Revenge of the worthless?

Once upon a time there lived a young boy who promised that democracy would have its revenge. And so it did.

Vengeance was swift and brutal. On Saturday revenge floated on the streets and roads of Karachi as vehicles and residents drifted and waded their way to home and office. Revenge flowed through the electric wires in place of current, and revenge bobbed along tonnes of trash sailing through watery avenues and boulevards. Revenge paraded in the wide space between official promises and actual performance and mocked the residents of this metropolis as they struggled to reconcile with the intensity of their misfortune.

But they should have seen it coming. The young boy and his ilk had been exacting revenge again and again on a hapless populace fed fat on rhetoric and rhetoric alone. Warriors of democracy came and went and Karachi kept waiting to be saved. Warriors of khakis came and went and Karachi kept waiting to be saved. Warriors of Urdu and Sindhi and Pashto came and went and Karachi kept waiting to be saved.



But saved from whom?

Tragedy flowed out of the ballot box like toxic magma and scorched its way across the land. Rural Sindh was seared with fury. Infants died utter negligence in Thar as men and women begged for health, education and fundamental rights in Hyderabad, Khairpur, Sukkur, and Larkana. The revenge of democracy was not done yet however. It smashed schools, pulverised hospitals, atomised roads, defiled thanas, pounded courts and infected morale with pessimism and dread.

This revenge was exacted on the wrong people by the wrong people. The Sindh government started off as a joke, turned into a farce and has now mutated into a tragedy. Its sheer incompetence takes your breath away. Its ineptitude overflows through the sewers and gutters of Karachi. The stench of mal-governance wafts across the land wreaking olfactory mayhem upon the hapless.

And the hapless look on haplessly as they have done all these years crushed under the weight of the ballot box. They waited for their drainage system and electricity system to be fixed; they waited for their garbage to be lifted and their hospitals to be revamped; they waited for their roads to be carpeted and their water to be supplied; they waited for their safety and security and for the supply of basic amenities.

Instead they got Qaim Ali Shah. And Nisar Khuhro. And Sharjeel Memon.

They did not get a local government until the court had to intervene. And they still do not have it. Perhaps one day they will. But even if they do, the Sindh government has already extracted a tooth, an arm, a leg, and possibly the spine too from the local government’s powers.

And here’s where the new Shah makes his entry. He goes by the name of Murad Ali Shah and he’s been to Stanford. Nice. He also likes to order garbage off the streets while enjoying parathas and tea at a roadside dhaba surrounded by incompetent sycophants. Oh, and he seems to revel in the glare of the camera. He’s been brought in to salvage the rotten image of his party. And so image-making is what he is doing. Which is better than no image-making a la his predecessor, but when you are responsible for arguably the worst-governed province in the country, a better image can only go so far before it smashes into the wall of ineptitude and official callousness.

So here’s a newsflash for Mr. Shah: you are not the mayor of Karachi. Optics may be important for you, but if they are your priority along with quick fixes and populist measures, you are merely exacting revenge from a different angle.



But isn’t that what the role model of all chief ministers does, you may ask? Go visit a government hospital in Punjab and the answer will bite you like a rattlesnake. The whiplash of democracy lacerates people across and beyond provincial lines. Whiz across eight lane motorways and witness human development horror unfolding across the fertile hinterlands. Catch the gleaming metro to the nearest slum and see women dying in childbirth. Visit the model thanas in Lahore, Faisalabad and Gujranwala and revel in men being tortured under the latest 60-inch LCD screens.

Or cross over into the Khanland of K-P and feast your eyes on a jalsa crowd surprising Imran Khan by shouting a loud ‘No’ when asked if things have improved the last few years. Tour the hundreds of new schools being constructed in the province but do remember most are being funded by the UK development agency. Yes he police are better here, and so is the local government structure but the yawning chasm between promise and performance continues to mock those who stuffed their yearnings into the ballot box and got Pervez Khattak in return.

The antidote to this deluge of misery is not to throw the ballot box out, but to replace it with one that is sturdier and more transparent. The problem is not with democracy, it is with the unreformed, unaccountable and unvarnished system that is in existence in this land. This creaking system is begging and pleading for reform, but this reform will not come if it threatens the interests of those who are its current beneficiaries.

Every institution that constitutes the governance structure of this land needs radical reform. Why can’t Pakistan have the best education and health facilities, the best police and investigating agencies, the best municipal corporations and efficient, service-oriented governments? Why can’t Pakistan have the most transparent elections through a system that enables the best talent in the country — and not just the so-called electables — to enter legislatures? Why can’t Pakistan have an executive that operates under a system of checks and balances so that individuals interests remain subsumed to institutional ones? Why can’t Pakistan aim higher than the myopic aims of dynastic leaders who will ultimately become footnotes in our chequered history?

The answers lies in the ballot box. But which one?

Published in The Express Tribune, August 7^th, 2016.

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