Imran Khan and His Midas Touch
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg , CA
“Men will not keep faith with you; how can you keep it with them? Politics, Machiavelli seems to say, as much as consists in breaking promises, for circumstances change and new necessities arise that make it impossible to hold to one’s word…do not depart from good when possible, but know how to enter into evil, when forced by necessity.” Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. introduction to “The Prince.”
The year 2012 is the year of Imran Khan. It is not a parrot-drawn prediction; it is a logical conclusion. The quicker the ruling party – PPP - fused with the feeling that it has a divine right to rule and complete its term, aligns itself with the arty-in-search-of-the-past-glory, PML (N), the better it would be for Imran Khan. Both the parties are now like a red rag to the infuriated public bull.
The effective use of the social media as a reckonable factor in politics, the mobilization of the youth and their physical presence in the highly successful public meetings, an acute desire in the people for a change in leadership, along with the presence of chaos and corruption, combined with bad governance are some other factors that can make even a dullard to deduce that the Year 2012 belongs to Imran Khan.
The present government’s performance can best be explained through a simple, but enlightening parable once narrated by Ernest Campbell, a faculty member:
A woman, once, purchased a parrot for her company. The next day she came back with the parrot to report, “That parrot hasn’t said a word yet!” “Does it have a mirror?” asked the storekeeper. “Parrots like to be able to look at themselves”. The next day she was back again, announcing that the bird still wasn’t speaking. “What about a ladder?” the storekeeper said. “Parrots enjoy walking up and down a ladder.” The woman bought a ladder in compliance.
Sure enough, the next day she was back with the same story— still no talk. “Does the parrot have a swing? Birds enjoy relaxing on a swing”. The next day she returned to the store to announce the bird had died.
“I’m terribly sorry to hear that,” said the storekeeper. “Did the bird ever say anything before it died?” “Yes,” the lady replied, “Don’t they sell any food down there?’
The ruling junta and the political leaders of Pakistan in general are like the lady in the story, always wanting the people to produce, to perform, and to do more. When the people get worn out and fatigued in the effort, the leaders then provide them with all kinds of swings, ladders and mirrors, (entangle them in non-issues, and keep playing with their loyalties, resilience and simple joys, feeding them on hollow promises, etc.). What it never occurs to these clueless, incompetent, corrupt to the core, egotistical and selfish leaders is to ever realize what the people actually need. The people need, food, security, education, health-care, rule of justice, merit and quality of life; and what these loonies have provided them is what the parrot got in the story - keep serving and pleasing till you fall dead. Imran Khan’s genuine piety appears to be holding the promise of a healthy change.
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In the words of our veteran bureaucrat, Mr. Roedad Khan, the man who is going to care about them has arrived. “The hour has found the man who has the will-power to restore the Pakistan dream. At long last the people have found the only leader who will light a candle in the gloom of our morale.” The optimism seems well-placed because in the, Shared Hammam of corruption where all the rest stand soiled, it is Imran Khan only who catches the eye for having escaped the muck. Should we then say that his not playing on the political pitch erstwhile, notwithstanding the opportunities, has been a deliberate step, a proof of his foresight, an act which is delivering him some rich dividends now in the current scenario? His votaries, at least, think so. I am also inclined to suspend my disbelief for the time being.
Mr. Roedad Khan showers all the plausible superlatives on Imran Khan in his article, “Star has arisen”, (destiny is beckoning him; a leader of great integrity and credibility, harbinger of change, a man of high energy level and unbounded vitality, poised to deliver, a shock therapy to the corrupt, etc. etc.) some of which, honestly speaking, appear a little pre-mature, or at best, they appear sounding like an expression of personal infatuation for the Khan. He is, undoubtedly, unique and world-class in the field of sports and philanthropy, but on the thorny terrain of politics, he is still to walk and establish his credibility, and credibility comes only through performance.
People in position often lose their balance, their initial passion and their articulated vision. Staying in politics for 16 years, and often being remembered in not so a pleasant manner, ( ‘political light-weight’, ‘an outsider celebrity in Pakistan’, ‘an Oxonian Taliban”, and in the words of The Guardian, “a miserable politician”, with political ideas as swerving and unstable as “a rickshaw in rain-shower”, “a puritan playboy”, and in the perception of MQM, “a sick person who has been a total failure in politics and alive just because of the media coverage”) may speak for Imran Khan’s tenacity, but not for his being good at politics.
Late Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan had always been there, and so had been Khan Abdul Wali Khan. They existed only as big names, just like Pir Pagara, or even Altaf Hussain, best known as king-makers, but never as the main protagonists of Pakistan politics.
Performing when in power is a different art. Asfandyar Wali Khan’s performance when in power is a living proof; the brief stint of Jamat i Islami is another. In politics, Imran Khan’s role can be equated to that of a 12 th man in cricket, and he knows how it is to be in that position. His real talent will come to light when he sits behind the steering wheel of the country.
Imran Khan is lucky too. There could have been two formidable contenders to him, but thanks to their parties, they stand totally eclipsed in politics. They were: Aitzaz Ahsan of the PPP, and Ahsan Iqbal of the PML(N).
Pakistan , we all know, is a land of surprises. Big crowds often create illusions in the minds of the leaders. If it were not so the Jamat-i-Islami, since long would have been in the saddle. Crowds consist of spectators, and hence are deceptive as they do not include those who actually come to the voting booth.
Air Marshal Asghar Khan is another case in specific. Maleeha Lodhi as editor of The Muslim, once capturing the national mood, wrote, “If ministers falling over each other in claiming they had led larger processions had used half that vigor in coming to terms with the work of their ministries they would have done the party a bigger favor”. At the Ghotki public meeting , the 20 thousand votaries who attended the meeting, did not come for Imran Khan. The TV camera showed dozens, saying, “We came here to see our Murshid, Shah Mahmood Qureshi”. Is Imran Khan collecting around him, the most electables, or the most eligible to govern? And the most electables often are the least eligible to govern. The current lot of the PPP ministers, including the head of the state is a solid proof.
What then is the base of such a cock-sure prediction made above that the year 2012 belongs to Imran Khan? The answer is obvious. It is his newly acquired Midas Touch that has begun working miracles for him. Imran Khan himself has defined what this Midas Touch is in his book on page 192. “It is almost impossible to beat whichever party is backed by the establishment in Pakistan”. With the acquisition of this miracle, Imran Khan can now turn anything piece of sod into gold. Who knows, he may have even a walkover in the next elections, a clear sweep. After all, Pakistan’s history is in no short supply of examples: Nawaz Sharif in 1990, Ms. Benazir Bhutto in 1996, and in 2007 are clear instances of political match-fixing.
The nation is banking upon Imran Khan, not because he is anti-American, or pro-Taliban (both the matters are of great concern to the scribe), but because he promises them a Tsunami type of change. The use of a natural calamity, though, as an analogy is unfortunate. To bring about a change of such proportions in a set-up which is mired in corruption, and is on the verge of total collapse, is a tough and lofty commitment. The process of change is like a flywheel - massive, metal disc mounted on an axle, about 100 feet in diameter, ten feet thick, and weighing about 25 tons.
Jim Collins using the analogy of such a flywheel explains the difficulties enshrined in the process of initiating an atmosphere of change in his wonderful book, “Good to Great”. The wheel of change will move if the leader and his team jointly exert their fullest energies in the stated effort. Initially, the wheel may move very slowly, inch by inch, but after the first cycle, it definitely will begin to gain momentum, as per the scientific law of mass times velocity. Once the wheel starts moving, the pushing then becomes less hard; its speed keeps accelerating. The condition, however, is that all the team members should be applying their force in the same direction. Imagine a situation in which the leader is pushing the wheel in one direction, and some of his associates in the opposite direction. Pakistan often has confronted this kind of situation. Imran Khan is also likely to face this problem as is becoming evident by the kind of people he is inducting in his party.
Moreover, there is another bottleneck also in the way of change as has been realistically highlighted by Machiavelli in his book, The Prince. “People are resistant to change and reform. Those who had benefited from the old order, resist most severely. Those who stand to benefit from the new, will be less fierce in their support”. Call the first kind as the members of the opposition, or the one out of power, and the second type those who by nature hate change, and who even do not change their sleeping posture until they get petrified. The Pirs and Makhdoomzadas and the turn-coats in the PTI are not for the people who may go for a change. For them change is a signal of death. In his book, Pakistan: A Personal History, page 191, Imran Khan himself writes, “Joining Sharif would not only mean I became part of the status quo, but I would have also lost all my credibility…an alliance with Sharif would have compromised my principles.” Imran Khan knows very well that we always clean the pot first before we put something pure and fresh in it. Dirty dishes turn even the fresh food as uneatable.
The politicians who are joining Imran Khan are intellectually barren and political uncreative and sterile; they are like the boiled eggs. The hatchers do not use such eggs for hatching the chicks. Columnist Hasan Nisar is right when he compares them to “poison”, which Imran Khan is willingly adding to his political diet. Their joining the PTI is of immense benefit to them, and not to him”. What the Khan is forgetting at this juncture is that history, nature, destiny, national mood, the establishment and above all the people, all are poised to rally behind him, and he has also been furnished with the Midas touch. Going for the trite and stale and recycling it in the hope that something fresh would come out is becoming incomprehensible for many of his well-wishers. How shameful to hear Hamid Mir, telling the audience in a meeting, “Imran Khan virtually prostrated himself at the feet of Maria Memon, beseeching her to join his party, and she rebuffing him with the words, “Get off, you liar!”. He should not use his assets so indiscreetly as was done by King Midas; he ended up turning his own daughter into gold, and himself meeting death with hunger, and getting buried in gold . The turncoat politicians have the potential to do this job for him. They are most likely to be his Achilles’ heel in future.
Mr. Lee Iacocca, the famous CEO of Chrysler in his book, “Where Have All The Leaders Gone?”, mentions nine characteristics, C’s, of a great leader. He warns that if the people are bad and their priorities are screwed up, then nothing will work, not even a great leader. Luckily, the people in Pakistan are not bad, they just are rudderless and direction-less. It is the lack of leadership and the disorderliness of the priorities that is keeping them nailed to stagnation. He says that a leader will succeed or fail based on the team he selects. Imran Khan is mysteriously silent on this issue. “If you want to succeed, you’ve got to have a group of people that knows what they’re doing…people who work together will win — period.” A leader can be compared to a bus-driver, borrowing another analogy from Jim Collins. A stalled bus is like a country that is not moving, or is rather sliding backward precariously. It is the driver, the visionary leader, whose job is not only to get it going, but also to get it where he wants it to. He knows who is on board and who should be off-board. Getting the right people on the bus - the government - is of paramount importance. And Imran Khan is not very articulate on this subject.
Imran Khan should keep in mind that no good head of a State or a Company can live without great minds surrounding him. His assertion in his book is, “Cricket is the only sport where you need leadership on the pitch; no other sport gives so much a role to the captain as in cricket - as in all other sports it is the coach who is crucial”. This is partially true as politics and cricket are two different entities. In one it is the defeat of 11 players, in the other it is the destruction of 180 million people. Cricket is by chance as he himself admits in his book; leadership is about getting a nation out of the mode of chance and luck. As Shakespeare would say, leadership is like a wheel with people like spokes tied to it. When the wheel breaks, the spokes break automatically. It is not the loss of a trophy, it is the loss of a nation. A leader, therefore, should have the knack to not only hire the best people, but also should have the courage and vision to utilize them and challenge them for newer ideas and deeper insights. A leader must have the guts to discipline and to dispatch such cabinet members home who fall short on performance, without caring about the political price, or fearing that it would open a can of worms for him.
Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has put his country on the path of progress; Bangladesh is catching up with Singapore and Vietnam in exports; Brazil has become the sixth world economy; in the year 1998, just like Pakistan, Brazils’s railroad system was at the verge of total collapse, and was operating at a loss of 80 million real. Mr. Behring turned it into a profitable enterprise of 24 million real. What he did as a leader of the company, is equally valid and applicable for a country that is in a nosedive mode.
Behring followed four simple rules, which our elders often generously had followed all their life. One: unblock revenue, i.e., spend money only in those projects which generate revenue quickly; Second: maximize up-front cash, i.e. the best solution to any problem is the one that would cost the least money up front; Third: faster is better than best, i.e. options that fix a problem quickly are preferable to the slower options that would provide superior results, but in the long term; Four: the golden rule: use what you have got, i.e. re-use and re-cycle the existing material as it is better than acquiring the new material, as stated by Chip Heath and Dan Health in their wonderful book, “Switch”, page 54.
Argentina as a country is holding a night-long vigil for the recovery of their President, Cristina Fernandez Kirchner, and is praying for her health because she has delivered notably in the field of human rights, poverty awareness and health improvement. Leaders who have vision and passion always succeed. Pakistan’s president in a recent interview, answering questions on law and order, inflation, shortage of power, and corruption in the major departments, keeps telling the interviewer, Mr. Hamid Mir, “It’s your journalistic perception, not his.” One is reminded of Nero and his flute.
In Pakistan we have leaders in power who are good at crying Vendetta, and are always wistful of being remembered as political martyrs. It was about such leaders that Abraham Lincoln once famously said that there are people who first kill their parents, and then plead for mercy on the ground as being orphans. Twenty-two years ago, at the dismissal of Ms Benazir’s first government in 1990, a similar situation existed in Pakistan. It was her own information secretary Iqbal Haider, who in an interview with Christina Lamb on the dismissal of the government, had said, “Whatever our sins, they have been washed away by our unfair dismissal.” They are looking for a similar conclusion of their rule in the year 2012, and the jialas like Mr. Babar Awan, are working overtime for accomplishing this aim.
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