Head over heels

Promises, it appears, are made to be broken and governmental promises definitely so. As night time temperatures plummet in the north of the country, anger and disgust with the powers that be are driving flood victims head over heels into debt.

A large percentage of these shelterless people have yet to receive the initial Rs20,000 pledged by the government for rebuilding homes and, even for those that have, this meagre sum goes nowhere. If the remaining Rs80,000 miraculously materialises, reconstruction will still remain an impossible dream, as conjuring up a reasonable abode from Rs100,000 is out of the question, unless the advice of the acting chief of the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Asghar Ali, is taken — ‘build out of mud’. For the PDMA to promote dangerous construction methods in areas prone to both flash floods and earthquakes is beyond comprehension.

The authority should be strongly reprimanded, with the thoughtless official pushing this solution removed from a post he is obviously unfit for. With winter fast approaching, the homeless are in urgent need of shelter; shelter the government unrealistically promised in the immediate aftermath of the floods a very long three months ago. That the government was totally unable to cope with the scale of the disaster became apparent as the latter's horrifying scale was unfolding. Despite that, the government has still not gotten its act together, leaving millions of affected people with no other option but to struggle along as best they can, even though this, unfortunately, means being swallowed by indigenous vultures in the process.

Where on earth are homeless, jobless, assetless people supposed to find the collateral necessary to obtain legal loans? Who, other than family members quite liable to be in exactly the same boat, is going to leap to their rescue with the necessary barrow loads of hard cash needed to buy bricks and mortar if, that is, those in trouble can prove ownership of a plot on which to build? The answer is, quite simply, loan sharks, who will, by hook or by crook, get their investment back, with stupendous interest, one nefarious way or another.

Heartless purveyors of construction material are reaping criminal profits too. The price of a sack of cement has doubled in recent weeks, corrugated iron sheeting is at least 50 per cent more costly now, as is all else even remotely related to building shelter of either a temporary or permanent nature.

The scenario is a much larger rerun of what happened in the autumn of 2005, when the homeless and others affected by the earthquake struggled to survive, as their well-placed countrymen ignored their plight or, worse, exploited their predicament. Profiting from other people’s misery is a despicable human trait that needs to be eradicated from society before it eliminates what currently passes for ‘society’.

Published in The Express Tribune October 19^th, 2010.