The price of pain —Andleeb Abbas

The government had merrily been declaring that all the terrorists have been nailed and had blown the horns for victory celebrations. The recent bomb blasts are a harsh reminder that dealing with just the symptoms and not the root causes of the problem will always have a short-term impact of a lull before the storm

You are better dead than alive. This is perhaps the most apt description of the state of affairs for many unfortunate people in this country. Whether it is bomb blasts by religious fanatics or extravagant abuse of official privileges by political ‘VIPs’, the mantra is that money is the best healer for all physical and emotional wounds. The competition is on. There is an auction of who pays the highest price of hushing up people screaming against injustice, oppression or corruption. There is a race between the media for revealing the unjust and for the politicians to buy the silence of victims. From the tragic death of the 12-year old maid in the house of an advocate to the birth of a child delivered in a rickshaw due to the VVIP blockage on roads, every leader thinks that money can buy anything. The rate of compensation depends on how bad the scandal is and how badly it affects the reputation of the concerned party. From one lac to five lac rupees, money is dished out from all parties in an attempt to express ‘their’ allegiance against the wrongdoers.

As the city of Lahore is still reeling from bomb blasts targeting prime areas of Model Town, R A Bazaar and Allama Iqbal Town, the complete inability of the government to provide any type of security to its citizens has once again been exposed. The government had merrily been declaring that all the terrorists have been nailed and had blown the horns for victory celebrations. The recent bomb blasts are a harsh reminder that dealing with just the symptoms and not the root causes of the problem will always have a short-term impact of a lull before the storm.

This attitude is reflective of the myopic thinking of the leadership in the country. This reactive approach is applied to deal with the multiple chronic problems facing this country. From shortage of energy to water, and from sugar to wheat, the story remains the same — disregard the root cause of problems; dismiss any attempt to discuss preventive planning, and disdain of proactive alternative identification of issues at hand; keep waiting till the disaster happens; deny the responsibility and pin it to the previous regimes and then go into the crisis management mode with short-term disastrous solutions rather than long-term development of viable and feasible strategies to ensure the removal of the root causes of the problem.

Terrorist attacks are dealt with predictable aplomb. The inability of the government to tackle this killing surge of terrorism is a combination of lack of sincerity and incompetence. While the government is fighting a war in the northern areas against extremism, the PML-N was collaborating with banned outfits in contesting by-elections in Punjab. It is an open secret that the PML-N collaborated with the so-called defunct organisations like the Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi to win elections. These double standards are typically reflective of self-interest being above national interest. It is this hypocrisy that has completely destroyed the faith of the public. The statements of the chief minister to tackle and eliminate terrorism thus ring a hollow bell both in the public’s ears and in the ears of the terrorists who know that when it comes to power and position, the enemy becomes the best friend.

Lip service days are over. The government must realise that they will be caught in their own trap of false promises and empty hopes. They must learn the art of dealing with the root cause of the problem and uprooting it to deliver sustainable results.

It is this short-term approach to anything and everything that eventually brings their downfall. History shows that both the ruling and the opposition party have hardly lasted more than a couple of years whenever in power. They come with an exaggerated list of promises, but get so entangled in covering up their own lack of competence and character that very soon they become victims of their own lack of vision and values.

As the government funds its own extravagances, the public suffers shortages of water, power, sugar, wheat, etc. As the list of casualties due to bomb blasts or public injustices increase and the government has to dole out public money to pay for the unfortunate human demises, the gap is filled by decreasing the development expenditure. The development expenditure, which is already one of the lowest in the world, has further been reduced by Rs 100 billion. The only development sponsorship strategy employed so far is to beg and borrow. Living on other people’s money is never a long-term sustenance solution. Thus, as expected, with hardly half the year gone, we have run out of resources as ‘Friends of Pakistan’ have not fulfilled their pledge to give us the money to support our burgeoning expenditures. A country ranked near bottom on human development index, with spending on health and education already negligible, cutting down the development budget is not just terrible but criminal. As the basic facilities to the ordinary man get more and more scarce, crime, terrorism and lawlessness are going to become a matter of routine.

With the media exposing these social and political injustices, it is just a matter of time before the government discovers the adverse impact of such a short-sighted approach. Power and money have never been sustainable strategies to rule and govern a country in the long run — a fact very obvious to all but those who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

The writer is a consultant and CEO of FranklinCovey and can be reached at andleeb@franklincoveysouthasia.com