By Kassapa
The news that former President Ranil Wickremesinghe will ‘address the nation’ last week generated much expectation. At least some anticipated that Wickremesinghe would announce his retirement from politics and relinquish leadership of the United National Party (UNP) which he has led for the last thirty years.
Alas, it was not to be. Instead, Wickremesinghe made a sales pitch to voters urging them to vote for the ‘gas cylinder’ at the general election claiming that the presence of ‘experienced’ parliamentarians is required for the country’s economic recovery. How such parliamentarians would contribute, given they are very likely to be in the opposition, he did not say but one hardly looks for logic and reason from Ranil Wickremesinghe.
The more disturbing thought was that, after thirty years as the leader of the UNP, Wickremesinghe was not calling it a day. It was a time during which he whittled down the party’s guaranteed base vote of 30 to 35 per cent to just 2 per cent in 2020. It was a time when he lost three presidential elections after shying away from contesting three other elections in 2010, 2015 and 2019 and ‘outsourcing’ them to others. As a result, the UNP has not had an elected President for the past thirty-five years.
Even when extremely fortuitous circumstances handed him the all-powerful Executive presidency on a platter in mid-2022, Wickremesinghe had more than two years to show the country that he could govern democratically and act against corruption and abuse of power. Had he done that, he would have won the 2024 presidential election easily. He chose not to.
Wickremesinghe also failed to use those two years to resurrect and revive the UNP, a cardinal sin, blinded as he was by the hosannas sung by the likes of Vajira Abeywardena and Sagala Ratnayake. This left him at the mercy of Basil Rajapaksa and the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) when it came to election time. They did ask for their pound of flesh, the premiership. When that was refused, they opted to field Namal Rajapaksa as their candidate.
Wickremesinghe’s track record over the past thirty years suggests that he has never been able to gain total control of government. On the few occasions that he had some control (in 2001, 2015 and in 2022) it was always in cohabitation with a rival party or leader. When placed in that unenviable situation, he always emerged as the weaker party, being out-witted, first by Chandrika Kumaratunga who dissolved Parliament, then by Maithripala Sirisena who replaced him with Mahinda Rajapaksa and finally by Basil Rajapaksa who thrust Namal Rajapaksa as a candidate.
So, Wickremesinghe is not the Machiavelli that he is made out to be. There is no reason that he should be retained at any cost. At 75 years of age, with no presidential election due until he is eighty years of age, he must surely leave the UNP. He refuses to.
UNP loyalists have a sense of déjà vu about his intentions to leave or retire. This is what he said in the aftermath of the drubbing the party received in 2020. The solitary National List seat it secured was kept vacant for ten months because there was no agreement as to who should fill that seat. Wickremesinghe then broke his own edict that no defeated candidate should fill a National List seat and returned to Parliament. The rest, as they say, is history now.
Mahinda Rajapaksa’s saga is more straight forward. Asked last week whether he would retire he dismissed the question with the remark ‘there is no such thing as retirement for politicians’. Of course, not for him. He wants to ensure that the Rajapaksa dynasty, so decisively rejected by the people on September 21, is somehow kept alive, so they could return at some later date and deceive the masses once more.
Unlike Wickremesinghe, Rajapaksa is a successful politician. Whatever his faults, he ended the Eelam war which his four predecessors failed to do. For that and that alone, he has earned his place in modern Sri Lankan history.
Sri Lankans used his initials, ‘MR’ to call him ‘Maha Rajaaneni’ or Great King. They gave him a second term only to find him blotting his copybook in style, engaging in the most brazen acts of corruption, abuse of power and allowing his cronies to act with impunity, disregarding the rule of law and order. This is why he was booted out and replaced by Maithripala Sirisena.
Sri Lankan voters being who they are, they didn’t learn from their mistakes and, in the face of Sirisena’s comedic performance as President and in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday attacks, gave the Rajapaksas another lease of life with Gotabaya as President and Mahinda as Prime Minister. The Rajapaksas didn’t learn from their mistakes either. They continued from where they left in 2015. That is why we are in this predicament today.
Rajapaksa, which was the most marketable surname in Lankan politics a fifteen years ago, is now the most despised. Rather than being an asset, it is a handicap that Namal Rajapaksa has to overcome. The younger Rajapaksa has decided he wouldn’t take the risk of contesting at the election and losing because that is a very real possibility and has put himself on the party’s National List. He must be hoping the SLPP polls at least 250,000 votes countrywide which would earn him a National List slot.
It is in this context that Mahinda Rajapaksa, three years older than Wickremesinghe and not in the best of health, is saying he will not retire. Unlike the UNP, the SLPP has a readymade successor in Namal Rajapaksa to whom he can pass the torch. He doesn’t wish to do that either. By lingering on, he is hurting his son’s prospects, not helping him.
In this sense, both Ranil Wickremesinghe and Mahinda Rajapaksa, are no different to each other, different though their political journeys may have been. The country has long rejected both of them and the ideals they represent but they haven’t still got the message from the masses: “for God’s sake, Go!”
