When do the mundane, the ordinary and the unimportant take over? It happens when there is a deficit of vision, of comprehension, of understanding about what matters most. The budget exercise in June is an epitome of firstly apathy and then a panic approach adopted by the government to come up with supposedly the most important plan governing the way the economy is managed in the coming year. The government planning process is a parody. Instead of starting with what should be the major objectives this year that can help the socio-economy prosper, the focus is what we do to hide the terrible state of the economy and how we can splash a few projects around and distract attention from the gaping holes present in the economy. While the economic side is being eye-washed by a meaningless budget document, the legal side is being muddied by a stage drama better titled as ‘justice and the joker’. This tragic-comedy is riveting enough for people to have short-term amnesia regarding the flagrant contempt of court displayed by those who hold the highest offices in the country.
The Punjab budget that we all expected to be different from the federal budget as the chief minister keeps claiming that the federal government only knows corruption and has failed to present anything beneficial to the country, turned out to be as stale and as frail as a document hastily made to fill in a template. The budget had huge expenditures and declining revenues with an overdraft of Rs 30 billion and debt component of 75 percent. The two major areas of health and education, of which health gets 36 billion, with most of it going on salaries and expenses and hardly any development project in the offing. Having had a torrid year on health with the PIC incident of medicines, newborns’ deaths in a hospital fire, doctors always on strike, one would have expected some really innovative initiatives that focused on preventive steps and better healthcare facilities. Education has been allocated Rs 31 billion with no mention of how to improve the terrible quality of education existing in the country. However, the whole focus is on showcase projects. With the elections being round the corner, their desperation to have a demonstrative effect made them resort to focusing on projects that have failed in the past like the laptop scheme, yellow cab scheme, green tractor scheme and ashiana scheme, etc. Either these are all scandal-prone projects whose repetition only implies two things: that the government is so thick headed that it cannot come up with something innovative, or it thinks the public is so thick headed that they would fall for the same bait. The probability is that the people in government are too thick headed to see that the public is not thick headed. Take the classic case of the Lahore Metro Bus Project that is going to cost Rs 11 billion. This is one-third of your total education budget. The project underway is a simple showcase effort of having a metro that has ripped the main city streets apart, killed the environment, yet will be visible to every onlooker to see, wonder and applaud. But at what cost? The amount allocated for it is very unjustifiable for a country that has the worst social indicators in the world. Despite trailing behind countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in education and health, we are willing to spend one-third of our education budget on a fancy road transport that is hardly going to benefit a few thousand. With this amount, at least 20,000 schools can be upgraded or be provided better teaching quality and methodology. However, since that may take some years and the election countdown has begun, an immediate visible transport ‘toy’ will attract much more public attention and approval. Additionally, there is a lot to be made from construction projects in the form of kickbacks and commissions.
Another example of how to dilute supremely important issues by splashing cooked up scandals is the treatment meted out to the decision on ‘memogate’ vs Malik Riaz’s allegations. The timing was almost perfect. The day the memogate commission report declared Hussain Haqqani guilty of colluding with the Americans, the very day Malik Riaz opened his loud mouth so loudly that all else became inaudible to the public. The memogate report is a controversial one. It allegedly involves the sovereignty of the country. It argues that people at the highest level sell their loyalties. It is an alleged question of the involvement of the president to negotiate the armed forces’ power for retaining his own power. It is an alleged invitation to the US to attack and disregard Pakistan’s independence and self-esteem. However, despite the report, it has become a backbencher as every TV channel is grabbing Malik Riaz and showing headlines of his declarations and making people so obsessed with what comes next that nobody seems to have noticed that a much more serious alleged offence is not even being discussed. If Arsalan Iftikhar has taken favours for leading a plush lifestyle, he should be punished.
Thus, from Veena Malik to Malik Riaz, our media and politicians have fed our public scandals of the outrageous sort in such huge quantities that they have become addicted to it. People are fed on shock and awe on how low a human being can stoop. This then becomes a war on the media of who breaks the news in a more audacious and scandalous form. Ideally, the public should be attracted to human beings who inspire admiration due to their integrity and achievement. Since such politicians are almost extinct in the country, the only form of attraction is the extent of dirt they carry and can fling on others. In such mudslinging, what matters most is almost always buried deep in the slush of what matters the least.
The writer is an analyst, consultant and the Information Secretary of the PTI Punjab and can be reached at [email protected]