The glass half empty

After 76 years of independence, Pakistan still has major challenges up ahead

Last year and this year in a TV show that I and a few others do during the week when asked the usual Independence Day question of our gains and losses of the last 76 years as a nation, my response is always positive given the flavour of the day. Indeed, when I look back at the journey that all Pakistanis have made since Independence it is upward mobility for all in terms of national, societal or personal well-being and how Pakistan compares to the day it was born. Given the cynical self though which has garnered over the years in a media environment which tends to focus only on the negatives — because that alone sells — it is prudent to spotlight the missing space, the proverbial glass half empty.

Political or economic malaise isn’t born in a day or over one tenure alone, it is a culmination of decades of dereliction. Our biggest loss of the last 76 years is we are not where we could have been as a nation. Rather we just brushed the edge of going under and barely survived with some embarrassing supplications. Our problems: We are heavily indebted; we don’t earn enough but spend a lot more than we have; our treasury is literally all borrowed; our governance is abysmal; our administrative structures are creaky and heavily compromised; rule of law, if at all, is only nominal and the rich anyway escape it; we don’t pay taxes and launder money easily. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Shakespeare may have then concluded, “that we ‘turned’ underlings.”

We have hardly known or learnt discipline as a nation or a people. We were reasonable at Independence and a decade after, but it was on a slide. Slowly and gradually, we turned into a mob and lost the essence of being a society with responsibilities. We lost our civic sense and let our surroundings and environments degrade into heaps of rubbish and refuse — literally and metaphorically. Our municipal sense took leave of us as a society. We were and are an unruly mob on the roads and have charted our own will in what were joint spaces or collectives. Instead, roads and collective spaces were arrogated as personal holdings. When respect for law faded so did law soon after and we turned into a horde.

We don’t recognise preservation of an ecology, an environment, or heritage which is a combined national possession — we instead steal from government and smuggle artifacts away as personal gain. We proliferate trash and never clean after us — something more progressive societies teach their children as toddlers. Our leaders justify smuggling and unpaid taxes as a way of life. We steal electricity as a right and bill the losses as exorbitant rates to those who still pay. We in many ways are a lost cause who have learnt life differently from those who are knocking at the zenith of human existence. Valuing law and respecting it is what differentiates societies.

A society will throw up its leaders from the same stock. When you stop being civilised unfortunately your leadership exhibits the same traits. They represent a mindset which is half human and half animalistic. Except that they will now hold unchecked power as public representatives through which they only give sublime meaning to depredation and dismissal of law or checks which decent governance would normally ordain. It is an existence of entitlement arrogated from position, authority or pelf — three principal agents of our collective degeneration. Politics and economy, governance and administration, and structures — governance, democratic or bureaucratic — are the next to ruin under this disposition. Corruption, corrosion and creakiness then feed of each other. This defines our existing functional mindset. There will be exceptions but at great cost to themselves proving the rule.

Lack of education, and economic opportunity in terms of jobs and incomes, breeds this culture of abject disrespect and abandon dismissiveness reinforcing the mob and mindset of hordes. A scary comparison with some African states where societies have lost their bearings may explain our predicament better. To many we may not have yet touched those lows but venture out of your barricaded comfort zones and taste the flavour for those on the outside. Soon the swamp will over run the separation between our make-believe and the real world. If we can return dignity back to this large mass of people, they will also learn to do their part more responsibly. If rule of law is what they will observe, rule of law is what they will expect to be observed.

Basic education to the College level — the first twelve years — is the first step to restore their dignity. There on professions or vocations can kick in. The government must enable these minimum societal and human standards. The society will benefit as will economy. The electorate will become more discerning and throw up better leadership which will stand the scrutiny of conduct and performance. If this is what will answer Bilawal Bhutto’s lament of his last address to the National Assembly, this is what he and Maryam and others in the new generation of politics should be working off their backs on. You can’t have a 100 billion PKR budget on education when what you are handing out 500 billion in alms under the BISP. That is akin to addicting a society to the dole.

If we need good leaders, we will need a good society. Everything else will follow its natural course. Here is then a recipe for the caretakers for the time they are in-charge: While the SIFCs etc will run their own course those are only band-aids to immediate pain. The short-term needs foreign infusion of funds and those will come under one name or another, but real sovereignty begins at home. The journey to that end though must begin right now — only if we know what constitutes it. We desperately need an economic thinker, not a manager, to envision our path to freedom from the yoke of foreign dependence. Mahbub ul Haq was last of the ‘Bohemians’; anyone after has hardly known his Adam Smith from his Keynes. Nor do they care.

The caretaker prime minister will do well to institute austerity for starters. Next, strict discipline in his government and on the roads. He will need to enforce respect for law and the minorities. He will be tested on both. Governance for him should constitute strict adherence to law for all, supported by an effective administration which should stop being servile before authority. He will do equally well to focus on government provisioned schools and colleges through his ministries at the Centre and in the provinces. Let this hiatus from regular and chaotic politics be gainfully used in shaping the society of the future. Our hopes can then only turn promising.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 18^th, 2023.

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