For nearly a month now, the sporting world has been firmly fixated on the tiny Middle Eastern state of Qatar, even as the world’s most popular sporting event reaches a crescendo with the FIFA World Cup final slated to kick off in Doha tonight (18). Aside from what takes place on the field this Sunday evening, Qatar as the host nation will surely be crowned as the ultimate winner through what has been described as the best organised World Cup ever – no mean feat for a nation that was all but a wasteland when some of our present politicians first entered politics. 

If one were to look beyond the controversies surrounding the circumstances in which this peninsula state of just 2.7 million people landed the hosting rights for this mega sporting event second only to the Olympics, one could see an astute, visionary leadership that has transformed this once barren, low-lying desert land one-fourth the size of Sri Lanka into the thriving first world metropolis that it is today, rubbing shoulders with the most prosperous nations on Earth. In fact, in terms of income, Qatar has the fourth-highest per capita GDP in the world, with that figure currently estimated to be around $ 114,000, while Sri Lanka’s has been lagging at the miserly $ 4,000 mark for quite some time.

Here are some interesting facts that should put our politicians, who have held the fort for decades upon decades with the end result of their ‘leadership’ being the creation of a bankrupt state reduced to being at the mercy of anyone and everyone willing to spare a dollar, to shame – not that they have any.

In 1971, when Qatar gained independence from the British, a politician by the name of Mahinda Rajapaksa was already an elected Member of Parliament in this country. Just six years later, another politician by the name of Ranil Wickremesinghe became an elected member of Parliament. For the next 51 years they have alternatively presided over the destinies of this nation in some form or the other and today both continue to remain at the helm of affairs – one officially and the other unofficially. 

The irony is that, since 1971, when the barren Middle Eastern nation first began to rise phoenix-like from the desert dust to be what it is today, Sri Lanka, with an abundance of every conceivable resource it could imagine at its disposal, headed in the opposite direction to arrive at this pitiful current state, where nearly half of its population is in need of ‘urgent humanitarian assistance’. Ironically enough, Qatar was one of the first countries that bankrupt Sri Lanka reached out to for assistance, to no avail.

Yet another interesting fact about Qatar is that out of its 2.7 million population, 2.3 million happen to be expatriates, including Sri Lankans, who account for about 5%, while the actual Qatari citizens number less than 400,000 – for context, about half of the resident population of Colombo. It is this miniscule population led by a visionary leadership that has not only propelled Qatar to first world status but also to be a shining beacon for the rest of the region. One can argue that it is all thanks to the petrodollars that Qatar is where it is today, but if one takes the case of Venezuela, which has the largest petroleum resources in the world but like Sri Lanka is also in the doldrums, then it becomes clear that the defining factor that separates success from failure is all about the quality of leadership.

Speaking of which, Sri Lanka too has been blessed with petroleum resources in the form of natural gas deposits off its north western shores in the Mannar Basin, but other than talk that has lasted at least a couple of decades, not much has happened by way of action to harvest these resources for the benefit of the nation.

It is understood that the Yahapalana era Petroleum Resources Minister Champika Ranawaka made some progress in mapping out the deposits, demarcating sectors, and allocating these sectors for exploration, but, like everything else, the entire process came to a grinding halt with the change of regime in 2019. The culture and practice of re-inventing the wheel every time a different government is elected in five- and 10-year cycles has ensured that the country remains stuck in a loop with whatever progress made by one government being undone by the next.

This hopeless state of affairs is a direct result of the lines demarcating the State from the government being obliterated beyond recognition as a result of the wholesale politicisation of the State sector to the point that government and State have now become one and when a particular government exits, the State becomes an orphan due to the mass-scale purging of political appointees of a particular hue – only to be replaced by another set of henchmen who then go about re-inventing the wheel.

Needless to say, this unproductive and degenerative process is persisted with for obvious reasons as it enables the new appointees to help themselves to the gravy train. It is this process that breeds corruption and in turn bleeds the nation dry. What is unfortunate is that even those who label themselves as ‘clean’ are not only guilty of aiding and abetting this self-destructive cycle, but also failing to pursue and prosecute those found with the hand in the till while also refraining from bringing to book those responsible for the nation’s economic misfortunes.

If Sri Lanka is to regain paradise lost, it must first come to terms with the fact that it must first reform itself – the people and the people in office. As long as the top remains rotten – by top we mean the collective political leadership – there is no way that the rest of the body can be healed from what is now clearly and rapidly developing into a terminal illness.

While it is true that at the end of the day people get the leaders they deserve, there is no escaping the fact that political parties – at least the two main ones that have ruled the country alternatively for almost 75 years – have collectively failed the nation by nominating individuals not fit to manage even a corner shop to high office, not least among them Parliament itself.

It is no secret that Qatar’s success – and to a greater extent that of Singapore’s, as pointed out by its architect, Lee Kuan Yew, who our leaders over the years have publicly aspired to emulate – has been the quality of people who are appointed to high office. By nominating individuals whom no private sector company will dare touch even with a barge pole to the country’s highest political institution, Parliament, they have dug the grave for the politically-immature electorate to jump into, and the results of continuing to do so are apparent with degeneration setting into every aspect of governance – from the economy and the rule of law to education and even the highest seats of learning.

If one needs confirmation, the daily news headlines are all it will take to confirm the fact that this nation – on the cusp of its diamond jubilee of independence – has well and truly hit the nadir. The ability to climb back up will be wholly dependent on wiping the slate clean on the political front and installing the right people in the right places, top to bottom. Take a bow, Qatar.