Watchdogs and lapdogs
Friday 8th March, 2024
The Parliament of Sri Lanka is never united when it has to tackle vital national issues. The government and the Opposition go for each other’s jugular at the drop of a hat, but they unitedly take moral high ground and censure others.
Parliament is in the news for the wrong reasons, again. No sooner had the Opposition handed over a motion of no confidence against Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena than SLPP MP Rohitha Abeygunawardena was appointed Chairman of the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE). It has been reported that a majority of the COPE members elected him to that post. The government members of the COPE outnumber their Opposition counterparts; they notoriously lack discernment and are blinded by party allegiance. So, the appointment at issue has come as no surprise.
The COPE was established in the late 1970s to ‘ensure the observance of financial discipline in Public Corporations and other semi-governmental bodies in which the government has a financial stake’. It has had a chequered history. It lived up to public expectations under some of its Chairmen, such as D. E. W. Gunasekera and Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, and helped restore the people’s faith in the parliamentary process to some extent. But, sadly, most COPE chairmen became mere putty in the hands of the heads of government and tarnished the image of Parliament.
The remit of the COPE, one of the two financial committees of Parliament, the other being the Committee on Public Accounts, is to ‘examine the accounts of public corporations and of any business undertakings vested in the government’. So, the members of the financial committees should be capable persons of integrity, given the vital tasks they are required to perform to ensure financial discipline in the state sector, which has become a metaphor for irregularities. It is more so where the heads of these committees are concerned. They must be better than the rest and able to command the respect of their colleagues and the public alike.
What’s the world coming to when the national legislature of a country cannot find members of integrity to head its watchdog committees?
Abeygunawardena is an ardent defender of the Rajapaksa family and the incumbent dispensation. Some arguments he puts forth, at media briefings and in Parliament, in defence of the indefensible, are toe-curlingly ludicrous and amount to affronts to the intelligence of the public. It may be recalled that Abeygunawardena’s immediate predecessor, another die-hard supporter of the Rajapaksa family, got into hot water by making a shushing gesture, during a COPE meeting, to prevent a cricket administrator under a cloud from unwittingly revealing something unfavourable to Sri Lanka Cricket.
The SLPP-UNP government is on its last legs, and its members are all out to prop it up, and will do anything to retain their hold on power. Therefore, whether the COPE or other parliamentary committees headed by ruling party MPs will probe the state ventures headed by the henchmen of the current regime the way they should is the question.
If public interest is to be served, the COPE, the COPA and the Committee on Public Finance, must be placed under Opposition MPs. Not that the Opposition legislators are more intelligent and capable than their government counterparts, but the fact remains that they are driven by a genuine desire to expose irregularities in the state sector, especially in the public ventures headed by government backers. Ruling party MPs who are intrepid enough to act independently and probe irregularities in state institutions, without being swayed by political pressure, are extremely rare.
