It is reported that lawmakers are going to get laptops. Some of them, in fact, may have some need for portable computers but we have doubts about the majority of others. They are said to be already using desktops and we wonder whether the country has gained anything from their being equipped with such machines. Some of them, it is said, have covered computers with pieces of cloth and placed flower vases atop them in their party offices.

Sri Lankans are known for putting things to uses their inventors never dreamt of. Take for example barbed wires, which are usually used for fences. In this country, they are being used in the process of distilling moonshine to enhance the strength of the spirit. Hence, the term Katukambi for Kasippu. (Folks, don’t ask us how it works scientifically or otherwise. Ask those politicians who are well versed in the subject.) Insecticides, pesticides, weedicides etc., are meant for killing insects and weeds. But in this country they appear to be used mainly for suicide.

Back to technology; it was only a year or two ago that at the Jayawardhanapura University, a group of students used computers to beat their rivals with; one died. In the house by the Diyawanna, last year, in the course of a bout of fisticuffs that often pass off for debates, someone used a mobile phone to hit a rival literally below the belt. He was hospitalised. A novel way of using GSM technology!

In a place where chairs are fixed securely to the ground, paperweights are not allowed in and the Mace is sent on a trip once in a while, one dreads to think of the uses that laptops may be put to in an ‘emergency.’ In brouhaha, they might even be flying across the well like saucers.

Even if they are serious about putting laptops to their intended use, a wag says most of them may find computers not visible if placed on their legislative laps because of the bulging pots.

We are loath to sound cynical but cannot understand why IT should precede basic lessons in good conduct, debating and public speaking in the case of most politicians. Look at that flibbertigibbet who insults a great warrior king who unified this country once, by claiming to be his reincarnation and goes about tilting at night clubs in typical bovine style. What use does he have for a laptop? He may not know a laptop from a desktop or from a television for that matter. He appears to be a cousin, if not a sibling of that legendary nitwit of Polgahawela, who having won in 1977 painted all birds in his poultry farm green to celebrate victory. What such politicos need most are shouldertops, meaning brains.

Going by the behaviour of most politicians, it is not so much computers that they need but slates and some schooling plus extra lessons on public speaking and debating. Erskin May’s treatise on the law, privileges, proceedings and usage of Parliament could be introduced to the curriculum at a latter stage. After that, they could graduate to IT and laptops so that they will be able to apply what they have learnt. Otherwise it will be a garbage-in-garbage-out situation.

Educational qualifications are required for any category of workers employed by the state. Even those in the lowest grade, sanitary labourers, have to have some basic education. But strangely, the politicians who have taken upon themselves the task of controlling the destiny of the state/nation are not required to have any education. They need not be academics and intellectuals, some of whom have failed as politicians and/or leaders. A decent basic education has to be made the criterion for entry into politics. There could be no better antidote to the increasing deterioration of the country’s politics.