Misgovernance – the only way to govern Pakistan

Misgovernance – the only way to govern Pakistan

Pakistan has always been known as an agrarian country, yet, with enormous potential to utilize its untapped natural resources to exploit its industrial potential. In 1960s, just 13 years after the creation of the country, despite
having far less human, capital and industrial resources as compared to its nieghbours, it was perhaps the only emerging economy of the region that was one of the top priorities of the investors looking forward to safe and promising returns to their investments.
However, today, about four decades down the road, despite the successive governments claiming to live up to the expectation of the people and turning their lives upsides down with long awaited social and economic revolutions, why is it so that we have ended
up becoming underdogs in the world.

The blame here is not to be put on to the rife corruption, rampant nepotism, or inefficiency and a laidback approach on part of successive incumbents as these are the inflictions which have not spared even most advanced of the
nations. The point of concern here is governance, or rather, lack there off.

If we want to miss-out the names of politicians to equally give them the due credit of their misdeeds, we can say that the only thing that has been ruling Pakistan in past 40 years or so is misgovernance. By misgovernance, here,
we mean the inability of those at the helm of the affairs in prioritizing and safeguarding our own interests. After death of Quaid-e-Azam and murder of Liaquat Ali Khan, the country landed into the hands of power hungry beasts, who were oblivious of the concepts
of integrity and honesty and didn’t understand the meaning of nation building.

Instead of the leaders of a democratic republic, they thought of themselves to be the kings and queens of the land of pure. To them, they were the most important, rather, the only important people on the face of the earth, and
thus, they always gave their personal interest priority to those of the country and people. It was this approach of theirs that we could never have our own independent stance on world issues. We followed American lines, danced on Saudi vibes or bowed to Russian
school of thoughts; we had never had our own independent self. This not only eroded our self confidence as nation, but undermined others trust on us as well. People started to think that we had no moral values, and we could do anything for petty personal gains.

Realizing this, there was altogether a different approach on world attitude in dealing with us. Instead of working on bilateral relations, in order to make us pursue their lines of interests, they started using stick and carrot
policies with us. Getting on with it, there came a time when we were told that you were either with us or against us. We were told that democracy was not a suitable system of governance for us, and rather it was okay for the people to make it up with never
ending dictatorial regimes. We were told that we had to launch a full fledge war against our own citizens to safeguard someone else’s interests. We were told that we could not subsidize our poor, had to cut back on our expenditure on health and education and
had to leave our people as deprived as ever. And all this happened because we were being ruled by the people with literally no vision of future for the country.

Recently, it prevailed that we, as a nation, have completed thirty long years of being a client to IMF. This is an “honour” which no other nation in the world has earned so far. And in the backdrop of this recent privilege we have
earned, one dares to ask where the money of all the IMF programmes have gone? During last 30 years, we have had seen all of the “Leaders” completing several terms in government offices. We saw their single factories converting into foundries comprised of over
30 factories, we saw their land holdings and foreign assets increasing exponentially, but we couldn’t observe equally substantial increase in people’s standard of living.

Third world leaders are usually corrupt, but not as much as the genre we have over here in Pakistan. The cost the country is paying today by having an economy that dips down even deeper every other day, is because of the wrong
priorities that our rulers have had. Had they made better choices, the country could have been in a far better condition, and had we made better choices in selecting them, we would not have suffered as much as we did in past 65 years. I wish the sanity may
prevail and we may be able to make wiser decisions during this election year.

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Posted by Fayyaz Yaseen on Apr 27 2012. Filed under Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry