The Constitutional Council (CC) has rejected President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s nominee for the post of the Auditor General. The Opposition has torn into President Dissanayake—and quite rightly so—for his attempt to have one of his cronies elected to the post of Auditor General at the expense of a highly deserving officer with 30 years of experience in the Auditor General’s Department. The rejected nominee has only five years of experience in the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, the Opposition has alleged.
Various professional associations, such as the Sri Lanka Audit Services Union, the Association of State Assistant Auditors Union, and State Auditors Union, have demanded to know why President Dissanayake overlooked the most deserving candidate for the post of Auditor General. But the government has chosen to remain silent.
The JVP-led NPP based its election campaigns on promises of good governance, etc., and flayed its political opponents for cronyism, which, it said, had ruined the public service. Now, the NPP is drawing criticism for cronyism.
The manipulation of the CC process yields adverse consequences. The incumbent government is all out to oust IGP Deshabandu Tennakoon. The controversy over his conduct would not have arisen if the Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe government had not undermined the CC process to have him appointed IGP in early 2024. The CC was divided over his appointment; four members voted in favour of it, and two against it, with two others abstaining. The CC consists of 10 members, but it had only nine members at the time. The previous regime engineered a tie in the CC vote by interpreting abstentions as opposition to the appointment at issue and had Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardenea cast what was made out to be a tie-breaking vote!
One of the main reasons why President Ranil Wickremesinghe became unpopular in spite of his courageous political leadership for breaking the back of the country’s worst-ever economic crisis was that he succumbed to the arrogance of power, defended the corrupt and other undesirables, and enabled his cronies to secure sinecures and top posts in the public service. He blatantly undermined the CC and even sought to make the judiciary bend to his will, but in vain. No surprise that he came a poor third in the 2024 presidential race.
Are we to conclude that some of his predecessors’ sordid practices have rubbed off on President Dissanayake?
Politicians intoxicated with power cannot bring themselves to stomach defeat, and therefore the government will do everything in its power to have an NPP loyalist appointed as the Auditor General to ensure that its interests will be served in state audits. They know more than one way to shoe a horse or skin a cat. Hence the need for robust constitutional safeguards to prevent governments from undermining the CC process to achieve their political ends.
The CC deserves praise for having intrepidly torpedoed President Dissanayake’s move to appoint a fellow university alumnus as the Auditor General. Such bold decisions will go a long way towards safeguarding the integrity of the key institution tasked with depoliticising the public service. However, the CC has not stipulated selection criteria for the nominees for the high posts. If they had been in place, President Dissanayake or his predecessors would not have been able to nominate their cronies for the top positions in the state institutions, according to their whims and fancies. The CC stands accused of either rejecting or endorsing nominees in an ad hoc manner. Parliament and the CC must take up this issue and introduce selection criteria so that not even a government capable of mustering a majority in the CC will be able to have officials appointed to top posts on the basis of their political affiliations.
The NPP is rapidly forfeiting its good governance credentials. Out of its sheer desperation to seize control of the hung local councils, it has unashamedly opted for a political honeymoon with the very councillors it condemned as crooks before the 06 May local government elections. In power politics, expediency takes precedence over scruples. Horse-trading over the hung local councils as well as the President’s attempt to elevate a crony to the post of Auditor General has proved that the current dispensation is not capable of resisting the corrupting influence of power. It’s the NPP government’s moment of shame or lajja!
