The Last Straw on the People’s Back?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

Question: what’s the litmus test of a clueless, gutless and shameless government?

Answer: It’d never accept any responsibility for its jarring failures and look, instead, for scapegoats and excuses to cover up its ugly foot-prints of crass cupidity.

Take, for example, the ongoing petrol crisis in Punjab, in its 9 th day as of the writing of these lines, but still showing no signs of easing up, much less being overcome.

It’s heart breaking for this scribe currently sojourned in Dubai—where gas stations, or petrol pumps in the Pakistani parlance, are perennially over-crowded with long queues of cars waiting to have their tanks filled up—to see the poor and harried people of Pakistan scrambling for a lite of petrol at stations with no gas.

Punjab’s empty gas stations and their milling crowds of petrol-seeking harried citizens on their scooters, motor cycles and cars, are telling a million stories of the Nawaz government’s horrendous incompetence.

As if determined to make the lives of the people of Pakistan worse than ever before, this government of carpet-baggers and bounty-hunters has heaped on them one crisis after another. Be that power, or water or gas for cooking, or CNG, the name of the game under Nawaz’ clueless cronies-in-power has been never-ending shortages.

The people of Pakistan have been starved of the basic amenities of life taken for granted in civilised democratic societies as their people’s inalienable right. But, not certainly, so for the people of Pakistan under Nawaz and his robber-barons.

The three-time-lucky Nawaz obviously thinks of himself as a born-again Mughal emperor who must emulate his illustrious forebears and create a legacy of his own worthy of them. So he might think that his Metro Bus monstrosity in the city where Emperor Shah Jehan built his fabulous Shalimar Gardens and Emperor Auragzeb his monumental Badshahi Mosque is the 21 st century parallel to those grandiose landmarks.

The man is infatuated with metro bus, motorways and their likes. Fine; none would begrudge him these developments that have their own utility and value in any developing or developed country, provided he first built the basic infrastructure justifying these later-day innovations.

But the clueless man, surrounded by cronies whose sole pursuit in life is to have his shelter over their heads so they make amass as much wealth as possible in the time available to them, can’t have it in his head that a pyramid can’t be built on its pinnacle. An inverted pyramid, if it could be built, would still be a very unstable thing. Alas, the man with a fetish for fatty, greasy, food can’t get it through the umpteen layers of fat in his head.

This massive crisis of petrol shortages is a case of monumental incompetence on the part of Nawaz and his kitchen cabinet. But neither the chief nor his minions are prepared to have any blame on them. Their only response is to seek scapegoats and find excuses to pass the buck on to others.

Nawaz had no problem singling out a clutch of senior bureaucrats—who may or may not have had anything to do with precipitating the crisis—as the fall-guys to take all blame for it. Many of these bureaucrats had been appointed by him, personally, to head positions in the departments concerned. But scapegoats he must have to mount on the gallows.

Nawaz’ alter-ego—his major domo and bumbling buffoon—Finance ‘wizard’ Ishaq Dar, proved, yet again, why he’s so indispensable to his master and mentor.

True to his salt, Dar had an easy explanation when cornered by the news men to say who was responsible for triggering the crisis. It was a ‘conspiracy’ against the government. End of the debate. The innocents of Nawaz government are being conspired against by ‘the enemies of Pakistan’ who don’t want this country to progress under the ‘dynamic’ leadership of the born-again modern-day Mughal, Emperor Nawaz Sharif.

It’s obvious that the buck in Pakistan doesn’t stop at Nawaz’ desk, but at any other Tom, Dick or Harry’s. Credit for anything good should, of course, belong to the visionary Prime Minister. But blame for shortfalls and deficiencies—of appalling proportions, no doubt—belongs neither to him nor his confidants, most of whom are either his blood relatives or bonded to him in familial chords.

