-By A Staff Writer
(Lanka-e-News - 11.Sep.2025, 11.30 PM) Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa is packing his bags. Not for another glittering foreign visit, not for another taxpayer-funded retreat, but for a quieter life back in Medamulana, Hambantota. Why? Because Parliament, under the leadership of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the NPP, has finally done the unthinkable: stripped ex-presidents of their lifetime privileges.
Rajapaksa, visibly shocked, could hardly believe that the party he once crushed — the JVP, now reborn as the NPP — has had the last laugh. He used to boast that he divided and destroyed the JVP into political rubble. Today, it is the same force, reshaped and rebranded, that has dismantled his empire of perks. If there were ever a lesson in political karma, this is it.
For years, Rajapaksa treated presidential privileges as a personal inheritance. Dozens of security guards, fleets of luxury vehicles, private staff numbering in the hundreds, and billions in public expenditure were funneled into maintaining his extended family’s lifestyle. Even his children’s pets, critics joked, enjoyed taxpayer-funded caretakers. Sri Lanka’s presidency, under him, looked less like a constitutional office and more like a hereditary monarchy with a limitless budget.
But those days are over. The legislation passed by the NPP sweeps away the cushion of entitlement. No more endless bodyguards, no more lavish mansions maintained by the state, no more taxpayer-funded staffers running errands for grandchildren. Instead, Rajapaksa returns to his family estate, stripped of the grandeur he so carefully built.
His complaints are laced with disbelief. He never imagined that the JVP, whom he once thought extinct, could return to power and rewrite the rules. But the irony is hard to miss: the man who dismantled the SLFP, who devoured rival parties, now finds himself devoured by history.
Rajapaksa’s critics point out that this is only the beginning. With allegations of corruption, misuse of power, and billions hidden abroad in Dubai, the Maldives, or even Uganda, he faces a future not of privilege but of accountability.
So, farewell to the Vijayarama residence. Farewell to the retinue of guards and servants. Farewell to the presidential lifestyle. What remains is the reckoning — and perhaps, finally, the justice Sri Lanka has long been denied.
-By A Staff Writer
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by (2025-09-11 18:03:57)
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