Sunday, April 1, 2018

What likelihood of Ranil and Mahinda conniving to end the executive presidency?

No April Fools for PM. Can Easter help him?


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"What an anomalous position! The Prime Minister and other Ministers are collectively responsible to Parliament except one member of that Cabinet, the chief whose policy the whole Cabinet is carrying out. The Prime Minister and the other Ministers can be pilloried and thrown out for no fault of theirs, but the fountain-head of the faults and deficiencies in question will escape scot-free immunized by the Constitution itself."

- N.M. Perera, 1979. Critical Analysis of the New (1978) Constitution

by Rajan Philips- 

Today is April Fools’ Day. For Christians, it is also Easter Sunday. Skeptical wags will relish the coincidence, which occurs only three or four times a century. Here at home, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe may have been wishing the Joint Opposition’s No Confidence Motion (NCM) to be nothing more than an April Fools’ prank, or, failing that, in the week of the risen lord he (PM) too could rise from the near-death ordeal that he has been going through over two months and as many moons. Alas, there is no April Fools for PM. The NCM is no prank or pickle. The man is in a real predicament. Nor can Easter save him. The Christian message of Easter is that - one who sacrifices one’s life for one’s faith will live on even when dead. In politics and in public life, if you sacrifice your honesty for ill-gotten gains, you are spiritually dead even if temporally alive.