Putting the green back in Pakistan

On a recent Tuesday morning, Rao Saif Ur Rehman strolled wistfully through the streets of Lahore, Stephen Magagnini of the Sacremento Bee reports . In Liberty Market, the Sacramento-educated industrialist paused outside his family’s jewellery store, glanced at the armed guards along the square and reflected on peace that has been evading his country for a long time. In March 2009, masked terrorists armed with Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team near the market, killing eight people, six of them bodyguards and two innocent bystanders.
There have been suicide bombings and bomb blasts in or around Liberty Market, which no longer lives up to its name.
“Sacramento has changed me completely,” said Rehman, 46, who became a US citizen in 2001 after graduating from California State University, Sacramento, in 1990 with a degree in international business. “When I came to the US, I felt like the chains on me were broken, there was no pollution, I could eat as much as I wanted, there was no chaos.” Rehman, who earned $4.5 an hour in Sacramento delivering Straw Hat pizzas and working as a parking lot security guard, has become a multimillionaire in Pakistan.
He’s among a growing number of influential Pakistanis educated in Northern California who have brought their expertise back to their country, which needs their support the most now.
“There are five different pillars of power,” Rehman explained. “The military establishment, the presidency, the parliament and the prime minister, the judiciary and the media. Pakistan is not working as a nation because it consists of regional pieces that aren’t attached.”
Rehman grew up in Faisalabad, an industrial hub about two hours from Lahore. He came to the United States in 1987 and enrolled at Sacramento City College. “My dad said, ‘You need to come back when you complete your studies.’”
Rehman found Sacramentans “very very nice, cooperative and friendly.” He took strength in Friday prayers at Sacramento’s Downtown Mosque and Masjid Anur Islamic Center in the south area. He harvested crops in Yuba City and worked in a jewellery store in Old Sacramento, which helped him buy his first car, a $700 red Mazda.
Rehman returned home to work in his family’s jewellery business, then started his own textile manufacturing and exporting firm, selling cotton blankets to Bed, Bath and Beyond and other international outlets.
His political views aside, Rehman is still a traditionalist who agreed to an arranged marriage. “I accepted her sight unseen,” he said of his wife, and did not see her face until the wedding. They now have three sons and a daughter.
“To me it is not being fanatic, it is about being religious or not religious,” he said over a cup of coffee in a cafe at one end of Liberty Market. “If you’re secular, you are not committed to anything, you’re living a life that’s spiritually directionless.” Rehman prays five times a day. “I want to be a successful person when I appear before God on the day of judgment,” he said.
He has amassed vast wealth. His 10,000-square-foot home in Faisalabad has 14 servants who earn $50 to $100 a month – maids, drivers, security guards and a gardener.
Rehman pays his 500 factory employees anywhere from $70 to $1,300 a month, and plans to convert agricultural and forest waste into white coal by building a $50 million power plant that could serve hundreds of industries in Faisalabad. “Power is a huge problem,” he said. “We are out of power two to six times a day from one to two hours all year round…We want to buy natural gas from Iran but the US government opposes it.”
Rehman says his friends are encouraging him to go into politics, but right now he is content to support cricket star Imran Khan, whose Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (Justice Movement) party is promising sweeping reforms, including ending nepotism and favouritism and imprisoning corrupt officials.
“Khan has been struggling in politics for 15 years and he’s turned out to be a monster,” said Rehman by way of praise for the politician. “The two ruling parties didn’t deliver, the system’s corrupt, the economy’s down, our democracy’s hanging in the middle of nowhere.”
Others with Sacramento ties – including University of California, Davis-educated Syed Fakhar Imam, former speaker of the Pakistani parliament, and his wife, Abida Hussain, former Pakistan ambassador to the US–liken Khan to Ronald Reagan, a celebrity with a plan. They say that five years after the US pulls out of Afghanistan, Pakistan’s security problems can be brought under control and it will be ready for international investment and tourism.
“We’re struggling with unemployment, inflation, lack of energy and the government-run railroads are dead right now, the airline’s dead, the steel industry’s dead,” Rehman said. “Anybody who can solve these issues will be a hero.”