OFF THEY GO

Hoardings will not be allowed in Colombo in future, and apparently the Defence Secretary has informed all private property owners of this fact. Though the banshees will already be girding their banshee loins to oppose this move saying it is authoritarian and is a Rajapaksa government attempt at stiffing the freedom of expression (!), the ban on hoardings makes us Colombo citizens prouder to belong to a metropolis that is fast becoming one of the most habitable, relative to those in any part of the world.

This was a move that was in a sense long overdue, but it is understandable that with the considerable business interests that would have stood in the way, it took this long for the Defence Secretary to get things moving on this score.

Civil society in this country is generally not concerned about such things. These people are up to their necks in what they think the people are really interested in, such as the Bar Association convocation.(!)

If the man on the street is asked what he thinks of the Bar Association convocation, he will probably ask which bar, is it the one that is open on Saturdays and weekdays, or the other one down the street, round the corner?

All societies that have a semblance of real order about them are to some extent police states. For example, big brother is constantly watching over the citizens of the United States, but there are no good governance advocates complaining. Traffic tickets are issued through automated devices; bicycles have to be locked and parked in parking bays, else they are towed away. Almost every aspect of civil life is regulated. Drinking alcohol of any sort is prohibited at baseball and American football games, and the ban is strictly enforced. People are also not allowed to drink in their cars.

Drinking in public spaces is as they say, a big ‘no-no.’ The smoking ban indoors is very rigorously enforced. As for hoardings, the commercial establishment does not think about it. Public hoardings are almost non-existent in the US, and where they do exist the hoardings have come up under strict conditions of monitoring by regulatory authorities.

Yet civil society and the opinion makers go into a litany about human rights abuses when pavement hawkers are evicted from Colombo and slum dwellers who do not have the proper papers are given quit orders!

That’s testimony that civil society lobbyists in Sri Lanka are noisome, disruptive and a general nuisance. Activists in other countries are aware of their civic responsibilities to make the cities and the public spaces in general more livable and more habitable. But Sri Lankan civil society activists have on the other hand a groove they are stuck in that compels them to bring in human rights and governance issues into everything, and no doubt a lot of these people are paid to be a regular disruptive force.

Tomorrow, in these pages we will be carrying an article about how a well known NGO for instance was infiltrated and retained as an extension of the agit-prop machine of a very big power.

Yet with all of this paid for propaganda going on in this country, the people who are paid to do this propagandist work insist on calling anything written about the work of the State propagandist. Those who do the real propagandizing are under the delusion that if they take cover behind slogans such as good governance and human rights they could pass off their agit-prop work as being legitimate civic awareness campaigns.

People have gradually becomes so cynical of these efforts due to the fact that these people bark at the most obviously productive campaigns such as getting rid of unauthorized slum dwellers from the city, and they have a very low credibility quotient as a result. The citizenry is now impervious to their ranting; after all, they are not so jaded as to be unaware of the benefits of the good work that goes on around them, the latest being the effort to get the hoardings down.