By Seevali Abeysekera*

All my previous posts pertaining to Sri Lankan politics written over the last decade or so have had one primary theme, namely that Sri Lankan politics was merely an extension of a culture based on false values which had created and promoted inept, incompetent and semi-literate leaders who had led the country to bankruptcy.

Never did I envisage a day, certainly not in my lifetime, when large sections, let alone the majority of the electorate, would reach a point where they could contemplate a paradigm shift in terms of leadership and thinking which would result in the political equivalence of the shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates which result in huge tsunami’s.

Much to my astonishment and joy, that day did happen and what appears to be a new political dawn has broken.

For a candidate to increase his share of the vote from 3% to 42% in little over five years was either a case of him transforming himself into a near messianic figure or a set of factors that made his message or brand of politics suddenly very appealing and necessary.

In other words, the perfect storm when all the elements and stars aligned themselves in his favour.

The newly-elected President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s (AKD) vision of a society that treated each citizen as equal within a meritocracy was essentially a complete culture change in a country whose practices and values are best described as feudal, familial and patriarchal.

Those values were reflected in the political leadership that was either based on delusional “old boy” networks which promoted abject mediocrity or on nepotism which championed idiocy.

The country had a leadership group that were either arrogant delusional old age pensioners or the offspring of previous leaders whose primary modus operandi and contributions to the betterment of the nation was industrial scale corruption and theft from the national treasury.

Little did I appreciate just how angry the people were with the existing status quo that they were prepared to put their trust in a man whose political party was commonly referred to by many less than a decade ago as ”........

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