An honourable man

No Pakistani politician, public figure would ever find themselves offering resignation because buck stops with them.

More than 300 people, most of them teenagers all from the same high school, are known to have died when a ferry capsized and sank off the South Korean coast on April 16. South Korea is in a prolonged period of national grief and the bodies of the dead are slowly retrieved by divers working in the most hazardous of conditions. All of the crew of the ferry who survived, including the captain, are now in custody and under investigation for their part in the tragedy. The reasons why a modern well-equipped ship could go down in calm waters and in good weather remain a mystery. As of April 28, there are at least 188 confirmed dead.

As a direct result of perceived inadequacies, failures and irregularities surrounding the sinking, South Korean Prime Minister Chung Hon-won has offered his resignation. In his resignation speech he said that to retain his post would be too great a burden for the administration and on behalf of the government, he apologised to the relatives of the dead for the inept way the incident was managed in the early stages and the dissemination of conflicting information. We believe that he has acted honourably by resigning and look askance across our own political landscape for any similar sign of honourable behaviour in the face of innumerable failures. There is none. No politician or public figure in Pakistan would ever find themselves offering their resignation because the buck stops with them. Ours is a shameless culture where laws are flagrantly breached by those who are our lawmakers. They claim inflated allowances and present fake degrees as proof of their learning. Most are guilty of something irregular, but none, if found out, and many increasingly are, would resign in shame. Nobody is going to credibly apologise to the relatives of the thousands of dead civilians and army personnel for the mistakes that led to them being taken from us. Chung Hon-won did the honourable thing. We, however, have no expectation of such resignations occurring in Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 29^th, 2014.

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