Outdoor media watch.
Yes, even those readers not exactly well-versed with the economics of the industry would know that outdoor publicity costs a lot of money. What they don’t know is that it costs far more than what they would think.
The money involved varies depending on whether it is billboards we are talking about or streamers in the middle of the road. This form of advertisement provides significant revenue to their respective cities, which through bodies like, say, Lahore’s Parks and Horticulture Authority, arbitrate rates depending on the quantum of traffic on a particular road and the purchasing power of the demographic that would ply that road.
The recent blitz campaign of outdoor publicity, asking for the army chief to stage a coup (“For God’s sake, take over”) covered several cities, including Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Sargodha, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Peshawar, to name a few. On high tariff roads. What is more, they appeared in the cantonment areas as well.
Someone has clearly spent a lot of money.
That someone, apparently, is a fellow named Ali Hashmi, who heads a “political party”, called Move On Pakistan. “Dictatorship is much better than this corrupt government,” he said in one of the interviews that followed his poster carpet bombing. “The way General Sharif has dealt with terrorism and corruption, there’s no guarantee that the next man would be as effective as him,” he said.
Of course, there are many issues here. The first, in our coup-prone praetorian state, is the suspicion that the military has something to do with it; this view is further buttressed by the appearance of these posters in the cantonment areas. Those suspicious of the military’s subsequent denials of any involvement ask why the cantonment authorities weren’t more vigilant in the first place, when the posters were being placed.
That is all speculative thinking, of course. Not casting an aspersion on the competence and professionalism of our military, but the fact of the matter is that it, like all the large organisations of the world, will have instances of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Diseconomies of scale. Yes, heads should roll on this, when it comes to the relevant personnel in the cantonment board, but that’s about it. Furthermore, there actually is a constituency in our country that wants military rule. This lot doesn’t need much prodding to hold forth their views. They aren’t shy of telling anyone who’d listen (and many who won’t) that the military should take over. This just happened to be one of those who also had cash to burn.
Even in this second, innocuous explanation, there is much to ponder on. There are some limits on free speech, even in societies that hold such freedoms sacred. Incitement to violence, for instance, is a no-go. Instigating a citizen of the state to commit high treason is definitely another. In fact, instigating high treason is being guilty of it oneself.
Till we start making examples of such individuals, we won’t make any headway.