Healing The Nation – A Question Of Leadership 

By Nihal Jayawickrama –May 13, 2016

Dr. Nihal Jayawickrama

I am deeply honoured by the invitation of the Lanka-Japan Friendship Society to deliver the Deshamanya Dr P.R. Anthonisz Memorial Lecture this evening. I was intrigued by the subject that was assigned to me, since a surgeon’s approach to healing a patient is usually to cut and remove a part of his or her anatomy. I wondered whether I was expected to advocate the same approach to healing the nation. Coming, as I do, from a family of lawyers, with only one doctor of medicine produced in several generations, it was my brother who knew and worked with Dr Anthonisz over many years. He mentioned to me that Dr Anthonisz, when 90 years old, had arrived late for a meeting of the Diabetes Association to which he had been invited, and explained that the delay was because he had to remove a patient’s gall bladder. He had said that he proposed to break the world record held by a Russian surgeon by removing another gall bladder after he reaches the age of 92. I do not know whether he achieved that distinction. Dr Anthonisz was one of a small group of brilliant surgeons of the 20th century that included Dr Noel Bartholomeusz and Dr M.V.P. Peries. I have had the good fortune never to have been subjected to Dr Anthonisz’s scalpel, but I have had the privilege of meeting him socially, often in the home of Felix and Lakshmi Dias Bandaranaike, and also elsewhere, and he always treated me with the utmost kindness. To the memory of that remarkable surgeon, I dedicate my own thoughts on the subject I propose to address, with respect and affection.

‘Healing the Nation – A question of leadership’ immediately raises the question: what is expected of a political leader in a democratic society? Should the leader reflect the views, the fears and the prejudices of the electorate to which he has to return for re-election; or should he determine a path according to his own vision, his own values and his own judgment, and endeavour to lead his electorate along that path? President Jayewardene ruminated on this issue some years after he had left office, and wondered how long one could go along with the wishes of the electorate. A military leader or a dictator does not have to worry about that, but a democratic leader has to because the electors are his main and only support. He recognized that it was very difficult to win an election again unless the leader continued to enjoy the continued support of those who had placed him in that position. However, he was willing to make an exception in regard to economic matters where external factors often determined what could or could not be done, however much that might displease the electorate. Incidentally, he had some sound advice for those aspiring to be leaders. Politics, he said, was a “stayers race”; a race where a man or woman who does not try to kick his neighbour or jump over him, but stays on till all the others disappear, wins the race. Therefore, he advised aspirants for political leadership that good health was vital: “look after your kidney, nurse your heart, eat little, don’t exercise too much, and in the end you win the stayer’s race and you become the leader”.

Read More