Daily Times

No, it is not going to happen. Mian Nawaz Sharif, prime minister (PM) of Pakistan is not going to resign. He is not going to resign for any reason presently known to mankind in general, and the people of Pakistan in particular. Even if he loses the next election he will probably have to be forcibly removed by his successor. Most likely, somebody will convince him that as PM he has to visit another Central Asian country, and on that pretext get him out of the PM house and on to his Raiwind Palace. And no Khan Sahib, you are not going to become the PM under almost any possible scenario. So as I have suggested before, and I will repeat again that at least for this year nothing politically important is going to happen except for the appointment or not of a new chief of army staff.

Much is being said about the offshore accounts and leaks thereof, and how all that can excite and incite the people of Pakistan to rise up against the PM. Vox Populi (voice of the people) is being mentioned again and again as something threatening the rule of the PM and of his party. To test that perception I decided to have a chat with a representative of the aforementioned Vox Populi. Mr Populi as I will call the person I discussed this matter with seems quite representative of the average Pakistani. He heads a family of four living on about four dollars a day, educated enough to read an Urdu newspaper and sign his own name. The latter of course qualifies him to be considered an educated Pakistani. And yes, he is also a Punjabi who vacillates in his political support between Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and the PM’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz.

Mr Populi started the discussion with me by enquiring in all seriousness what the big deal was about ‘pajama/pyjamaleaks’ and if the PM had a pajama that leaked why could he not change it? At this I started to explain to him that these leaks were about a country called Panama that was almost exactly half the world away and had a population less than one of the localites in Karachi. This information completely befuddled Mr Populi who could not comprehend why something leaking in faraway Panama could possibly be of any importance to people in Pakistan. At this point I considered briefly trying and explaining the concept of ‘offshore’ accounts and hiding money that was illegally acquired. But one look at Mr Populi convinced me that explaining the concept of offshore accounts would be a tough row to hoe. So I abandoned that idea and thought it best to talk about the massive corruption that many of our politicians and bureaucrats and evidently even some army types are being accused of.

Before I proceed any further I must repeat once again somethings I have said often enough in the past. First that the PM and his family are pure as the driven snow, and second that the PM’s entire family has been blessed with this God-given gift that they all can create large amounts of wealth from thin air. As far as the brave members of our armed forces are concerned, they are mostly men of exemplary probity. Bureaucrats and politicians or what are often lovingly referred to as ‘bloody civilians’ are a different matter, the Sharifs being excluded of course. Why are the Sharifs (PMs family) excluded, you ask? Well, they have spent so much time in the Holy Land that holiness has completely infused their beings. And it has been reported that on occasion a halo can be seen hovering over the PM’s head especially when light shines on him from a certain direction. That this is probably an optical illusion is most likely but believers must believe.

So coming back to corruption, I told Mr Populi that a former minister is being held in custody for massive corruption, and according to his accusers he is richer than the world’s reported richest men. Here I must admit that even I wondered what this person was doing in Pakistan when he was worth more than Bill Gates. Then of course there was the recent report of a bureaucrat in Quetta that had almost seven hundred million rupees worth of stuff in his home that was discovered maybe a day before it was all going abroad — to Panama? This timing suggests a disgruntled co-conspirator or what in the old country is called a ‘whistle blower’ or in the vernacular a ‘dirty rat’.Any way, Mr Populi could not even comprehend the magnitude of such corruption. But Mr Populi did have strong opinions about the sort of corruption that he was most concerned about.

Mr Populi worried about the ‘metre reader’ that often over-read his electricity usage, and expected some money to give a correct reading. Mr Populi was worried about the milk he bought for his children that contained virtually no milk in it, or the policemen at the picket lines who primarily extorted money from passing motorcyclists. And yes Mr Populi was worried about the rising price of essential commodities, and the sellers making an excessive profit on the back of ordinary people. But as far as the ‘Panama leaks’ are concerned Mr Populi had no understanding what that was all about. The question then is why is the PM and his cronies prolonging the Panama leaks problem even though neither the ordinary people of Pakistan care about it and nor is anybody ever going to be able to prove any criminality. The answer is simple. The PM and his government want to distract the attention of ordinary people from the real scandal. The real scandal is that this government is completely incompetent and incapable when it comes to fixing the one issue on which they won the last election. And that is load shedding.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians