{
  "id": 6223750,
  "title": "Whatever on earth happened to meritocracy, pragmatism, and honesty in Sri Lanka?",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/08/whatever-on-earth-happened-to-meritocracy-pragmatism-and-honesty-in",
  "topic": "world",
  "section": "World",
  "published": "2026-09-08T00:00:49.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Island Sri Lanka",
    "slug": "the-island-sri-lanka",
    "url": "http://island.lk/whatever-on-earth-happened-to-meritocracy-pragmatism-and-honesty-in-sri-lanka/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The once-promising nation of Sri Lanka has fallen into a pit of economic crisis, rampant corruption, and political short-sightedness, leaving observers to wonder what happened to the ideals of meritocracy, pragmatism, and honesty that once characterized the country.\n\nIn 1959, just a decade after gaining independence, Singapore elected Lee Kuan Yew as their Prime Minister. The country's founders looked to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) with envy, admiring its fertile land, highly literate population, functional civil service, robust infrastructure, and standard English education. Lee Kuan Yew openly desired that Singapore emulate Ceylon. Now, however, the contrast between the two nations is stark. Singapore boasts a GDP per capita exceeding US Dollars 80,000, world-class institutions, and zero tolerance for corruption. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka finds itself in the ashes of sovereign default, begging for financial aid, plagued by debt, corruption, and political dysfunction.\n\nThe answer to this stark contrast lies in the simple three-letter acronym introduced by Singaporean diplomat and academic, Professor Kishore Mahbubani: Meritocracy, Pragmatism, and Honesty (MPH). Mahbubani argues that any nation - regardless of size or origin - can achieve extraordinary success by rigorously applying these three foundational doctrines.\n\nHowever, Sri Lanka has systematically dismantled every single one of these three pillars of good governance. The triumph of nepotism and tribalism over meritocracy is evident in the appointment of politicians' children, loyalist party hacks, and henchmen in the civil service, state corporations, and diplomatic missions. This has led to a brain drain, as Sri Lanka's finest minds have been driven out by a system that rewards loyalty to a party over competence.\n\nPragmatism has been abandoned in favor of ideological dogma and economic madness. Instead of emulating Singapore's adoption of proven global best practices, Sri Lanka has pursued closed-economy import substitution followed by unbridled, corrupt market deregulation. This led to the disastrous overnight ban on chemical fertilizers in 2021, causing agricultural yields to collapse, food security to evaporate, and tea production to suffer devastating damage.\n\nHonesty has completely vanished from Sri Lanka's political landscape. The country's culture of systemic corruption, driven by a lack of zero tolerance for corruption and weak enforcement of the rule of law, has become the single biggest reason for third-world countries' failures. Sri Lanka's economic policies have been driven by shortsighted populism, ideological posturing, and economic illiteracy, leading to catastrophic results.",
  "summary": "By A Concerned Aficionado In 1959, just over a decade after Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then known, gained Independence, a tiny, resource-barren island in many ways, named Singapore, elected a man called Lee Kuan Yew as their Prime Minister. Before that, having been ejected from the Malaysian Federation into forced independence, the founding fathers […]",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}