos maluwa and ambul thiyal without an inquisitive son of a YouTuber asking how the president of Sri Lanka spent state money.

Here is the poor chap roaming the world to earn a few dollars, now yen, to pick up in Tokyo or anywhere Sri Lankans are making a living. Instead somebody wants to know how and why he is spending the country’s funds just because generous people handed over gifts to tide us over.

And when did it become his business? Just because there is a law?

Personally, I blame Ranil Wickremesinghe for all this because he intended to do good. It was way back in the year 2000 or thereabouts that he was pushing this idea of the Right to Information law. I remember his telling me about it during the Commonwealth Press Union conference in Colombo.

It took time for the idea to grow into a ripe fruit. Now see what happens. A man—and a woman too—cannot have a meal in peace or even in pieces without some individual posing questions to an information officer and even to another higher-up called the designated officer, who turned down the request to answer the question.

The person or persons who pose the question or questions are required to divulge who and what they are. But those assigned to respond to the questions remain under the guise of a designated official. Who they are and what their qualifications are remain buried, if you please.

How did they reach this position? By meritocracy, democracy or hypocrisy?

(Neville de Silva is a veteran
journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later, he was Deputy Chief de Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London.)