Money cannot buy a general election, especially for a sitting government, if its performance has been dismal.
LAHORE: While money can facilitate electioneering, it cannot buy a general election, especially for a sitting government, if its performance has been dismal and there is genuine discontent and anger amongst the masses. Never has the performance of a sitting government, especially on issues concerning the common man, such as insecurity, crippling power shortages, inflation, unemployment, collapse of health, education, public transportation, organised extortion and land-grabbing, been so poor as it has been during the tenure of the one that was voted into power in 2008. The unending series of scams, the shameful apathy towards the sufferings of the victims and creation of obstacles in the prosecution and investigations ordered by the Supreme Court are acts that cannot be erased from public memory. Except for successfully carrying out amendments to the Constitution, or enactment of laws without the political will for their implementation, no effort was made to alleviate the suffering of the people.
While this government looked after landlords by elevating the support price of agriculture produce, it did nothing to ensure that millions employed in the farming sector get a proportional increase in wages. This government never tires of rhetoric on the importance of education and development of natural resources but, in practice, appoints semi-literate and corrupt cronies to head vital state corporations, jeopardising their long-term future and employment of millions.
It targeted the Higher Education Commission only to protect fake degree-holders and in the process, harmed higher education. In such circumstances, even hundreds of billions allocated for launching an election campaign will yield no positive results because the suffering, anger and humiliation that the people have gone through are still fresh in memory. Those in power must remember that the powerful establishment, with all its resources, could not stop Benazir Bhutto’s electoral win because the public sentiment desperately wanted a change in 1988. In the recent American elections, Mitt Romney, despite launching the most expensive election campaign in US history could not steal the elections because the public had still not recovered from the wounds inflicted by the Republican party’s rule under George W Bush.
Malik Tariq Ali
Published in The Express Tribune, February 9th, 2013.
