The flood season

Rainwater, from Dir to Dadu, develops into floods because our leaders have no will to harvest this bounty of nature

Floods — uncontrollable rain water gushing through streams and rivers from mountain ranges down to the plains of mostly southern Punjab and upper Sindh — have been a seasonal affair for generations, for successive governments and the media. The only vestige of regularity in the irregular pattern of monsoon rains is the sight of the political class and the media overlooking the floodwaters, distributing food items to the affected and leaving behind instructions for the district administration to take care of the locals. These visits have to be brief, for there are many other such stops on the way. Not just year after year, but generation after generation, we have seen this happening. There is yet another great addition to dealing with floods and other ‘natural’ calamities — the National Disaster Management Authority. It is supposedly there to manage things in the wake of disasters.

One thing I am sure of when it comes to floods is that it is not a natural disaster. Floods occur with regularity because our political class is incompetent, expedient, short-sighted and unwilling to take difficult political decisions. Rainwater, all the way from Dir to Dadu, develops into floods because our leaders have no will to harvest this bounty of nature. They have no shame and no regret in allowing floods to take the natural course — devastate populations, crops and animals before losing strength and flowing into the Arabian Sea. This is a shameful neglect of planning and development of Pakistan’s vast water resources.

Water resource planning is hostage to bad politics. It is among the many other things that the Pakistani society would like to see happen through the agency of the state. The real challenge of Pakistan, in almost every critical aspect, is that the political process and main vehicles of it, the political parties, have been taken over by individuals and groups that have hardly any stake in Pakistan. It appears that they are here to rob us and run to places where they can hide their theft and themselves. With the ease of exit and entry at their disposal and no fear of the law, they have relocated their hearts and minds to other countries for the sake of their stolen wealth.



Britain, as a colonial power, in this regard, did a better job than post-independence ‘national’ leaders. It saw the potential of agricultural development — though for its own extractive reasons — in the five rivers of our land, and the deserts in this region. They laid a very sound foundation for the canal system. In the early decades, we were able to build two dams — just two dams and no more. The life and capacity of these two dams is shrinking each year, while our leaders and the governments they form postpone making decisions on the construction of more dams and reservoirs, leaving it to the coming generations — only they would build the necessary consensus. Not sure how long Pakistan could endure this type of leadership that is devoid of vision, energy and commitment to developing the country.

As a weak society that is unable to hold the political class accountable and allows the committing of every wrong, Pakistan cannot escape the consequences of having a passive population. As the floods recede after causing massive destruction equivalent to a loss of almost one per cent of GDP, the pictures of this annually-assured destruction will disappear from the political radar.

Our ineffective leadership is used to dealing with symptoms and not the cause of a problem. In any other part of the world, abundance of water during the rainy season would have been used as an opportunity to make deserts like Cholistan and Thar, and the Baloch territories on the west of the Indus, bloom. That is the only rational way to manage ‘floods’.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 5^th, 2015.

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