Calamities are not shy lone rangers. They usually seem to prefer coming in multiples. Of late, however, man-plus-insect-made and natural disasters appear to have set up their permanent abode on our poor country’s ‘front porch’.
The otherwise blessed month of Ramadan was an especially unfortunate one this year. Even as the blood of innocents flowed freely in Karachi, the record rainfall in the South – the worst in those parts in 50 years – resulted in massive over-flooding of vast swathes of Sindh, causing much human misery and destruction of staple and cash crops and livestock for the second year running.
Though the monsoon spell has nearly spent itself at that end of the country, but the toll has been devastating: by some estimates nearly 300 dead, about six million affected, 1.2 million homes destroyed and standing crops on 1.7 million acres affected.
Simultaneously, the dengue causing mosquito also seems to have found fertile breeding ground in the Punjab, laying low thousands while proving fatal to an unfortunate few (so far). Not for the first time, the provincial government has been caught totally unawares, and again its apathy, its lack of initiative in preventive measures has led to the outbreak reaching epidemic proportions, now threatening to rear its ugly head in the flood-affected areas also.
It is a pretty bleak picture on top of the dismal political, economic and law and order situation, and would no doubt cause sleepless nights to any normal leadership, sensitive to the people’s pain. But not to our disunited, disjointed lot that is so seriously lacking even in a passable modicum of proficiency.
The president compounded his lack of real interest by undertaking a ridiculous photo-op in the calamity-hit areas, observing the damage from the air and later wading in the flooded streets in what is his own patch – an action as hollow and fake as it gets. What followed was even worse.
In the face of such formidable problems, the president, true to form, scooted off to more agreeable climes, to London this time round to get a check on his own physical well-being only to be handed a clean bill of health post-haste.
That was not all. The prime minister too went on an ‘earth-shaking’ jaunt to Kazakhstan, and later on a slightly more meaningful trip to Tehran, from where he could winkle out $100 million for the victims of the floods. With none of the two big chiefs choosing to remain home among their suffering brethren, or making some tangible effort to ameliorate their lot, taking a cue, the speaker of the National Assembly and her firebrand of a spouse too left their worst-hit district Badin under the flood waters to spend some much-needed rest and recreation time in Dubai’s relaxed environs. But of course it might well be a ‘diplomatic’ leave of absence, as fireworks, directed mainly at Zulfiqar Mirza, were expected in the latest session of the National Assembly, with the missus sheepishly presiding over the proceedings. As it was, the session was prorogued after only one day, causing a loss of millions to the already strained national exchequer.
Before flying off to London, the president took two quite remarkable steps. First, he fired off an appeal to the UN for help and then, no doubt considering it as the most effective antidote under the circumstances, asked the nation to collectively pray for the cessation of the misfortunes which have befallen them, implying no doubt the deluge that had desolated the southern parts of the country. As for some practical crisis management, that was as conspicuously absent as the man himself!
Only if our prayers had worked, we would have been far better off than we are. As for the UN, we know from last year’s floods that its appeal didn’t raise the kind of funding it had anticipated. Now, with major donors’ economies already in dire straits and donor fatigue having set in too, the UN secretary general’s call is not likely to have much of an impact either.
On top of it, the donors no longer trust the ability and integrity of our bureaucratic channels and local handlers and are extremely reluctant to route their funds through them. And last year’s experience tells us that by the time they find the right NGO, if at all, to funnel their funds through, the interest has waned.
Instead of seeking relief from abroad every time we are struck by a disaster, what we really need is a professional well-trained outfit on a permanent basis which can be quickly deployed to its disaster-hit areas to provide timely relief to the victims (without displaying any prejudice or bias against our already much agonized minorities – which to our abiding shame has been the case in Sindh – and also to assist in their rehabilitation.
The worst calamity is that there really is little that one can expect from the cash-strapped (read bankrupt) federal and provincial governments, and their paucity of ideas as well as practical will. For if these ingredients were there, the despair and distress among the affected would have been mitigated a great deal. Even better the scale of devastation and suffering, from rains and dengue, would have been far reduced.
Postscript: By the way, despite tens of billions have been lavished on its infrastructure year after year for almost a decade, with the MQM’s Czar of Karachi, Mustafa Kamal, lording over it for five uninterrupted years, the city was literally drained in rain-water still, exposing his hollow boasts and gloating about unprecedented public works carried out in his incumbency. Perhaps MK had his attention focused on ‘glory’ projects that could be flaunted, like flyovers and bridges and overlooked the part that an efficient drainage system was considered essential even in the time of Mohenjo Daro.
The writer is Sports and Magazines Editor, Pakistan Today.
