ROUTING THE PIQUED PIPERS OF PESSIMISM -- AND PAIKIASOTHYS ...

Readers focused on the household rupees and cents aspect of the national budget may not have noticed the presidential comments with deep political overtones that were written into this year's speech script. Said the President that he feels the Provincial Council system ought to go.

Devolution should not involve high spending and complex governance structures that would impose further burdens on people, the President said. "Everybody who met me from all corners of Sri Lanka, whether they were Tamils, Muslims or Sinhalese, asked for greater access to education, health, employment opportunities, better living and equal standards across the nation. The elimination of provincial disparities using national standards is the main weapon through which national reconciliation can be promoted. "

This confirms what for long has been thought, if not known, to be presidential policy. There is absolutely no doubt that the Provincial Councils are an alien imposition, totally unsuitable to the Sri Lankan reality -- and costing untold millions to the exchequer to boot. Yet, a good part of society has been made to belabour under the illusion that the system is somehow necessary if we are to maintain stability and, yes, avoid ethnic strife.

Somebody has to do it - which is to say that what is exorbitantly expensive and what creates power gridlock and redundant political offices, cannot be good for the country as a whole, and therefore has to be surgically excised from the system.

Nobody can fault the government of not working to a plan. As our front page headlines in this newspaper stated yesterday, the budget targets an upper-middle income economy. That this cannot be achieved with white elephant droppings that decorate the system, such as the financially disastrous Provincial Councils, is obvious. 'Devolution' per se however is a multi-faceted concept, and there are ways to devolve power avoiding the prescriptions that are given to us via the NGO think-tanks by various schools of Western thought.

The President has always sworn that a better system would follow the Provincial Councils, and if all of the political parties that are stakeholders put their heads together in the parliamentary Select Committee, something that is home-grown viable and acceptable to all should be hammered out as a political arrangement to replace the PCs.

Those who swear by the ways of the white man and who are lettered in Ivy League schools may say for instance that the panchayat system is not a suitable way to 'devolve' power as the panchayats are grama rajyas that operate at the level of the grassroots, making this devolution bottom-up and not top-down.

But the system has worked in other parts of Asia, and had its own variation in this country before the British colonized us and bequeathed their own top-down administrative devices.

The problem the President will have to face in the daring and laudable quest to get rid of the Provincial Councils altogether, is to deal with the political flak. Already the resistance is seen with the heartaches currently involving the Supreme Court being wrongly interpreted by some as effort to push the PC system out. This kind of misinterpretation unfortunately makes the legitimate task of dismantling the PC structure all the more difficult.

If this President can be defined by one overarching quality, it is the fact that he did what he thought was good for the country, and not what others prescribed as being wholesome. That was evident in the war fought to a finish - where he ensured the LTTE was trounced, though there were hundreds of powerful forces here and abroad that did not like the idea. This is history now, and nobody has to be retold that destroying the LTTE was the best thing that happened to this nation in a very long time.

Dismantling the Provincial Council system will forestall the thoughts that various interested parties entertain of running this country from offshore, and by remote. Thankfully this administration has the internal political clout to weather the storm that would likely result from stymieing their stratagems.

In the meanwhile though, there will be the regular complaints that the leadership 'wants to control everything' which is a sure sign that this administration is not tolerating the inimical designs of the piqued Paikiasothys who make such frustrated observations.

More the joy.