How Pakistan can rise

The Pakistanis only need someone to fix a goalpost in front of them

We Pakistanis are suffering from a collective fear. Fear of the future. Fear of the rising cost of living. Fear of the rising national debt. Fear of continuity of the government and fear of deeper adversity. We sleep every night with the fear that our tomorrow will be worse than our today. My generation, born soon after independence, has lived in this fear. But there can be a positive side of it. Iqbal says: Khuda tujhe kisi toofan se aashnaa kar dey/Ke teri beher ki maujon me iztraab nahin.

Perhaps adversity can breed confidence among us to be able to fight back – amazing yet true. The other day I went to the offices of LESCO at Ghazi Road, DHA Lahore and further moved up to the first floor to meet Mr Billah, the young superintending engineer in-charge.

He said us Pakistanis have added hundreds of thousands of air conditioners, refrigerators, deep freezers and microwaves in the last decade to their homes and shops without applying for addition to their permitted loads. What shall be the obvious outcome of such callousness, he asks. A collapse of the distribution system; the supply lines will burst, the transformers will be burnt and the grid stations will trip off.

When it happens the same people will raise hue and cry and will protest against the LESCO and WAPDA. The people must actually protest against themselves. Should they not, he would ask me, while disposing off a number of cases of power theft brought to him? Should you not be behind bars, he remarks with contempt while disposing off a power thief’s application for his bill’s payment in installments and warning him of his mercilessness if it happened again.

Meeting with people who have such painstaking ability to comprehend our national dilemma, of loss of self-esteem, gives one mixed feelings of happiness because a young Pakistani public sector professional is still expectant of moral miracles in a decadent society, of unhappiness because we have eroded our moral values so shamelessly. For a few hours’ temporary relief and comfort we can compromise our national integrity.

Then my thoughts went astray and I floated back to the good days of Pakistan.

During our student days of Bhutto’s era in a seminar on “Third World and Imperialism” an economist who is a leading opinion maker of the day now posed a question to the students: why are the World Bank and the IMF forcing Pakistan to raise the price of Sui gas, 100 per cent our own natural resource? Then we had no answer but today we all have got our answer as we have grown older and wiser. When a nation sells its conscience it has to sell its family silver as well, most of time cheap and under coercion.

Now that Ramadan has come we can learn some lessons and display our resilience. Just as we cut down on our food consumption for a few hours, Pakistanis can cut down their power consumption. It will be like our national fast to shun power consumption for a few hours daily.

I can assure Mr Billah and the masses of Pakistan that if we display such a strong will for a few months which is nothing but going back to the times when we slept without fans we shall be getting uninterrupted power supply. We will also force the producers and the regulators to reduce the rising power tariff. Power is a perishable product. A decline in demand will make the producers nervous and they will come back to the people with lower rates.

Can we do that was the question that was bugging me? I am sure it is the same question which has been bugging Mr Billah and the likes of him. Perhaps he and we all will live to see this imagination turn in to a reality. Our nation of 170 million people knows how to score goals.

They only need someone to fix a goalpost in front of them.

The Pakistanis will have to rise and fix a goal post for themselves. Today the masses are a lot more educated than the earlier generations. Media has brought the whole world of knowledge to them.

It is not just electricity. The nation is paying disguised higher fuel and diesel prices because hefty government taxes are included in the sale price, because the government has no other way to raise money for its extravagant expenditures. If the nation collectively decides to go on a national fast to reduce its demand for oil by pooling transport, using public transport, not using oil in generators immediately there will be a drop in demand for fuel causing low sales, thus giving to the government reduced revenues from the sector. The outcome will be lowering of the fuel prices.

The same fight has to go on with owners of the private education system.

In older days the families sent their children to government schools where the fees were nominal and after matriculation the students went to government colleges where too fees were very low. Some went to the Punjab University, among the oldest of the Universities of India by paying very little by way of fees. It was so because the state took the responsibility of education upon itself which as the prime function of the state.

Then the state gave up its responsibility to the private sector and look where we stand today. The nation is divided between the haves and the haves-not in terms of private and government education. Now perhaps it is too late to prohibit private education but it is very much possible to draw an education policy which brings the fees of the private schools at par with the government schools and if the private schools do not accept it then the nation can keep a national fast to stop sending their children to private schools. The private schools will not be able to withstand that for long and soon will come to terms with the government and accept a uniform national education system.

Health care too needs to be the responsibility of the state as well. The private sector hospitals charges are out of reach of the ordinary man; such fees and bills which only the minor elite can pay. The government hospitals too have adopted a somewhat similar attitude and the poor prefer to die than treat themselves on account of their poverty.

What I am writing today is not a dream. It will become a reality of tomorrow. The 170 million Pakistanis are not living. They are merely surviving to save themselves from death, in their own motherland which they got after their democratic struggle. They are the owners of their country yet living like slaves. Today the masses perceive every affluent Pakistani as a thief, who steals electricity, who steals government taxes, who loots banks through defaults or write-offs, who robs the people through official corruption.

The masses, the real owners of the country today are similar to the forces of Mao Tse-tung and the minority elite are like the parasites of Chiang Kai-shek.

The future of Pakistan can be easily predicted in the light of this argument.