Predictably, President Chandrika Kumaratunga has had her allegation that the members of the Bribery Commission have done very little work and, by implication, are incompetent, flung back at her face first by the commissioners themselves and now by Opposition Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe. They have both made pointed reference to the letter that the president herself wrote the commissioners last November expressing appreciation of the work they had done in the preceding three years.

We quoted what the commissioners said in this regard last Sunday. They found it "passing strange'' that having used all those soothing words in a letter in which she had sought their resignations, bell, book and candle are now being thrown at them. The public has been for the past several months been treated first to the sorry spectacle of the conflict between the commissioners and their director-general, Mrs. Nelum Gamage, and thereafter to the open hostility between the government and the commission.

If the government was serious, as it claims to be, of having the offences of bribery and corruption investigated, the way to do that was not by emasculating the commission. Clearly, the problems between the commissioners and Mrs. Gamage was impeding the smooth working of the commission. Given the fact that a case against the then director-general's husband was under investigation by the commission itself, it stood to reason that she should not hold a position of influence and authority in that body and it was obvious commonsense that she be moved elsewhere.

But Mrs. Gamage, who had the distinction of being named in the PA election manifesto, was not without influence and it took a long time to do what needed doing. We do not know whether she was kicked upstairs, or "promoted'' as Messrs. Wijesundera and Rajasingham have said in their widely publicised letter. But what we do know is that the government was not one bit interested in solving the problem of the "quarreling'' (as the president put it) between the director-general and the commissioners and then getting the organisation it created with much fanfare back on track.

If there was any such interest, the systematic crippling of the commission would not have been undertaken with deadly dedication. Firstly, the government deliberately refrained from filling the vacancy that had arisen in the commission by the death of Mr. Siva Selliah in January 1997. Thereafter no director-general was appointed to replace Mrs. Gamage who was moved out. Worst of all, all the police investigators and state counsel assigned to the commission were withdrawn. Having all that done to it, how could anybody expect the commission to do any work whatsoever?

It is now known that as many as one hundred cases against important personalities and institutions are pending before the commission. The secrecy clause contained in the law under which the commission was established prevents revealing the identities of the VIPs concerned. A lot of publicity has been given to the fact that complaints have been lodged with the commission about the controversial Air Lanka privatisation and also about Minister Mangala Samaraweera's credit card dealings. But nobody knows what the other cases are about or who is involved.

There is every possibility of frivolous complaints intended to taint reputations being lodged by interested parties. That is why there is a secrecy clause to prevent the abuse of the commission's machinery for improper reasons. But given the kind of corruption that has been rampant in our society for a long time, there is also the probability that at least some of these cases are not altogether without substance. The public, naturally, believes that no government, be it UNP, PA or whoever else, would co-operate in kicking the ball into their own goal. That is why they must be convinced that investigations against VIPs of whatever colour are being investigated by an authority of acceptable integrity and impartiality and not by some compliant commission dancing to one political tune or another.

Given the high jinx we have already seen, the incumbent commission can be perceived by the people to have an animus against a government that has been kicking it around in this unseemly fashion. It is a great pity that when the commission was first set up, the opposition too was not consulted on who should sit on it so that a truly bipartisan authority could have been set up. It is also a pity that a parliamentary select committee, in which the government is vested a majority, should now sit in judgement on the commission. As columnist Nayana has pointed in today's Legal Watch, the credibility of all concerned would be destroyed if the commissioners, irrespective of the merit of the case against them, should be removed by a politically partisan vote in the House.