The March of Folly 19 – Trying to improve the quality of legislation and parliamentary oversight

I wrote last week about how we need to improve the quality of our representatives in Parliament. I concentrated there on ensuring individuals who are accountable to particular areas, and therefore need the planning capacity to work for those they represent. But I also noted their wider responsibilities, and that indeed was what the OPA was primarily concerned with, in organizing a Seminar on Suggestions for Improving the Quality of Our Legislators.

 

But before embarking on this, we need to understand what exactly we mean by the term legislators. At its simplest, it means law makers, but we have to understand law here in terms of the functions of Parliament. And here, while Parliament is there to make laws, it also has a second function that springs from its legislative function. Amongst the most important laws it makes are those affecting the finances of the country. Hence the need to have an annual budget, which is supposed to be discussed at length by all Parliamentarians. And then,  since it is Parliament that allocates the finances which are used by the executive branch, it must make sure these are used in accordance with the provisions it makes. Hence it must monitor the use of funds by the executive.

These are the principal functions of Parliament. But because we are still steeped in the Westminster system, we confuse the functions of Parliament as Parliament with those of the executive branch of government, which on the Westminster model is based in Parliament. Even though we moved in 1978 to an Executive Presidency, we have – uniquely amongst countries which elect an Executive President independently of a parliamentary election – maintained the rest of the Executive in Parliament. Incidentally I should note that my despair about what passes for Departments of Political Science in this country is that there has been no serious research about both the rationale and the impact of J R Jayawardena’s decision to violate the commitment of his manifesto to have an executive outside Parliament.

The March of Folly 18 – Creating Better Members of Parliament

Coincidentally, shortly after I began work on suggesting new ways of working in the Public Sector, I was asked to contribute to a workshop on ways in which to develop the capacity of Members of Parliament. This was a request from the Organization of Professional Associations, which I recall contributing significantly to public policy several years ago. It seems recently to have lain relatively dormant, which saddened me, not least because it had a great opportunity in 2015 when a government committed to reforms was elected.

Sadly many of those who genuinely believed in good governance thought they had elected a government committed to this, and relaxed. Before long they realized that good governance was not at all intended by the Prime Minister who was calling the shots. He was more concerned with winning the next General Election, and for that purpose he had to ensure that the President remained a cipher. So the President did nothing constructive in the six months in which he could have asserted himself because of the strong SLFP presence in Parliament.

Instead, as he said when I complained about the first breach of his manifesto, he had left those matters to Ranil and Chandrika. He advised me to speak to them, but I said I would do nothing of the sort. I had come out in support of him, and I did not think I had any reason to appeal to two people who had shown themselves failures when they had had power.