Leaders without Soul: Followers without Hope
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburgh, CA
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country… corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.” - Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864
The joke is trite, but is relevant when viewed in relation to the presence of brazenly rampant corruption in Pakistan. The owner of an orchard once caught a young boy red handed stealing fruit, and pulled him down from the tree, threatening to take him to his father. The boy, nonetheless, protested defiantly, contending, “Where are you taking me to and what for?” The baffled owner yelled, “Rascal, to your father”. “But my father is on the next tree”, said the boy innocently.
When the Supreme Court in its verdict of Dec. 16, 2009, made public the list of over eight thousand “sacred cows” who allegedly had maneuvered to digest without a blurb the bank loans of 54 billion rupees, not a single one of them blinked in shame, nor did any one of them come forward, making a confession, “Yes, terrible mistakes had been made and I am sorry. I return here whatever I can, and I seek forgiveness, both from God as well as from the people I had been entrusted to serve”. “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language”, as said Emerson, is what followed, instead.
As if Pakistan were not a country, but a mausoleum, a new culture of lamentations and pathology as a solution to the woes that inflict it was invoked. The blood of Ms. Benazir and of her father came to be used as a sort of atonement for all the present and past sins by Mr. Zardari and his associates. President Zardari even went over-time to set a new tone, as he read in the verdict a clear conspiracy to oust his government. He counted some 64 times his so-called “sins/mistakes”, but not for once did he admit that financial irregularities had taken place, and that he was now there to set things right. He and his henchmen saw the conspiracies, but not the wholesale plundering that had taken place, and they being a part of it, somehow.
“Did the Chief Justice resign when Musharraf accused him? Why should we resign”? “If Sharifs didn’t resign over charges, why should the PPP?”; “Attempt to oust government will be resisted with full might,” said the PM. “Do not intimidate me or my workers”, “Don’t consider our tolerance our weakness. We know how to fight”, “The whole country is under my charge,” said the President. He even described Garhi Khuda Buksh as the “ Karbala of the PPP”. His close friend and minister, Zulfiqar Mirza, even went admitting when he said loud and clear, “By God, on the assassination of Ms. Benazir, we, at one point, almost thought of revolting against Pakistan”. Instead of accepting the judgment and vowing to set the house in order; a jeering and mocking campaign against the Supreme Court got initiated. Now attempts are being made to procure votes of confidence in favor of the President from all the four provincial assemblies. Would that make him any more reliable than what he is? Chronic diseases need authentic and aggressive treatment; mere statements are not enough. “All things may corrupt when minds are prone to evil”, Ovid.
Pakistan, unfortunately, is a country where the leaders like Dr. Faustus, remorselessly appear to have signed a pact with the Satan, “Mephistopheles”, for infinite mortal pleasures, and in the bargain have bartered their ‘souls’. So no hearts cry here, because no heart is healthy here. They are ‘sick’ and are ‘rusted’, or are totally ‘locked’ and ‘heedless’, to speak in the Qur’anic terms. Like in the play, the short period of mortal pleasures of ‘twenty-four years’ ( in this case, the joy-ride of two years) for our brand of “Dr. Faustus” is about to be over. Faustus, at least, at the end of that period of pleasure, felt sorrowful for what he had done. Our leaders show no such signs of redemption.
Instead, they are emerging as more defiant and hardened, ready to destroy anything that comes between them and their right to rule. Little do they realize that “Man is his own master and his own worst enemy… and God is not, on the side of the heaviest battalions” as says Chester McCollum in his book “Man, Morals and History. Limb by limb they will be torn like Dr. Faustus, for they did not care for the consequences of their actions. They tried to “Trick God and the faithfuls… but they are not aware. In their hearts is a sickness,” The Qur’an: 2:10
The Greeks and Aristotle termed what we call, “Qalb/heart/mind/soul” as “psyche”. Poets like Iqbal have named it as “Ahsas-i-zia/sense of loss”. The worst scenario that an unfortunate nation can face is when its “psyche/soul/heart/sense” gets blurred or tainted to the extent that its people stop distinguishing the right from the wrong. For every wrong, they then have a rationale. “Where ever you see a man who gives someone else’s corruption, someone else’s prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us,” said John Jay Chapman, 1898.
Nigeria and Somalia have faced such a scenario. The “sacred cows” freely walk on their streets. Be it the government of General Buhari or of President Olusegun Obasanjo, little success to eradicate corruption has been achieved because “those waging the corruption wars were themselves corrupt”. Even unethical deals like the one which President Obasanjo made with the family of general Abacha, allowing them to keep $100 million of the stolen loot, and return about $1 billion to the government, were made (BBC May 20, 2002), but nothing works in a culture in which corruption gets ingrained into the very fabric of the society. The present junta of the rulers in Pakistan is sadly reflective of that kind of mindset.
Many in Pakistan have begun contending that since corruption is pandemic (widespread), and endemic, therefore, why to churn it day and night. Their logic is silly. If it rained yesterday, and it rained today, that does not mean that it should rain tomorrow as well. Man is not born corrupt. Corruption becomes a virtue when people hear the very prime minister of their country saying, “Who can arrest Mr. Rahman Malik? He arrests others”. Or, a statement like, “Moral soundness (Akhlaqiat) is not a valid qualification for being a minister, or for holding an office”. It is an alarming situation. 291 target killings in Karachi alone, (BBC, Jan. 12), and yet the government claiming its right to rule! Corruption is not an isolated phenomenon. According to the famous economist, Paolo Mauro of the IMF, “Corruption discourages investment, limits economic growth and alters the composition of government spending, often is the detriment of future economic growth”. His famous finding is, “The more the corruption, the less spending on education”.
According to Mr. Ahmed Arwo, a political analyst of the Muslim world and Africa, “Democracy is the best possible system of government, but there is a dangerous disease that eats its body alive bit by bit. Corrupt elite worldwide poison system with ill-gotten money, buying votes in a different level of the society. … Families are adulterated and children lose their decency. It is a sordid and cancerous disease that leaves no one untouched”. Further, according to him, “Corruption is the master key to injustice. It allows innocent citizens jailed, while despicable criminals fill seats of authority. Judges serve not justice but deliberate according to the price offered. …no nation can prosper nor enjoy persistent peace without eradicating corruption.”
Corruption, therefore, is symptomatic of the presence of a cancerous malady, which when left unattended, is bound to result in the total death of a nation. We are not talking here of the rise and fall of a few loonies; what is at stake here in Pakistan is the existence of the country. After all, what happened to a whole civilization of Maya people who once made paper from the tree-bark; wrote books; studied stars; introduced terrace-farming and the system of how to drain out marshes; produced some very sophisticated patterns of architect and built some of the most beautiful temples in the mountains of Central America, sometime between 2 BC and 9 AD and then disappeared within a few decades. Most historians agree that greed, rather than an epidemic, led them to fight endlessly among themselves. Corruption ate them up.
Has Pakistan reached a stage in corruption that Nigeria and Somalia now appear as amateurish in comparison? We are not close, we have surpassed Nigeria according to the Transparency International CPI. ( Nigeria is at 130 and Pakistan at 139/180), and they say in Nigeria, “Becoming corrupt in Nigeria is almost unavoidable”. One big reason of this landslide moral decline had been the lack of values and a low standard of morality; nepotism, display of wealth, lukewarm attitude of those who are supposed to enforce the laws of the land (police, executive, judges etc); all these vices are the direct off-shoots of corruption. Even military takeovers, political destabilization and social unrest and anarchy get their sustenance from a corrupt culture.
SOLUTION: Be it terrorism or target killings; lack of justice or security; economic stagnation or political destabilization, they all can be controlled and corrected in one stroke, in one resolve, which is: hit corruption hard. But, how? Let the army indirectly provide strength to the judiciary (corrupt executive calls this phenomenon as judicial activism and intrusion), and let the judiciary directly, discretely and judiciously take on the corrupt big-wigs relentlessly, and I emphasize, mercilessly; the way they did in Bangladesh. Transparency in accountability is possible these days due to the Cyber revolution and media’s boldness. After all, judiciary and taxation department in Pakistan did show improvement in the ranking by three points since 2006 as per the Pakistan Perception Index.
But this will happen only if the developed countries, like the United States of America, Britain and France also help Pakistan in this matter. President Obama is correct when he addressed corruption in Afghanistan as the country’s problem number one, but that should also be extended to Pakistan. Developed countries have a moral duty that they reward only those countries that show good governance and punish those that have rotten regimes and that “stick to the chair of satanic authority”, as says Ahmed Arwo. It is not an act of charity, it is an obligation. Uncountable benefits accrue to them as well. The rotten regimes, like the one we have in Pakistan, just defend themselves by justifying their incompetence, greed, corruption and abuse of power under the cover of slogans like “Democracy must be given a chance”. Democracy without effective accountability and justice for all is demonic.
Corrupt leaders must be banned to travel; or at least, they should not be welcomed; their ill-gotten wealth should be traced and made public; their accounts must be frozen, prohibiting them to taste purchases of “a single penny they stole”, says Ahmed Arwo. In the eradication and elimination of corruption in a country like Pakistan, it is very important that the world leaders refuse to deal with the known corrupt leadership. The financial aid given to countries like Pakistan must be people-specific. “Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.” - Karl Kraus, Morality and Criminal Justice (1908)
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