Liars and cheats?

Are we a nation of liars and cheats? Not really, would be the response by many. But how come the inclination to lie and cheat is deeply ingrained in the national psyche? Is it just because we are South Asians or because of our own socio-political environment since the first literal martial law in 1954?

Let us consider the following before any emotive judgment on the issue.

“A country’s potential for success and development is directly proportional to its ability to speak the truth. Do we speak the truth? Domestic and foreign investors will invest if they believe we speak the truth.”

Hussain Dawood, Chairman Engro and Dawood Hercules, made this telling statement in a December 2023 speech at the PSX Top 25 Companies Awards in the presence of the caretaker prime minister Anwaarul Haq Kakar and many luminaries from the business world — all those lording over Pakistan’s political and economic landscape.

With one sentence, Dawood encapsulated Pakistan’s fundamental ailment: hypocritical behaviour tinged with lies and a deceptive demeanour. I am sure his addressees included leading businessmen, politicians and civil, military bureaucrats — all of whom have been instrumental in shaping present-day Pakistan.

Mr Dawood had an undeniable point. Look around critically at the words and deeds of the aforementioned public and private elites, and you can easily figure out how many Pakistanis speak the truth privately or otherwise. Big majority?

Hussain Dawood’s words — both stimulating and bitterly sad — took me four decades down memory lane. Back in mid-1984 at the Abbottabad bus stand, we were waiting for the next van in cue to take us to Rawalpindi. When the queue did not move for over an hour, we found out that because of the unusual rush of passengers, van drivers were bypassing regulations — that required of them to report to the bus stand management so they are assigned their turn — and were picking up passengers from the road and leaving for Rawalpindi without reporting to the bus stand manager.

Frustrated, I went over to the stand manager and asked what was going on. We had been waiting for over an hour, but no van had shown up; instead, it was picking up people from the road. Why don’t you tell us the truth? Is there no law or regulation?

What law or regulation are you talking about? We were promised elections in 90 days, and now it has been over seven years.

This response literally left me speechless and was quite sobering for a 24-year-old graduate who had just embarked on the professional journey, full of inspiration and dreams for a rule-of-law-based society in his native Pakistan.

We obviously walked out of the bus stand after this dialogue with the manager to catch our van for Rawalpindi from the roadside.

That encounter in 1984 still sits deep in my memory. It kept coming back during my next three years in Cologne, Germany, with Deutsche Welle Radio. Many things that I said or did were self-understood for me. But for German friends, they amounted to an unwanted social crime. For them, dodging children with lies — when you try to deflect their attention or want them to be off your back for the time being — was the worst crime we could commit.

“Tell them straight what the problem is. They are going to find out the truth soon anyway,” was the curt advice of a friend’s German wife when she saw me deploying the same tactics with her three-year-old son that most Pakistanis would.

My daily interactions with German colleagues and friends would make me increasingly realise the shallowness of our society, where most of us indeed grow up in an environment shaped by lies and hypocrisy, mostly for the sake of temporal expedience — total disregard for how this conduct shapes the mindsets. It inculcates a thinking that is at odds with the general principles of life in Europe i.e. deploying a lie, cheating, or deceptive tactics for temporary gains is not considered something abhorrent.

A Manifestation of the Conduct

Attempts by Pakistan’s ruling elites to secure international funding to offset the consequences of climate change also reflect the same hallmark.

However, Pakistan neglected to monitor the massive carbon emissions of the power sector. A UN mechanism offers carbon credit funding to retrofit old, inefficient thermal plants and lower toxic emissions. And we have a few dozen over two-decade-old thermal power plants that would qualify for such UN support.

Billion-dollar question: has the government asked these companies to go for retrofitting so they emit less carbon into the climate? Has any independent power producer approached the UN for carbon credits?

None of the above has happened. Why should the UN and other donors lend credence to shallow rhetoric? The quest for climate funding is weighed against actual mitigating strategies on the ground, for example, on IPP emissions, and not just insubstantial presentations.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 2^nd, 2024.

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