Out with the old…

The Pakistan People’s Party has decided to pension off the octogenarian chief minister of Sindh, Qaim Ali Shah

And in with the new. Or new-ish. A twig has just fallen from a branch on the tree of the geriatric kleptocrats that run much of the country at a political level. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) working out of its camp office in Dubai has decided to pension off the octogenarian chief minister of Sindh, Qaim Ali Shah.

It had been obvious to many for some years that age had overtaken his capacity to effectively perform the job of chief minister. The rest of the world was moving somewhat faster than he, and in the end the party hierarchy had to take a dose of reality and wave him off into the sunset. Few are going to weep at his exit, and in the end he was comprehensively stitched up by the very people who had maintained him in post way beyond his sell-by date. Such is politics.



Paradoxically his undoing is likely to have been the issue of an extension of the powers of the Rangers, extending those powers beyond the confines of Karachi to the rest of Sindh province — which was the very last thing the PPP satraps wanted as some of them might have their own collars felt were this to be so. His proposal to extend the Rangers powers went down like a lead balloon, and the doors of the retirement home opened shortly thereafter. There are going to be other changes in the Sindh cabinet later in the week. The PPP has a free hand as it has a simple majority in the Sindh Assembly and will have no difficulty electing a new leader of the house. Whether he or she will be any more effective than the old leader is very much open to question. The usual candidates are already lining up with Murad Ali Shah perhaps the leading light among them.

Something needs to change in Sindh. Its ramshackle governance in recent years is symptomatic of the decline in the fortunes of the PPP generally, a perception reinforced by the trouncing it got in the AJK elections recently. We can but hope for better times, but doubt the Rangers will ever get a grip on the bigger fish.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 26^th, 2016.

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