By Lucien Rajakarunanayake Courtesy The Island

February 23, 2018, 11:03 pm

A fortnight of jiggery-pokery in politics has now led to big talk about a Cabinet reshuffle.

Can any shuffling of this set of politically crooked persons engaged in bad government bring anything good for the people? The two weeks of a power struggle within a hugely skewed team in government, and the pretense of an attempted power grab by the suddenly booming team of the continuing scoundrels in politics, and a government that could hardly bring any benefits to the people.

The proposed shuffle is a move by the President, who leads this pack of knaves, to show he is not out of the reigning knavery in this largely defeated democracy.

This pack has everything from hearts that cheat the people, diamonds that hoodwink the voters, spades that shovel the dirt of corruption, and clubs that beat the people to dirty profit, with kings, queens, and knaves or jacks of these four types. Of course, there are jokers too – those who believe the people are meant o be fooled.

What can this pack ever achieve, however much it is shuffled? In the three years since they were elected by the people, after the election of the President, they have hugely ignored the promise given to the people to fight corruption – which was the slogan of their victory, over the crooked of the past. In fact, what they did was kicking that pledge away from their stuff of governance.

Yes, there was an amendment to the Constitution, which broke the plans of the former Big Man to be in office for decades, like some of those governing knaves in Africa. The Presidency was given a shorter term. There are more signals being sent that the President does not really know the meaning of the changes he introduced, when the heat of victory was still pushing him into action. The achievements were wholly limited. The pledge to fight the clan of the earlier robbers was largely ignored.

The Greens in the pack – the UNPrincipled, UNParliamentary, UNProgressive etc – as one left-wing leaflet in the mid-1940s described them, were proved correct in full measure. The PM persuaded the President to appoint a Master Knave on crooked banking to head the Central Bank. And the Greens can hardly look clean after that.

Of course, they had loads of other dirt too, in how the National Carrier – SriLankan -was hugely mismanaged through crooked relations and dirty manipulations. They had their “Hoaxwagen” fraud hugely exposed, and their Finance Ministerial Knave did help manipulate the Bond Scam and also profited by way of millions in Perpetual Rent for his luxury penthouse, in a mastery of ignorance. And, we can certainly ask today whether success in the production of soap with Kohomba fragrance, was any qualification for a High Commissioner to the United Kingdom?

But the Blue Knavery, promoted by the Big Knave was also the stuff of the hugely crooked. The key knaves in that team won the election, but made the leap to the profits and perks of ministerial knavery. Several of them were in fact beaten by the voters, but crept into Parliament through a dirty twist to the National List. They were the rouges of the past, joining a new team of pretended Good Governance, to ensure the roguery of the past would continue.

They were doing a Dance of the Blue Knaves, in a mock performance to help the Big Knave, but their dance brought no results.

But their knavery was displayed from the start in nepotism – of brotherly appointments, the deliberate delays in probes into the crooks of the knaves of yesterday, the protection of big knaves of the past, the manipulations to prevent arrests and the call to the court of the uniformed knaves of the past. Their striking knavery was to never let the probes into the murder of Lasantha Wickremetunga, and the missing Prageeth Eknaligoda to continue as they should have.

The new performance they did after the recent election, to make a leap into the camp of the Crooks of the Past, whose flower bud was blooming, was also a dance that failed to deliver.

This is the mockery that politics and governance are facing today. The shuffling of this pack of knaves, crooks, cheats, fraudsters, and political scoundrels can bring no benefit to the people and the country. The Big Knaves can make noises about a coming re-shuffle. They are now divided in the politics of the crooked, but united in the cheating of the people.

The re-shuffle may come, and the knavery would continue.