Town Hall stench beats the Beira stink

Light Refractions by Lucien Rajakarunanayake

If the stink from the Beira Lake these past few days has made you keep holding your breath, just move away and do some real sniffing around Town Hall. That?s where you will find a stench that beats the Beira stink, as it spreads polluting the entire municipal administration.

There is no need for even the short-sighted to wear spectacles to see the disgusting mess that local government has been put into with the politics of the remote control. Those who spoke of administering the city by remote control, after their failure to fill out a nomination paper for the municipal elections, have made such a mockery of the people?s choice, that Colombo reeks with maladministration today, with the citizens being kicked around harder and all over like a football in the World Cup games. The aim of the kicking in football is to score a goal, but the kicking around in Colombo lacks even such purpose. It is a case of corruption kickers going berserk in a city they?ve made their playground.

Sirisena ?Carnival? Cooray is not seen or heard of any more, with all his promises of how the UNP will run the Colombo Municipal Council, through the people of the spectacle frames, who will in turn be manipulated by remote control. As Colombo moves into a longer phase of non-administration, or administrative anarchy, it seems that the batteries in Cooray?s (and the UNP?s) remote-control have run down, or that it is not pointed in the proper direction.

The garbage keeps piling up and with the rains of last week many a city road was often impassable. The problems in the city have become so endemic in nature that even the media that used to highlight these appear to have been pushed into frustration at the continued failure of the CMC, to manage its affairs under its manipulative minders. It was more than funny to see the new Common Man?s Mayor being taught how to grapple with the issues facing his office by a former UNP municipal councillor, clearly one of the Carnival Minders and some others.

All it really showed was that the new man, who admits to inexperience in municipal administration through no fault of his own, will only be taught all the wrong and corrupt things to do, when tutored in one?s work by those who epitomize corruption and incompetence in local government.

Trying to learn good administration from such tutors can be as bad as, or even worse, than trying to learn spoken English by those teachers who conduct classes for over 200 youth at a time, in lecture halls complete with amplified sound. It?s simply called humbug.

While the CMC remains rudderless with a captain who knows nothing of steering a vessel, we now see the ugly spectacle (no pun intended) of officials of the council, who are expected to guide the members in their work, instead kowtowing to those who manipulate the mayor like a puppet on a string.

The key officials of the CMC too appear to have readily agreed to be puppets being handled by the same green puppeteers, who seek to run the council today, without even seeking a mandate from the voters to do that job.

Be it a commissioner or secretary, it is time these officers paid by the public and not their political masters or favourites, realized the public expects more from them than fawning before the crooked holders of office, who have readily become puppets in a mockery of municipal office.

The behaviour of these fawning officials, whose designations confer on them an aura of importance and expectations of probity in administration, adds to the stench of Town Hall, surpassing even the fetid odours of remote control politics, as it happens there today.

With more than two months after the elections to the council, and a reluctant mayor who was sick at the prospect of taking office, the time is past when one can laugh at the situation in Town Hall, with cartoons of an elephant looking through a spectacle frame to see things better. Those who could not see well enough to fill nomination papers properly, with or without conspiracy, are fast dragging the CMC, the premier local body of the country, into an abyss of corruption, ineptitude and cheap politics far removed from what the citizens of Colombo deserve.

No one blames the new mayor for not knowing his job, for he was not born into it or trained for it in any way. Yet, even as one learns to drive a three-wheeler, good governance is not something difficult to learn, provided you have the intent and proper teachers to guide you.

It is time the mayor took time away from his minders of the corrupt jumbo camp, and either rode his mayoral car or travelled by three-wheeler to learn more of the actual needs of the city. Even the slightest show of honesty of purpose in at least attempting to solve some of the problems of Colombo could go a long way in reducing the nauseating stench of corrupt politics that today pervades Town Hall, the office of Mayor, and the functioning of senior administrators of the city.

Colombo is a big stink today with the foul odours from the Beira Lake being only part of the whole smelly racket of city administration.