Daily Times

The above quote sums up the queer combination of pathos and ennui surrounding an average Pakistani’s life in a country that was supposed to act as the guarantor of their basic human security needs, having been freed from the yoke of colonial exploitation and religious particularism. All that was promised in that El Dorado of hope has ultimately turned into a dystopia miring people further into the bog of penury, socio-economic inequality, and religious bigotry.

With revanchist designs of the covetous neighbours and foreign powers, on a mission of “managed chaos” in the neighborhood, the witches’ brew of our discontent reaches a perfect boil. The ‘Core-Periphery” argument that drove the polemical resistance of intellectuals against social injustice has started smelling stale, having been asphyxiated in the suffocating grip of a structural violence visited upon our social, political, and economic life. Our geopolitical curse as a national security state has condemned us to a condign fate of perpetual dependence. With three wars and few near wars under our belt, we seem to have learnt little to value and preserve our freedoms and prosperity.

The lugubrious ruminations of a bleeding heart patriot mean little in our little neck of woods where strategic epiphanies often drown clarion calls for human security. But like all important lessons of history, the lesson that comes back to haunt us is the need for a high quality and well provided human resource. Four elements have been touted as a must for a high quality human resource. They are education, social justice, political freedom, and economic egalitarianism. Do we as a nation pass muster on the bar of above four elements? If the answer is an obvious no then it is worth introspecting as to what stopped our march to the promised dawn of peace, prosperity and development. With a Gini coefficient of 0.45, a health and education spending of 0.8 and 2.5 percent of GDP, and 29.4 percent of the population below the poverty line it is not too difficult to fathom the reasons of our continual slide. The real question is whether there is a way out of the structural penury imposed upon us by a geopolitical curse and a leadership deficit?

The country with its structural weaknesses like perpetual dependence upon politics of patronage, weak institutions, poor leadership, and almost zero regard for rules and laws whether in civic or politico-economic domain presents the image of an unruly mob incapable of any disciplined endeavour

The winter of our discontent would not turn into a summer of contentment till the time we do not loosen the shylock an hold of the kleptocracy ruling in cahoots with the crime mafias, keeping the state deliberately weak in order to milk its economy. Where else would one find a parallel economy bigger than the formal one with grudging admiration for the criminal enterprises like smuggling, over/under invoicing, and institutionalized corruption? The country with its structural weaknesses like perpetual dependence upon politics of patronage, weak institutions, poor leadership, and almost zero regard for rules and laws whether in civic or politico-economic domain presents the image of an unruly mob incapable of any disciplined endeavour. While the masses get conditioned to an undisciplined life of lassitude and corruption under corrupt elite the vicious cycle of poverty and violence engulfs the country. A democracy sans rule of law and independent institutions, that inject the essence of democracy in the roots of national existence, is nothing but a fig leaf to protect the loot and plunder of an extortionist elite. What else does that elite do to our national survival and what is the way out of this suffocating stranglehold?

Our extortionist elite are obsessed with power accumulation and self aggrandizement instead of serving people through good governance. The people are kept scrounging for paltry doles while the influential segments amass unearned rents through deceit. The elite thus assault the environment, economy, social harmony, and national polity untrammeled by any moral burden consigning the country to a perpetual poverty and under development. The underdevelopment in turn leads towards social disharmony, crime, and conflict in the society. Pakistan’s burgeoning population, poor governance, and low development spending has resulted into problems like unemployment, environmental degradation, infrastructural shortage, crime, and human insecurity. The death wish of the rapacious elite is playing havoc with our public goods which are already under multiple threats from over population, environmental degradation, and natural resource scarcity. The conflict drivers in society get a fillip under this climate of resource scarcity with ethno-linguistic and religious differences acting as major catalysts. The most endangered entities doublessly are the natural resources and public goods. The bad governance results in siphoning of national wealth abroad with little left to be spent on critical communication infrastructure, water resources, health, and sanitation etc.

The upshot of the criminal death wish by our elite is our degraded environment, resource depletion, and abysmally low health and education indices. The visionless elite fail to see that the public goods like health, education, water & sanitation, and clean air are common bounties of nature that are being impaired irreparably due to their self centered policies. They fail to see that tomorrow their own progeny would find no roads to ply their luxury vehicles, no clean air to breathe, and no safe water to drink. Already they are found scurrying to UK and USA for even minor ailments in the absence of world class medical facilities, a scathing indictment of their governance failure. In the absence of mass transit systems our heavily populated urban centers are rapidly turning into rabbit warrens where traffic jams frequently take heavy toll of time and fuel.

The avaricious elite that uses democracy for extraction of rents only, has little time or inclination for investing in public goods. A water scarce country that has failed to build dams and to harness cheap renewable energy resources ultimately goes hat in hands to foreign donors to finance its costly fuel import. There could not be a better example of the egregious failure of development planning.

Do we all wait for the proverbial Godot to come and solve our problems or is there any other way out? The present system of parliamentary democracy where the political leaders are perpetually blackmailed to give undeserved favours to their electorate and where the leaders have abdicated tough decision making to unrepresentative institutions it is only fair that the defacto power configuration is institutionalized for better governance. This nation needs to be governed well and to be disciplined like the East Asian and Chinese nations before leaving them at the mercy of unfettered freedoms of democracy. Discipline, hard work, sincerity, and vision are the pre requisites of progress in this age. If these attributes cannot be instilled in population through normal political oversight a new model of governance becomes necessary. It is in this context that the role of the judiciary, media, and the military assumes great importance. The sinews of justice should be stiffened by the military as the common effort unfolds itself in support of the politicians following the dictates of merit and fairplay. Both institutions duly supported by the media need to behave as the poor man’s equivalent of Lee Kwan Yu or Muhatir, the two iconic leaders whose vision and leadership lifted their nations to heights of progress. It is time the state institutions countered the death wish of the visionless elite through extraordinary steps remaining within the ambit of constitution.

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST; e mail rwjanj@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, January 22^nd 2018.