Keynote
speech delivered by journalist Namini Wijedasa at the
Annual General Meeting of the Citizens Movement for Good Governance today,
held in the auditorium of the Organisation of Professional
Associations, Colombo.
Members of the Citizens Movement for Good Governance and
friends, This is an honour indeed. And yet, I am more than a little
daunted at having to speak before an audience whose experience and
memories stretch so back into the past. When Dr. Visvalingam invited me to
address you, I was delighted. But as the days flew by, I became more and
more uncertain of what I could say to people who already knew so much
more than I do. And who have lived much longer than I have.
So I stand before you as an
ordinary journalist who makes no pretense about the depth and
extent of my knowledge or insight. I present to you my views based on
what I have learnt of my country through the exercise of my
profession.
It is the practice today that when
somebody presents a view contrary to that which is held by the government
and its henchmen, that person and his opinions are loudly denigrated. He
must have an agenda, they say. And the
word ‘agenda’ is almost always used negatively.
If you criticise the way foreign
relations are conducted, you’re being bribed by the West. If you speak
about human rights abuses, you are a grasping NGO agent. Either way, you are embroiled in a certain
conspiracy to topple the government. If you
oppose the mass ordination of Buddhist children because you think it is
not the healthiest way to alleviate poverty or to protect the Buddha
Sasana, you’re part of an international religious plot to destroy
Buddhism in Sri Lanka. If you eat bread or noodles, you’re a slave to those
evil multinational companies—despite the fact that the person making this claim
is a noodle himself.
If you
criticise your rulers, you’re just downright ungrateful because they won
the war—and that should suffice for the next several decades. Indeed, “if
you are not with us, you are against us”. Still. Three years after the war
ended. This bigotry and intolerance is untenable. It is wholly detrimental
to the free thought, free speech and the advancement of society. Why in
this day and age is a government afraid
of a diversity of views? Why do they feel so threatened by detractors and
critics that they feel it necessary to classify them as conspirators or
traitors?
As journalists, we have to avoid
all these labels. And yet, you could still be sold out by colleagues who have
aligned themselves so closely with this government that they are irreversibly
indebted to them. If there are stooges in all other sectors, so it is also
with the media.
Carrots are certainly more powerful
than the stick. This is not a phenomenon unique to the prevailing regime.
Ranil Wickremesinghe had media lackeys who treated as heretics those colleagues
who did not blindly follow the leader. So did Chandrika Kumaratunga and no
doubt those before her. I may be mistaken but it feels so much worse now. If
there is one change I would like to see in the media industry, it is that
we do not let our political preferences erode relations among ourselves to the
extent that we are unable to tolerate each other in a room.
I have an agenda.
That agenda is set by me, based on certain principles, and is not financed by
anybody. It comes from wanting a better life for my children. It comes
from having made a choice to stay in Sri Lanka when leaving was an attractive
option. As with any journalist, I have had access to many policy and
decision makers over the years. I have observed how politicians think, how they
work and the difference between the two. I have been able to compare how
systems, and the attitudes of those that run them, have changed. I have witnessed
half-baked attempts to introduce some semblance of independence to our public
institutions through the 17th amendment. Then I saw how easily, and
flippantly, even these efforts were reversed through the passing of the
18th amendment. Having covered the story from the day the law was
passed, I will be the first to admit that the 17th amendment was
flawed. I remember writing that the law was riddled with more holes than a
string-hopper. But it could have been improved for the greater benefit of this
country’s citizens and its public officials. Instead, the opposite was
done. Our public institutions have
lost every semblance of independence and are completely and wholly controlled
by the executive. And this includes the judiciary.
When the
judiciary depends on the executive for survival and career advancement,
and the executive is of the type that expects complete subservience, what hope
does this country have? I
don’t have to go into detail here about just how politicised our
institutions are. My audience knows it. What is despairing is that it appears
to be a bottomless pit. You keep falling, and falling, and falling. The
level of submission required is suffocating and even extends to the arts,
particularly to the world of film. Since the war ended, Sri Lankans have been
allowed to view the conflict only through the eyes of the Sinhalese or
through the eyes of the military. Their story of loss, grief and victory must
be told. But what of the others who died, who suffered, who grieve? What
about the Tamils? What about the LTTE fighters, many of whom even the government
says were conscripted by force? They have a story to tell too. If we don’t
tell it a foreigner will. And then we won’t like it. Then we will whine about
it. And somebody out there will join the growing ranks of traitor, of conspirator,
of enemy.
I remember visiting a Tiger
cemetery once, during the ceasefire. It was for a story. Back then we were encouraged to
report these things. A mother and her daughter were laying flowers out on a
grave. The woman said her son was buried there. He had been 16 at the time of
his death. I saw the same pain in her
eyes that I have seen in the eyes of other mothers, Sinhalese mothers, Muslim
mothers. Sorrow has no ethnicity, no bias, no race or political
preference. So why do we give it these attributes?
