We are living in difficult times. Not many appear ready to own the moment. The Treasury members of the parliament have been crying themselves hoarse maintaining that they are not responsible for the situation and blaming the previous governments. Members on the other side never tire of stacking out arguments to claim that the incumbent government alone is responsible for the crises. The common man sees no end to his woes. He is paying his taxes and is never spared. He sees his prime minister on TV telling him he has not done his part and should pay more. Reports of myriad surveys on unemployment and poverty are treated as irrelevant. Government leaders clearly do not see them as something they need to do something about. They are other people’s problems. Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, the army chief, has risen to the occasion, stating, “In difficult times no individual can succeed unless the whole nation comes together. It’s time to be [such] a nation.” The individual left alone is the individual in our streets, at a loss to understand how to pay the inflated bills with a rupee earning whose value is getting eroded by the day. The army chief was addressing a seminar titled Pakistan’s Economy: Challenges and the Way Forward at the National Defence University, Islamabad. He also said there was a strong correlation between economy and security, meaning that the two rise and fall together. The general once again shared his vision for regional stability asserting that countries do not prosper in isolation; that they prosper only when the whole region in which they are located prospers. The logic of this statement can hardly be disputed in the context of the ongoing visit of the Afghan president to Islamabad. The army chief minced no words about the “difficult economic situation” saying it was “due to fiscal mismanagement.” He went on to say, “We have been shying away from taking difficult decisions.” He said the current government had taken some “difficult but essential decisions.” The army, he said, was playing its part in every way. Gen Bajwa’s statement is a message of hope and togetherness for the citizens. The people can rest assured that state institutions never go to sleep on a watch. The political parties should heed the message and take ownership of the situation instead of passing the buck on to one another. *