A Facebook president?

A dictator proposes to come out of retirement to do politics on the strength of a Facebook page.

It was bound to come down to this, as divorced as we are from real life and given our predilection for all things virtual, we were destined to have a Facebook president. We the chattering classes, in doing so, will be sure to not think, or act, or make any effort whatsoever that may involve mental or physical muscle and through those omissions we shall ensure the infliction of yet another incompetent or, in this case, the same incompetent on this country.

If you revisit our glorious and fairly recent past it is loud and ostentatious, which is sometimes mistaken for glamour — swashbuckling cricketers, tragic heroine politicians, the odd millionaire with a boat in the south of France and a flat in one of the smarter sections of London. None of which translated into strong institutions, policy or industry. It raises an important question. Do we have the depth and thereby the capacity to transcend the ordinary, to think, to analyse, to go beyond? As my friend Zahir Riaz, lamenting the fact that nobody reads and referring to our newfound admiration for TED, put it we are taken by ‘the 19-minute idea’. It underpins the problem; we are just not willing to apply ourselves in any way whatsoever, if someone can talk you up in 19 minutes and if it sounds convincing it’s good enough. No need for independent study or confirming the veracity of the story or even having your own story, virtual is good enough and its short cuts all the way.

It’s our penchant for quick fixes; buzzwords and catch-phrases that have ensured a numbing of the mind, no analysis, just momentary emotion that can switch sides the next moment to be a part of the next emotion. It is this that takes us back time and again to military rule which, on average, we tire of in 10 years or so, go back to civilian rule, which we barely tolerate for two years and demand mid-term elections. A round of political musical chairs and several short-lived governments later it’s the military’s turn again. There is lots of shouting about how we learn nothing from our past and that is absolutely true, we learn nothing because we have no interest whatsoever in learning. We haven’t learnt about capacity building, the importance of education, the right to question and demand that the government do its work. Ever thought of why we don’t challenge the military’s self-proclaimed right to rule and why we wait for it to dig itself in to a hole first? Some say we are lazy, others that we don’t care but most say it’s just easier being intellectually dishonest. It’s easier to pretend that destroying institutions is a trade-off to fight against corrupt politicians not thinking that the only permanent solution to corruption is a system that ensures accountability across the board, be it the military, the bureaucracy, the executive, political forces and even the judiciary. This system is not something that falls out of the sky and presents itself, it is something we work very hard at to ensure it is not just there but it works and for all.

So today, a dictator proposes to come out of retirement and head back to Pakistan to do politics on the strength of a Facebook page. Just when it looked like we were all set to welcome him back having forwarded welcome text messages and tweets, our prime minister, perhaps feeling his back against the wall, stepped up to the plate and said that the general would find himself in court on return — facing indictment under Article 6 no doubt. Perhaps our political forces have been compelled to realise that there can be no shortcuts. That their survival lies with a strong and independent judiciary, not one that has been beaten and compromised. But this is only the beginning and until we cease to fear and realise how important an asset an educated population is, we aren’t going anywhere. As for the general and his cyber-dream — “woh kaun hai jinhein tauba ki mil gaee fursat, humain gunah bhi karnay ko zindagi kum hai”.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 17^th, 2010.