Everyone is doing politics
everywhere now. The end result is that we don’t get our services. It’s politics
at the municipal council, at the police station, in schools, universities and
in the health sector. Sportsmen do politics, actors do politics, soldiers,
even very senior ones, do politics on behalf of politicians. Politics,
politics, everywhere. To prep up a regime, or to topple it. Nothing in between,
where the people are. Then there is this business of how people have come to
accept the unacceptable. Some months ago, I walked to the top of our lane
with our five-year-old daughter, Anshula. We were heading to the little
bookshop near Jubilee Post junction. When we got there, there was police tape around
the shop and policemen outside. So we turned back. I asked some three-wheeler drivers parked at
the stand nearby what had happened. As my daughter listened open-mouthed,
they described how some men had come the previous evening—not too late—shoved
the owner of the bookshop into the inevitable white van and taken him
away. They had guns these drivers said, with great relish. Don’t know
where they took him. “Oh well,” I told
my daughter, “let’s come some other time”. “Will they find that uncle?” she
asked. “I don’t know darling,” I replied, noncommittally. “But there are other
bookshops.”
It was
only at night that it hit me. My reaction was not normal. It was not normal for
me to have accepted the abduction of this man. I don’t know if guns were
actually used, but it was also not normal for me to have accepted that a
bunch of guys could turn up with guns at the local
bookshop. What had happened to
me?
But this how it goes. We Sri
Lankans are getting so used to things being done wrongly that we forget what
the right way is. Does it make me an NGO puppet when I say all this? A traitor? A
conspirator? A misguided fool? A plant of the West? An anti-Rajapaksa
ingrate? Of course. To some people. But I’m none of those things to me.
And that is what matters.
So… how do we reverse the rot?
Heck, I don’t know. If the whole distinguished lot of you failed to get it done
over the years, what chance do I have of prescribing or enforcing
solutions? Most times, the situation seems so hopeless that the worst
option seems to be the best option: That
is, if you can’t beat them, join them.
But there has to be a way. And here
is a little of what I figured out through my interactions as a
journalist. First and foremost, we must fight on behalf of institutions
and systems while separating personalities and politicians from the same.
Politicians, regardless of their parties, have taken ownership of
institutions and systems that do not belong to them. The public must bear
on politicians to run them in a manner that benefits us.
So often, since the war ended, we
have heard that we must be grateful to the government. Yes, we must. But
this notion of gratitude has been taken too far. Today, we are expected to be
grateful for everything, particularly services that are our
entitlement. And those services, too,
are delivered so grudgingly, so
lackadaisically and so incompetently that it makes you cringe. This is a
country that can’t conduct an advanced level examination without a breakdown.
Need we look further? I say that now, three years after the military victory,
it is time to stop focusing solely on gratitude. It is time to demand
good governance. The regime must be grateful to the people for tolerating its inefficiency
thus far. All the international conspiracies in the world can’t mask the fact that things are not
right here.
So how
does the public know that they are being poorly governed, that politicisation
is eating way at the very heart of our systems? The message must go to the
grassroots, to the members of local government and provincial councils, of
village societies and women’s groups. Teachers, clergy, business people,
professionals, agricultural workers, everyone, must be made aware of their
rights and entitlements. People must be educated about how proper
systems work because we are so entrenched in what we have now that we
cannot see or remember a better time.
As a journalist, I have found the
public eager to learn about alternatives. I recall a discussion I had with
a group of law students at the Colombo High Court last November. It was a
vibrant dialogue about the importance of separating the judiciary from the
executive. It seemed all the more relevant because we were waiting for the
judgement in Sarath Fonseka’s ‘white flag’ case. They, and I, went away more
enlightened than when we came in. And I wondered whether the legal education
system was today independent enough for similar debates to take place at
student level. My guess is, no. When the message goes to the grassroots,
stuff happens. Changes occur. We may not see them now, but things start moving.
Politicians get nervous and feel more accountable. If the voices circulate only
in the capitals, nothing will change. I had a scheduled interview with a senior
VIP government minister recently. I was to meet him at 2 pm. At 1.30 pm, his aide
called me and said the minister would be delayed because he was in meetings at
Anuradhapura. Two o’clock came and went. I waited because the interview was an
important one. We have waited a lifetime for Chandrika to get to places so this
was nothing.
At 3.30 pm, I called the aide. So sorry miss, he
said. The minister was still at meetings and hasn’t even had his lunch yet. What’s
the problem, I asked. “Big problem, miss,” he said. “All the local politicians
are fighting with him about so many things and he can’t get away. He’s
been stuck since morning.” The minister did not return till late that day.
He had been given a tough time by the people that matter.
This
pattern needs to be repeated. People from the bottom have to get their rulers
to listen. They have to cut through the rhetoric about international and
local conspiracies and get to the root of the problem.
But the objective, in my personal
view, should not be to topple governments. Any fool can see that the
alternatives are not viable. And if the systems remain the same what’s the
point in changing a government anyway?
Besides, that objective will defeat the purpose. The fight
will
once again be about personalities
and not about systems. I don’t know whether we can achieve this. I do
know that the job can’t be left to journalists alone or to civil society alone
or to anybody else alone. Everyone who has the knowledge and the exposure must
encourage people at the grassroots to
demand more from our rulers. Governing, after all, isn’t the sole prerogative
or business of governments, and of particular political parties. The
agenda has to be set by us. If we can’t get the people we elected to do their
job, then we are responsible for the rot
we so despise.
I had to share this because I think this was a great speech. Something I have not heard in a long time. I do not know who this lady is but I am giving her a standing ovation shouting Bravo! Bravo!