So it’s unthinkable that the business tycoon, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, ruling the roost in the Petroleum Ministry, be expected to step down and accept responsibility for the appalling failure on his watch. Abbasi is as shameless as anybody else in the kitchen cabinet. Ministries are the milking cows for these dishonourable men and they must hang on to them as long as possible. Shame is an attribute of men of honesty and integrity, and you can’t think of anyone among Nawaz’ cronies suffering from this syndrome.

Besides chopping off a few symbolic heads in the bureaucracy, OGRA (Oil & Gas Regulatory Authority) has been blamed for failing to anticipate the situation that has degenerated into the current crisis. OGRA has come back with the disclosure that its executive board has been without its Oil member for more than six months. Any guesses who’s supposed to appoint the official concerned? Don’t strain your faculties; it’s the prerogative of the Prime Minister, who hasn’t found the right ‘yes man’ for the job, yet.

The businessman PM can’t help himself. Old habits are hard to die in this age. He’s used to putting his family’s business interests ahead of the country he’s expected to serve. So what should the poor man do if his business interests dictate to him to make the many-times-over billionaire tycoon, Mohammad Mansha—who lords over the independent power producers (IPPs) as uncrowned king—happier at the expense of ordinary consumers of petrol and gas. Let the people of Pakistan wallow in misery; they must get used to it by now.

So, what should be the end of it, if there’s an end in sight?

If logic has its way—rare though this phenomenon is in the Pakistani context—this incompetent and dishonest government ought to go. It has been teetering on the verge of collapse for a long time. But it has somehow dodged its tryst with ignominy. Circumstances have favoured it more than once. The latest stroke of fortune in its favour was, ironically, the ghastly massacre of innocent school children of Peshawar, last December 16, which plunged the nation in such a deep gloom that it forgot all about politics.

Will this filching regime have lady luck smiling for it this time around too, is a question that should be agitating every mind concerned with the welfare of Pakistan.

Come to think of it, this monumental folly of a habitually-erring gang of robber-barons should, logically, be the last nail in its coffin. The people of Pakistan have had it up to their eyeballs. No further evidence is needed to condemn this failed government and throw it into the dustbin of history where it should rest in infamy.

But at this crucial juncture, Imran Khan—the last hope of Pakistan’s civil society for redemption of a terminally-sick political culture—has, for reasons of his own, elected to cut his losses and refocus on his little patch of Khyber Pakhtoonkwa. According to his revised priorities, he’d like to make the PTI-governed KPK a model of development and a paragon of multi-faceted progress.

Good luck to Imran in his latest venture. But what about his resolve to craft a New Pakistan?

Why has Kaptan shifted gears to slow down just before the finish line?

Is it his deliberated decision to give the tottering Nawaz regime another lease of life just when he was so close to administering it the coup de grace?

Why has Kaptan done so, why?

Jaded pundits have more than one explanation making sense for Kaptan’s intriguing volte face.

The army, now into the thick of things as never before in recent years, has leaned on him to hold his horses, for the moment at least. It makes a lot of sense for politicians keeping the political front unheated while the army is engaged heavily in rooting out the scourge of terrorism from the country. Imran can’t say no to this sane and sensible advice even if his political sense tells him to pull the rug from under the abysmally incompetent and corrupt Nawaz cabal.

But Nawaz and cronies would be doing themselves disservice if they were to take it for granted that rival politicians would give them all the time in the world. Tactically it makes sense for Imran to give Nawaz a long rope so he may bind himself into knots that ultimately hang the poltroon. But it’d be poor strategy to not put an expiry date on the lease.

It appears that conscious of the fact that Nawaz shouldn’t be given an open-ended license to go on piling misery upon suffering of the people, Imran and the magician from Canada—the bombastic Tahir-ul Qadri—are reportedly getting together in Saudi Arabia this week. Both have the Umra camouflage to shelter their rendezvous.

Hopefully, the two who’ve cooperated with each other before will come up with a more sanctimonious plan to deal Nawaz the knock-out punch he so richly deserves. Keep your fingers crossed, folks. The plot is just getting thicker and juicier. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com (The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)