A sport as central to our national fecundity as cricket deserves critical attention as it goes through the formalities of leadership elections. It is precisely the waning, nay the emasculation, of cricketing energies over a decade and more, that requires Sri Lanka Cricket board elections to be more than just a ‘formality’.
As we pointed out last week, the SLC has gone through successive cycles of elections with much promise but ending with a repeat of the same failures and crises in finance and administration.And the rot quickly spread to the game itself with poor team selection due to nepotism and favouritism, bad playing strategy partly due to corruption and conflicting financial interests and, consequent loss of player morale ending in failure in playing performance.
After years of exposés of massive corruption and mismanagement, the public has got used to the carnage in SLC. National teams nowadays set out on tournament with little of the proudly expectant fanfare that should accompany them. And their return after failure again and again has seen embarrassing antics like the pathetic dodging of news media on arrival at the airport.
Notwithstanding the public exposure of both corruption and failure, and indeed some public shaming of miscreants, the same interest groups – both political and business – have persisted in vying for control of this apex body that presides over the country’s most lucrative sport. Since it has repeatedly presided over this mess, the old guard of SLC leaders must, therefore, assume some responsibility for the mess.
In this light we had some hope that the latest elections would bring in some fresh blood to the leadership.
But the latest elections seem to have brought in much of that same old guard or its proxies.
The cricketing community itself as well as the entire cricketing fandom can only watch to see if the same mess will continue.
The newly elected SLC leadership, therefore, faces a challenge: it must prove its innocence of past failures before the cricketing world is to have confidence in its leadership. We must wait to see how much of a ‘game-changer’ last week’s elections will be for Sri Lanka Cricket. Cricket-watchers must be forgiven if they are somewhat cynical about the future.
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Constitutional Council : the Tree that shelters all
Steeped in ancient naturist tradition as we are, we Sri Lankans love our shady trees and revere their sustaining role in the biosphere. The Sacred Bodhi invites all to the reflective, meditative calm of its leafy shelter and the possibilities of enlightenment or, at least, some spiritual uplift.
The Constitutional Council, the fount of publicly accountable governmental oversight and supervision, may be compared with such a tree with its spreading and sheltering branches growing out of a solidly rooted trunk.
The Constitutional Council is created by the Constitution and is empowered to serve the nation’s governmental needs on a level that, to some degree, parallels the executive, judiciary and legislature. Even if appointment to the Council comes through the legislature, it includes non-elected eminent citizens who, thereby, directly represent civil society at the highest level of the State.
The Council is tasked with the supervision of appointment to high offices and, crucially, the appointment of several authoritative commissions that, in turn, supervise the functioning of key arms of the Sri Lankan nation-state as well as the most important aspects of national life, including the conduct of elections, public administration, the judiciary, state higher education, the Police, national finance and economy and public accountability in governance.
To citizens, it is inexplicable as to why this august, pre-eminent body should be the target for vituperative and dismissive criticism by none other than the most senior national leaders and parliamentarians. Worse, the legislation that enabled its timely re-introduction, namely, the 19th Amendment, is also being criticised not in a constructive manner but in a dismissive manner.
And it is ironical that much of the criticism comes from those same leaders who were crucially instrumental in creating the political structures that frame the Constitutional Council and its ancillary Commissions.
When the political architects of the CC and its support structure begin to publicly question the validity of its functioning, there is an acute danger of loss of public confidence in the viability of this foundational edifice of our Republic, this vital tree that shelters our democracy.