Sri Lanka Cricket

As the Sri Lankan cricketers meet with disaster after disaster after losing to India in the World Cup final in April, not least the sound thrashing they are getting in South Africa in their current tour, those reversals come in the backdrop of them not being paid since March.

Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC), the national cricket’s administrative body which co-hosted the recent World Cup is bankrupt, that’s the reason why the cricketers have not got paid; however its other main co-host India has come out of the same tourney by being cash rich, what a tragi-comedy! And what is the reason for this sad state of affairs?
Cricketers not being paid since March, with the ICC stepping in by saying that they will pay the dues for SLC for co-hosting the World Cup direct to the cricketers instead as they have had not received their emoluments, a probable and a sorry indication that the ICC doesn’t trust SLC’s administrators, probably suspecting that if SLC was paid those monies direct, that they may not use those funds to pay the local cricketers their salaries, but instead may use it for something else!
What a tragi-comic indictment, SLC being treated more like a pariah and an untrustworthy member by international cricket’s governing body? Those payments by the ICC are due to SLC for co-hosting the recently concluded World Cup.
Let’s hope that the ICC’s seeming distrustful attitude towards SLC is not a reflection of how the international community views the island as a whole?
While SLC has no money to pay their cricketers their salaries, on the other hand monies in SLC’s coffers have had allegedly been raked in by the authorities to build cricket stadia at Sooriyawewa, Hambantota-President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s political base, and the other at Pallekelle, where the costs allegedly have had more than doubled from Rs. three billion to Rs. seven billion!
Where then is SLC’s priorities, is it to pay cricketers’ salaries or to build stadia, where costs are inflated apparently at the whim and fancy of somebody, which comes first?
By a strange twist of fate, one of the stadiums built was at the President’s political base. Was that done to curry favour with the powers that be by SLC or were they pressured to toe the line by building a cricket stadium at Sooriyawewa by Rajapaksa himself, that’s the unanswered question.
Is that the reason for ICC to be distrustful of SLC; that, monies if paid direct to SLC would be used for other projects other than paying the local cricketers their dues?
And, from a cricketing perspective isn’t that a poor indictment of SLC which independence is questionable as it comes under the Sports Act which allows the Government to directly interfere in its affairs, not least to dip into its coffers, now empty allegedly because of such actions?
The other cricketing scandal which happened long years before is building a cricket stadium in Dambulla when a certain businessman, now a ruling party politico (previously he worked for the present opposition!) was the chairman of SLC, where the leasing agreement between the two parties, ie SLC and a temple in question on whose land the Dambulla cricket stadium has been built, has run into problems.
Were these infrastructure works, ie building cricket stadia in Dambulla, Sooriyawewa and Pallekelle costing million of rupees, nay billions and belonging to SLC, embarked upon after doing feasibility studies, both technical and commercial?
Were leasing agreements between SLC and the Buddhist temple on which property it was built first preceded by following the acceptable financial and legal norms before the project was embarked upon? The same is also true to Pallekelle and Sooriyawewa as well.
The breakdown of priorities, if in the event is engineered at the highest level, generally has a tendency to affect all spheres of life of a country, not merely sports alone. “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” As said in the Great Book, “..a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.”
If one may look at what is happening in the stockmarket for example, because of the break down of accepted norms, a breakdown for the worse, the removal of the former Securities and Exchange Commission Director General for doing his job, followed by its former Chairman having been pressured to resign for not toeing the line, or, more precisely also for doing her job, both of these sorry instances allegedly due to the actions of a VVIP, and, as an accountant put it to me succinctly recently, where then is the rule of law?
It appears that the law of the jungle led by the political powers that be, like a cancer, is spreading its tentacles into virtually every fabric of the country, sports, finance, you name it.
From an objective perspective, when turning the searchlight inwards, isn’t Sri Lanka then behaving more like a pariah state rather than a civilized one, not dissimilar to Zimbabwe, Myanmar (now Myanmar appears to be getting out of that label with the recent visit of the US Foreign Secretary to that country), Venezuela, Iran, Syria and the like, though the scope and the scale may be different?
When systems crumble; when there is a blur between that which is right and that which is wrong, when there is no transparency and no accountability, then that spells disaster to a country thus affected by such a malady in all of its evil manifestations, spreading to every theatre of a nation’s operations, enveloping it like a cancer.