FCID’s Unintended Consequences; Resulting In Bureaucratic Quagmire!

By Vishwamithra1984 –February 22, 2017

“In a free society, the ‘vision thing’ is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a ‘visionary’ bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government…the poorer and less free the people.” ~Ilana Mercer

A lackluster, sluggish and thoroughly uncreative bureaucracy has been waiting for an excuse. And they got it- FCID. For the most inexcusable delay in getting things done, the Sri Lankan bureaucracy which was merely a ready, willing and handy and convenient tool in the hands of politicians in the standard (or sub-standard) of the last regime of the Rajapaksa’s, has become one of the most powerful yet caustic and encumbering forces in the present government, not as a positive driver of policies, nor as an exemplary force in government administration upon which hundreds of thousands of general masses depend, but as an authoritative, negative force in obstructing the general movement of businesses directly or vicariously related to government.

As per Wikipedia, ‘Financial Crimes Investigation Division (FCID) is the law enforcement agency of the Sri Lankan government. It is tasked within Sri Lanka for financial crime investigations and law enforcement; it is a subsidiary agency of Sri Lanka Police Service’.

Apart from drilling fear and shame into the minds of corrupt politicians, FCID has also been responsible for creating a very apathetic and negative sensation in the present crop of civil servants, if we can call them such, a crop of bureaucrats that is primarily accountable for the circulation of a narrative that the current government led by President Sirisena and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe is gipped with its own ineria of impotence and not capable of getting ‘things done’. However, it must be mentioned here that major part of the blame surely belongs in the laps of the Cabinet of Ministers too. While not making an iota of excuse for the political machinery of the current government, a more severe part of the blame must go to the officials who are charged with the actual execution of the jobs. Not that the last regime of the Rajapaksas had a more solid and energetic set of bureaucrats. They had this same lot. But what was absent from that past regime is what is embedded within the concept of ‘Yahapalanaya’, good governance. Here again, I must say that there isn’t any tangible evidence of Yahapalanaya to write home about.

Instead of beginning the day with a positive mindset- discovering an excuse to win, finding an excuse how to do the job, our civil servants are apparently bogged down in a pit of unwillingness to learn how to do a job! They are not here to solve issues relating to atomic research, nor are they engaged in rocket science, though some in the Ministry of Science and Technology may be. But as a vast majority of our present bureaucracy has not realized the truism that if you fail, never mind, do it again and again and again until you get it right and moving. Every man’s lifelong ambition is an expression of that eternal yearning, find an excuse to excel.

But in what context is this excellence needs to be attained? Whether the context is positive or negative, the action taken within that context has to be shaped and molded to produce positive results. No SLAS seminar or workshop would teach that primary mindset of an officer who needs to have to execute a job. If all they have is what they have inherited from their parents, teachers, friends and associates, then the game is lost, the whole enchilada is rotten and uneatable. The professional training would lend one the objective material in order to do a job; it may lend the training how to proceed from A to B in a given context. But it would not lend the inner strength that one has to use to turn that training into results. What is missing from beneath the so-called efficient exterior is that inner strength, that creative mindset, that craving to exceed excellence. And that is indeed sad and tragic.

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