A welter of unattended issues

President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s visits to the provinces these days are, apparently, proving highly revelatory. Our report yesterday on his on-the-spot inspection of conditions in the Moneragala district, for instance, would have provided the reader with a litany of unattended district-level problems that are either being ignored by the state agencies concerned or are being ineffectively dealt with. There are numerous questions in our provinces which are crying out for resolution, but which are, instead, meeting with official indifference, apparently.

In this day and age of stepped-up regional and national development, these woes from the provinces ought to take both polity and public by surprise. When the President visited the state agencies and the public of the Moneragala district he was greeted with a number of unattended issues which impinge closely on the lives of the people. Some of these are: a shortage of drinking water, lack of irrigation facilities, neglected popular health needs, inadequate road construction, irregularities in teacher transfers, land disputes, and the human-elephant conflict, to name just a few of these grievances of the public.

Being a seasoned and people-oriented politician, President Rajapaksa is bound to have taken these development hic-cups in his stride but the question that is clamouring for an answer is, what has the local and provincial level ‘people’s representative’ been doing about these everyday irritants of the public. The local and provincial-level governing bodies are bound to find this question very embarrassing at this juncture when Provincial Council polls are round the corner, but the poser cannot be prevented from presenting itself to the perceptive observer of local politics. Are our regional and local level governing bodies suffering from some sort of inner and enervating paralysis that is preventing them from perceiving and acting swiftly on issues that are so basic in nature?

What the public would be expecting of their Head of State in the face of these seemingly napping ‘representative’ bodies and state organizations, is the cracking of the disciplinary whip. If a resolution of local level issues should await the arrival of the President, it should be clear that governance at regional and local levels is hardly meeting public expectations. Apparently, there is much more than meets the eye on the governance scene at the regional and provincial levels which needs probing.

These disclosures of an unexpected kind should be welcomed and considered eye-openers rather than be winked at by the authorities. To be sure, the development drive is getting into top gear all over this land but we could do very much better if the bottlenecks in provincial development, which have just been outlined, are quickly cleared.

While the central state should consider it obligatory on its part to ensure that provincial and Local Government proceeds without a hitch, the public needs to demand a better job from their ‘representatives’. Unfortunately, the local public is not vocal to the desired degree in this respect. While the average citizen dutifully casts his vote, come election time, there is very little or no public debate on how well the different layers of government should serve the public. There is a widespread perception that our Provincial Council system is a drain on the public purse. This is not the factual situation but there is no denying that these bodies could do more to advance regional development. Apparently, accountability is lacking on the part of some of these governing bodies and the public becomes the recipient of very many ills Local Government and provincial-level institutions could effectively resolve.

The upcoming round of provincial polls should be turned into a platform to debate the ways in which provincial and local governance could be rendered more effective and development-oriented. Our public hardly sees the need for vibrant public debate on even issues that affect it in a basic way. The polls should be made a catalyst of change in this respect. They should be an eye-opener to the questions that are weighing the people down so agonizingly. Hopefully, this stultifying ‘culture of silence’ will end.