Jacinda Ardern says she’s burnt out

As an admirer of New Zealand’s Premier Jacinda Ardern, I was shocked to hear that she is resigning. Was it some political scandal, has something unthinkable happened?

No. As she put it at the Labour Party caucus meeting last week, she felt burnt out, and said she “no longer has enough in the tank “to do the job.”

“I’m leaving, because with such a privileged role comes responsibility – the responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not. I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple,” she said.

Asked how she would like New Zealanders to remember her leadership, Ardern said: “As someone who always tried to be kind”.

“I hope I leave the New Zealanders with a belief that you can be kind, but strong, empathetic but decisive, optimistic but focused. And that you can be your own kind of leader – one who knows when it’s time to go,” Ardern said.

To me, that sounds like an extraordinary admission by a highly successful politician who guided her country brilliantly through a very trying period, making New Zealand an example of how to deal with the pandemic to the rest of the world.

But her statement sounds extraordinary to me because I am a Sri Lankan, and the idea that politicians too, can suffer burn-out is strange to us. Most of our politicians are burnt out, but they don’t know it. It isn’t just our politicians. The pandemic followed by the Gotabaya fiasco alone would be enough to burn out the most resilient of people. But experience and interpretation of what one has undergone are two very different things. I think most Sri Lankans would not know what burn out means. In daily Sinhala usage, the term doesn’t
even exist.

The fault lies not with people, but with politicians who kept undermining education by cutting the budget while allocating more and more to military spending, citing non existing threats to justify what was for the Rajapaksa family a convenient outlet to hire unemployed youth for government service. I think they saw the army as their personal security service.

This isn’t getting sidetracked from the theme of burn out. The example taken is one of the principal reasons for the burn out the entire country has suffered. The Rajapaksa regime continued to recruit more and more personnel to the army even after the war was concluded. Apart from absurd arguments about threats to national security, the excuses given were that the army could help in other sectors as agriculture. Soldiers were even put to sweep the Vihara Maha Devi park!

But the army’s function isn’t to keep park clean or do agriculture. It’s an absurd proposition. The underlying reality of this steady expansion of our army beyond defence needs was very simple – there was still a very large number of youth without even GCE ordinary level qualifications who could not be employed for government service, and they could hope to get only the most menial positions in the private sector. The army gave them a dignified, even exalted job because of the Ranaviru (hero worship) cult perpetrated as an expedient policy by the Rajapaksas after the war.

But if you consider what it takes to train, arm, clothe, feed and provide lodgings (barracks) to a soldier, it becomes clear that Sri Lanka’s crash and burn-out wasn’t only because of Gotabaya’s idiotic ban on chemical fertilizer or his equally obtuse habit of printing money to cover government expenditure. It’s the result of our bloated military expenditure, which amounted to a very big slice of national spending.

Why bloated? The three-armed forces have a total strength of around 346,700 active personnel; militaries need not just weapons and ammunition, but uniforms, transport, fuel, housing, and maintenance. Any sensible country with no hostile borders and external enemies would have begun reducing military strength after any internal security threat had been dealt with (for example successfully ending a civil war). 

But this is not a sensible country. Not just satisfied with making the army even bigger, Gotabaya began filling administrative ranks, including the diplomatic service, with his retired military pals, and let’s not forget what he and brother Mahinda Rajapaksa did when the latter was president, militarizing schools and universities and giving military ranks to school principals. Mahatma Gandhi famously said: ‘We prefer our bad government to someone else’s good government.’

We certainly don’t want someone else’s good government. But we want a good government of our own. While one may have various criticisms of all our governments since independence, the sheer ruthlessness and callousness of the Rajapaksa brothers when it comes to doing all they can to ruin the country to serve their own selfish interests and idiotic vision of a greater nation is hard to beat. They are the principal reason for our burn out.

For the sake of comparison, New Zealand has a strength of only 15,191 personnel for all three armed services, made up of 9,215 regular force personnel, 3,030 reserve force personnel and 2,946 civilian members.  New Zeeland’s population is only 5.1 million, about a quarter of ours, but they have to defend  268,021 sq. km, including more than 700 islands. But that is a sensible country and Jacinda Ardern is a very sensible Premier.

Her parting words are still ringing in my ears – she wants to be remembered for being “kind, strong, empathetic but decisive, optimistic but focused,”

Kind? How many of our leaders can claim to any kindness? To be kind, you need to feel sympathy for the voters, even those who don’t vote for you. Our politicians have kindness in their hearts? Don’t make me laugh!
But they all want to be strong – rather, strongmen. The ultimate strongman of them all who was driven out by hungry, unarmed people a few months ago, may not know what empathy means, but he would lay a strong claim on being decisive, optimistic
and focused. 

Yes, he was optimistic and focused for his family and friends. Some had big hopes that his successor is different. To be fair, he has never put his family first at the expense of the country, but it remains to be seen if he’s working for his friends or the country, and if he’s capable of kindness and empathy to a people badly in need of both, and more.