Editorial
Sri Lanka is drifting into a perilous moral dusk, one not announced by tanks on the streets or decrees at dawn, but by something far more insidious: the systematic corrosion of ethical restraint under the guise of reform. The present Government’s inability – or refusal – to respect basic ethical codes in public appointments has now metastasised into a constitutional embarrassment, a democratic affront, and a warning flare for what lies ahead.
The most glaring symptom of this decay is the extraordinary fact that Sri Lanka has functioned for almost a year without a properly appointed Auditor General. In a country that has endured sovereign default, mass impoverishment and the pulverisation of public trust, the absence of the state’s chief financial sentinel is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It is a scandal of the first order.
Four nominees submitted by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake have been rejected by the Constitutional Council. Four. This is not misfortune; it is a pattern. The rejections, including the most recent attempt to parachute a serving military officer into the post, suggest not merely poor judgement but a wilful disregard for the spirit of institutional independence. The result is paralysis within the National Audit Office, disruption of state accountability, and the grotesque spectacle of a government seemingly incapable of nominating a candidate who meets even the minimum threshold of acceptability.
This administrative farce acquires a more sinister hue when measured against the moral absolutism with which this Government once campaigned. The NPP manifesto thundered against corruption, vowed to restore ethical governance, and pledged fidelity to independent institutions. It promised a rupture with the old political culture of patronage, manipulation and executive arrogance. Today, those promises lie not merely broken but trampled, their remnants barely visible beneath the heavy boots of expediency.
The refusal or failure to secure an Auditor General is not an isolated lapse. It sits alongside an increasingly brazen tendency to bypass parliamentary oversight altogether. Nowhere is this more alarming than in the post-cyclone Ditwah fund, where a coterie of businessmen was appointed to manage public money without parliamentary approval. In a democracy, disaster funds are subject to the highest scrutiny precisely because they are fertile ground for abuse. To entrust such funds to private actors, selected without transparency and insulated from legislative oversight, is not innovation. It is an ethical abomination.
This is governance by fiat, not by consent. It reveals a mindset that views Parliament not as a co-equal institution but as a nuisance to be circumvented. The executive’s growing habit of humiliating state institutions – whether the Constitutional Council, audit mechanisms, or the legislature itself – points to something more troubling than administrative clumsiness. It signals a creeping authoritarian disposition, one that tolerates checks and balances only when they are compliant.
Authoritarianism rarely arrives wearing jackboots. More often, it advances incrementally, through procedural vandalism and the steady erosion of norms. Today it is the sidelining of Parliament. Tomorrow it is the politicisation of oversight bodies. The day after, it is the normalisation of rule by decree. The Government may protest that such warnings are exaggerated, but history is unkind to those who dismiss early signs as paranoia.
What is particularly galling is the sanctimonious tone with which these actions are defended. This Government continues to posture as morally superior, as a corrective to past excesses, even as it replicates and refines the very habits it once condemned. Ethical governance, it turns out, was a slogan rather than a discipline. Accountability was useful in opposition, inconvenient in power.
The longer this impasse continues, the deeper the damage. Without an Auditor General, public expenditure drifts into shadow. Without parliamentary oversight, executive power metastasises unchecked. Without ethical consistency, public trust evaporates. Democracies do not collapse in one dramatic moment; they erode through cumulative acts of arrogance and neglect.
The tragedy is that this descent is entirely self-inflicted. The Government still possesses the opportunity to correct course: to respect the Constitutional Council, to nominate qualified and independent candidates, to restore Parliament’s role, and to treat institutions not as obstacles but as safeguards. Yet each passing week of obstinacy makes that redemption less plausible.
Sri Lanka has seen this story before. Leaders who believed themselves uniquely virtuous. Governments that mistook popular mandate for absolute licence. Executives that derided institutions until those institutions could no longer protect the public interest. The endings are never benign.
What we are witnessing now is not merely administrative incompetence. It is a repudiation of ethical restraint and a flirtation with authoritarian habit. If allowed to harden, it will have consequences far beyond a single appointment or fund. It will deform governance, corrode democracy, and leave future generations to pay the price for today’s hubris.
The question is no longer whether the Government has broken its promises. It has. The question is whether Sri Lanka will recognise the danger before ethical collapse becomes political destiny, yet again.
