Sri Lanka’s president Goatabaya Rajapakse is refusing to resign from the presidency despite calls by thousands of protestors for him to step down.
The President has said he will hand over the premiership to a party that can command 113 seats in parliament which he knows is impossible to achieve with the current parliamentary composition. The President’s stance was conveyed to parliament last week by chief Government Whip Johnston Fernando.
‘The President must listen to the voice of the people’, points out Lacille de silva who was a Director Administration of Parliament and after that the Secretary to the Presidential Commission of Inquiry on Serious Acts of Fraud and Corruption. ‘Sri Lanka is a democracy’.
The pressure on the President to step down has been increasing after a protest last week outside his private residence in Mirihana. It has been the catalyst for bigger and intense protests which have engulfed the country since. Until thencitizens were engaging in vigils asking for food, fuel, gas for cooking and electricity, the government’s inability to provide these essentials because it didn’t have enough dollars to pay for them having precipitated the crisis. These have snowballed to mass scale protestsacross the spectrum of Sri Lankan society including undergraduates, trade unions and professionals who want the President to step down for the mismanagement of the economy under his watch. It has crippled the lives of Sri Lankans and brought governance to a standstill. Sri Lankans meanwhile continue to queue for essentials and businesses and the country are hamstrung by daily power cuts that are running into hours.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected president in 2019 after 6. 9 million Sri Lankans voted for him. Today, they have joined the chorus of cries for the President to resign. A protest in Colombo yesterday in support of the President had a poor turnout.
Sri Lankans were hopeful that parliamentarians will find a way out of the stalemate when parliament met this week. Legislators were instead caught up trading blame and talking about how to bolster their security without finding a solution to the peoples’ issues and the unprecedented crisis in the economy and government.
‘They have still not realized the gravity of the problem’, says de Silva in despair. ‘The Speaker told parliament that we are facing an economic and social problem. Johnston Fernando, who is the Minister for Highways, told parliament that the government will face it. We simply cannot allow the situation to go beyond what it has come to now. Parliament should be a place where the people are protected but it has become a place where MPs protect themselves’.
Parliament is scheduled to re –convene on the 19th of April after the Sinhala and Tamil new year. The government is gambling on the week –long break to be a ‘cooling off’ period for the protests.
In a scenario where the president steps down, the Sri Lankan constitution provides for the speaker of parliament or the prime minister to act as president. They must elect a president from among the members of parliament within one month.
As part of several measures that can be taken within the constitutional framework, the opposition has said it will start impeachment proceedings against the President and the main opposition, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya, said it has started collecting votes to bring a no confidence motion against the government.
The Sri Lanka constitution allows for both an impeachment and a no confidence motion to bestarted parallely.
An impeachment, which is a lengthy procedure,will start with a motion to the Speaker listing the allegations against the President and should have the votes of two thirds of members of parliament. The motion will be sent to the Supreme Court for inquiry if the Speaker is satisfied with the allegations in it. A positive outcome in the Supreme Court will require another vote in parliament and the greenlight by two thirds of members of parliament for the impeachment to be successful. A successor president will have to be picked by parliament from among the members of parliament.
An attempt to impeach former President Ranasinghe Premadasa could not proceed because the Speaker was not convinced about the allegations in the motion.
In the case of a no confidence motion, the Speaker has to accept it after it is handed over to him and fix a date for a debate in parliament which will be followed by a vote. The votes of a simple majority of members of parliament are required for the no confidence motion to be passed. A successful no confidence motion will lead to the prime minister and cabinet of ministers stepping down and the president electing a prime minister who commands the respect of all the parties in parliament. The prime minister will then pick the cabinet from among the members of parliament.
The President’s invitation to opposition parties in parliament to form An All Party Interim Government did not take off after they insisted that the President must first resign.
According to a former legal draftsman, another option which can be considered is to bring in an outsider who commands the respect of all the parties in parliament through the National List as prime minister and a new cabinet is sworn inafter that. The former Speaker Karu Jayasuriyacan be a candidate for this.
Earlier in the week the cabinet of ministers said they had resigned and had handed over their letters of resignation to the President. Almost immediately, the President re-appointed some of them to the same ministries. The appointment of the former Justice Minister Ali Sabry as the Finance Minister caused consternation after he resigned from his new post the following day but spoke in parliament as the de facto finance minister because the President hadn’t accepted his resignation. Sri Lankans who are familiar with the country’s political power plays, are calling it all a ‘drama’. It is rumoured that Sabrywill stay on as finance minister because of the impending talks with the International Monetary Fund which will be crucial for the country’s salvation.
The recent appointment of a new Central Bank Governor Dr Nandalal Weerasinghe and a team of economists to straighten out the country’s economy and bring relief to the people is a silver lining amidst the dark clouds. The appointment came in the wake of the resignation of the former Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal, who with the President’s brother Basil Rajapaksa and the President, is discredited with mismanaging the economy. Basil Rajapaksa who was the Finance Minister resigned from his post earlier this week. Speaking at his first press conference yesterday, Dr Weerasinghe said that political stability will speed up the economic recovery.
Sri Lanka’s legislature hosts 225 MPs, and a party with 113 Members in parliament has a majority. Traditionally, it has been difficult for one political party to secure a majority in parliament. Therefore, governments have been formed with a coalition or with the assurance of the support of smaller political parties. The United National Party’s landslide victory in 1977 under the leadership of JR Jayewardene paved the way for him to use his majority to amend the constitution to introduce an executive president.
