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The people will pay

People die. It can’t be helped,"was a celebrated remark a former Permanent Secretary to the Health Ministry made several decades ago. He was responding to a newspaper query relating to the state of the health services and that comment has lived much longer than the civil servant who made it or, for that matter, the question which provoked it.

Although the GMOA has made great play about the emergency services that were provided during the 17-day long doctors’ strike that has just ended, even these services were withdrawn in some hospitals when the doctors took umbrage at violence unleashed against them allegedly by forces aligned to the ruling party. There appears to be at least a tacit acknowledgment of this by the government agreeing to make good losses suffered by doctors as a result of such acts of thuggery.

The bottom line, of course, is that it is the taxpayer who must carry the tab. The surgeon who found his car burning in his garage while the doctors were on strike will be presumably compensated according to an undertaking given at Friday’s talks between the GMOA and the president. That money will go out of the public purse. It was agreed at the same meeting that the doctors are not to be penalised for not doing the work for which they are paid their salaries by the exchequer. There is no doubt that means that they will get strike pay. The people will pay as they always have.

"Did the doctors win or did the government win?" That question can be debated till the cows come home and still there will be no conclusive answer. The one certainty is that it is the people that lost, particularly poor people who cannot afford expensive private medical care and must depend on the free health service that the GMOA crippled for seventeen days. Most people reading yesterday’s newspapers would have surely wondered why what has been agreed now, following talks between the president and the GMOA, could not have been decided before the strike started in the first place.

As we commented last week, the issue that triggered this strike is the first straw in the wind. Just as much as doctors want to belong to a centralised all island service, so will engineers, administrators of the SLAS and many other professionals who have belonged to such services. They will not want to be brought under the tender mercies of provincial warlords presiding over fiefdoms that nobody outside the north and east wanted in the first place. There will be some, of course, who can find patronage denied to them at the centre more easily at the periphery. One chief minister up to now has demanded the right to exercise the powers that he insists is his by law.

With elections coming in the next few months and the minority votes important to both contenders for power, it is unlikely that the president will backtrack on the devolution already granted by the constitution. She told a public gathering at Ragama hours after the strike had been settled that the government was duty bound to uphold the constitution and the demands of the doctors went against the fundamental principles of devolution that the constitution spelled out.

Both Justice Minister G.L. Pieris and Attorney General Sarath. N. Silva are on record saying that there are ways of getting over the problem presented by the doctors by simple legislation rather than by constitutional amendment. They should know what they are talking about and the government, obviously keen on resolving the immediate problem, is likely to sort it out that way. But that will only be a temporary palliative. Boiled down to essentials, the decision will have to be taken sooner or later whether this country needs the kind of expensively wasteful devolution that the people were foisted with as the price of ending the civil war.

But what have we got at the end of it? The war continues as fiercely as ever, guzzling resources that should be invested in giving all the people of Sri Lanka a better deal. Worst of all is that there is no devolution in those parts of the country where it is most needed. Except for Mr. Varatharajah Perumal’s brief glory as chief minister of the "temporarily merged"northern and eastern provinces, those districts have been administered by the military and a centrally appointed governor.

Although the doctors insist that their fight was in the national interest and not petty self interest, few people will buy that altogether. While many thinking people would agree that the GMOA does have a valid reason for ensuring that their service remains "national,"the method they resorted to win that demand was necessarily unpopular. As Dr. Ananda Samarasekera, former president of the GMOA who led this strike has admitted in a newspaper interview published yesterday, "everybody had to suffer."Yes, doctors, but poor sick people much more than members of your association who will no doubt be paid for work they did not do while your strike was on; and suffer no consequences of defying an `essential service’ order.

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