Proposals for formation of Cabinet on A rational basis

18 August 2015 06:41 pm

The Campaign for Sound National Policies launched its Programme on June 22, 2015 in Colombo with the patronage of President Maithripala Sirisena. The main purpose of the prorgamme has been to mobilize expertise to develop sound national policy frameworks for a number of important subjects such as economy, education, health and transport.

The President in his inaugural address made a request of the professionals, intellectuals and others who were present to make a sound proposal for the formation of the next Cabinet. We, as organizers of this worthy national programme, decided to respond positively to this request to develop a proposal to be submitted to the President and the Government for their consideration. In order to accomplish this task, we  mobilized the relevant expertise and conducted a series of consultations in order to develop rational proposals.

What is contained in this document is the outcome of the above deliberations. We were mindful of the fact that the developments following the August 17 General Election will have a bearing on the acceptability of the proposals. While the 19A to the Constitution provides a 30-member Cabinet and 40 non-Cabinet ministries such as deputy and State ministries; the possibility of a national government and likely increase in the size of the Cabinet could not be discounted during our deliberations. So, we propose two options.

The next issue is rational allocation of a plethora of State institutions that have functioned in the past under various ministries. This needed to be considered carefully as the efficiency of such institutions depends on right leadership and guidance. Having looked at various functions of these institutions, we have allocated them among the Ministries that we have identified.

As is well known, most ministries cannot function in isolation as the functions tend to be influenced by other ministries. So, for planning and coordination purposes, it is necessary for most of these institutions to function in clusters; in order to produce synergy, efficiency and effectiveness. In order to make the clustering easier, we have organized the 30 ministries into seven clusters as follows;

1. Education, HR and National Unity
2. Labour, Industry and Services  
3. Social Services
4. Defence
5. Infrastructure
6. Natural Resources and Economic Development
7.Finance, Planning and Implementation

We hope these proposals contained in the present document would be useful in taking decisions with respect to the streamlining  of the administration of the country to achieve broader national goals of developing public well-being and national unity.