THE RAJPAL ABEYNAYAKE COLUMN: CLEARING OF GARBAGE AN ESSENTIAL SERVICE; CLEAR THIS YAHAPALANA GARBAGE OUT!
Posted on April 27th, 2017

The political culture of this country cannot be redeemed. The Meethotumulla tragedy is one of the proportions which called for the immediate resignation of the Prime Minister, or the President. However, what’s more sickening than the fact that they did nothing about removing the mountain of garbage is the fact that their reaction was absolutely gross, pathetic, and plunged the lowest depths of political crassness.
For both these reasons the Prime Minister, if he has an iota of self respect, should resign with immediate effect.
(Of course we do know the wholly incompetent/indifferent/aloof/
traitorous Ranil Wickremesinghe does not have an iota of self respect, and that’s a different issue.)

SRI-LANKA-ACCIDENT-ENVIRONMENT-POLLUTION-FIRE
Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and Minister of Law and Order and Southern Development Sagala Ratnayaka (L) visit the site of a massive garbage mountain collapse in the Meethotamulla suburb of Colombo on April 19, 2017.

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The Rajpal Abeynayake Column

The tragedy has all of the relevant ingredients for the apportioning of Ministerial if not Prime Ministerial and larger governmental responsibility. The Commission appointed by the President may come to any conclusion, and the less said about the faith that can be reposed in such ad hoc institutions the better.
So, whatever is said in the pornographic language of Yahapalana officialese, the people know that the responsibility for ensuring the safety of the folks around the Meethotumulla garbage dump was passed up on many occasions. More importantly the garbage dump was forcibly — continually –foisted on them even as they protested as one – literally – when they held hands together when they were hit by water cannon, and the footage is there to be seen.

Meanwhile, with the clearing of garbage being made an essential service, the President acts as if the clearing out of Colombo’s waste is more important than the lives or general well being of people.

The only objective of this despicable dispensation that calls itself a government, has been to ensure that there is no garbage problem for the people of Colombo. The folks threatened by the dumping of garbage in the proximity of their residences in Dompe and elsewhere, have been trod on hard, their right to protest rudely and unconstitutionally shut down.

This has all the hallmarks of the insensitive government of the obnoxious and the inept, that has been in existence from day one. But why? As far as the garbage problem goes, who doesn’t know that many potentates make money out of the disposal of garbage, which made the recent tragedy murder by definition.
It’s not as if this is a government that is in any way useful to the people. it’s quite the opposite and that’s only too well known. The economy has been battered, while the only mantra has been to blame the predecessor government. (Yes, predictably even for Meethotumulla, the clearing of which was an election promise of the Yahapalanites!)More importantly the war heroes have been mistreated and those who have anything to do with the successful prosecution of the war have been persecuted. No words are minced. It’s a dispensation of ingrates, incompetents and the downright grossly deplorable.

But back to the Meethotumulla tragedy.

The Puttlam lime quarry solution, says the government, was aborted because the Puttlam lime quarry was in the Wilpattu buffer zone. (Repeat, buffer zone.)
What Ranil and his henchmen do, doesn’t cease to amaze us. This explanation, from a government that has turned a convenient blind eye to the aggressive massacre of Wilpattu from a Minister who can do no wrong because his support was vital to get this Govt elected?

Sagala Ratnayake could not visit Meethotumulla without the full honour guard so to say — he had to be protected from the people.
That did not protect him from the volley of epithets that were hurled by wronged, victimized, cowed and terrorized folks.
Here is the link to that, which was censored in the supine and collaborationist so-called conventional media.

This dispensation of general no-goods, cheap turncoats and the otherwise vile in terms of how traitorous they have been, have to resign for the tragedy they visited upon the innocents of Meethotumulla. They have to resign and flee, for a lot of other reasons too, but in god’s name let them resign with a modicum of respectability, for this alone.
Am I’m wrong?

Here is a quick run through of resignations based upon the concept of Cabinet or Ministerial responsibility which speaks for itself. (The list is by no means exhaustive.)

— In 2015 the South Korean Premier resigned over the sinking of the Sewol ferry.

— The Romanian prime minister announced his resignation over a nightclub fire that killed more than 30 people in Bucharest in 2015.

— The Director of the U.S Federal Emergency Management Agency resigned, after heavy criticism of his handling of emergency management operations in the wake of hurricane
Katrina in 2005.

— Latvia’s prime minister resigned after accepting political responsibility for the collapse of a supermarket roof in the capital that killed 54 people and wounded at least 40 others, in 2013.

— In 1982, Lord Carrington (then Foreign Secretary UK) and two other Foreign Office ministers resigned shortly after the invasion of the Falkland Islands.

— Following a period of growing concern over the risk of Salmonella in eggs, Edwina Currie, then a junior Health Minister (UK) resigned on 16 December 1988.

November 25, 1956: Railway minister Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned from his post claiming moral responsibility for the rail disaster at Ariyalur, 174 miles from Madras, in which 152 passengers died and several others were injured.

– January 9,1993: Minister for civil aviation and tourism Madhavrao Scindia resigned over the TU – 154 crash. The Russian plane had been wet – leased by Indian Airlines to break the pilots’ strike. Luckily all the passengers survived.

One Response to “THE RAJPAL ABEYNAYAKE COLUMN: CLEARING OF GARBAGE AN ESSENTIAL SERVICE; CLEAR THIS YAHAPALANA GARBAGE OUT!”

  1. Dilrook Says:

    Those people resigned because they took the responsibility upon themselves. In Sri Lanka, no one takes responsibility. Any tragedy (floods, drought, tsunami, landslide, war, etc.) is an economic opportunity for politicians to make money. Times of tragedy are the best times of their lives. Just count the number of politicians who made a killing from tragedies.

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