President Anura Kumara Dissanayake is apparently determined to have one of his loyalists appointed Auditor General though the Constitutional Council (CC) has prevented him from doing so. The government is apparently playing a waiting game.
Sri Lanka has never been short of self-proclaimed messiahs who promise to deliver people from suffering and secure enough votes to win elections. It is only after being ensconced in power that they lay bare their true faces. The public is left with a choice between merely voicing protest and grinning and bearing it. Sri Lankans boast of their high literacy rate, but fall for the wiles of politicians.
Last year, it was widely thought that a new era was about to dawn at long last. Most voters, civil society outfits and good governance activists reposed their trust in the JVP-led NPP, which embarked on a much-publicised crusade against bribery, corruption, abuse of power and waste. They were in the vanguard of a movement led by the JVP/NPP purportedly to upend rotten systems, usher in a new political culture and improve the people’s lot as never before. They helped the JVP/NPP turn the last general election into what they described as a shramadana to cleanse Parliament. But their disillusionment with the incumbent dispensation is now palpable.
Ex-Director of Parliament of Sri Lanka and former Secretary to the Presidential Commission on corruption, Lacille de Silva, has torn into the NPP government for keeping the post of Auditor General vacant with an ulterior motive. He has told the media that President Anura Kumara Dissanayake is trying to catapult one of his cronies into the high post, which has been kept vacant since April 2025. De Silva is of the view that the government will keep the key post vacant until early 2026, when the CC will have to be reconstituted, so as to have its crony appointed Auditor General. The government has brought a member of its Retired Police Collective––Shani Abeysekera––out of retirement and appointed him Director of the CID, which is pursuing the NPP’s political opponents relentlessly while sparing the government politicians and their supporters.
De Silva has said Mahinda Rajapaksa, after winning the 2005 presidential election, packed vital state institutions with stooges who pandered to his whims and fancies, and President Dissanayake is doing something similar. He has dubbed President Dissanayake Mahinda II!
Stooges have been going places under successive governments and turned key state institutions into mere appendages of the party in power. The NPP is trying to go even further. Nothing could be more demeaning for the self-righteous JVP/NPP grandees than to be compared to the Rajapaksas, whom they condemn vehemently at every turn.
The Auditor General’s independence must be safeguarded to eliminate corruption in the state sector. Only an independent Auditor General can scrutinise government spending without fear or favour to ensure that state funds are utilised responsibly according to the law, issue credible reports, prevent political interference, strengthen accountability and parliamentary oversight, build public trust, deter corruption and promote good governance. A political appointee will be beholden to his or her political masters and become a mere puppet willing to help further the interests of the government in power.
The least President Dissanayake can do to prevent the public from bracketing him and his government with those he has been demonising is to abandon his plan to appoint a crony as Auditor General and allow a qualified person of integrity to hold that post. The best way out is to elevate someone from within the ranks to the top post.
There are senior, capable, honest officers in the Auditor General’s Department. One of them can be appointed Auditor General.
The despicable practice of governments parachuting their loyalists into top posts, bypassing qualified internal candidates must be brought to an end forthwith. After all, that is what the NPP promised before last year’s elections. Just like its predecessors, the NPP government does not seem to have any sense of shame.
