The ninety-day Mantra!
WHAT is it that attracts so much attention to the 90 day period in this Land of the Pure? Think of anything and you are confronted with a mention of the 90 day period.
The Constitution fixes the interim period between a dissolved parliament and the newly elected one at 90 days.
The interim government set up to arrange fresh elections has its life limited to 90 days. And those dabbling in recent history of this blessed land will recall that our erstwhile dictators began their regimes with the promise to restore the democratic government within a period of 90 days.
The aforementioned are just stray examples. One could go on and on listing the examples of the 90 day period in the life of our nation.
And now as if that were not enough, the Chairman of the PTI (otherwise referred to as the Captain) had announced that if his party came to power the menaces of terrorism and corruption would be curbed in the first 90 days. And of all occasions, he made this dramatic assertion in his address at an Energy Conference arranged by his party.
Not being a political person, one is hardly qualified to comment on the ‘what and wherefore’ of this brave announcement. It is a tall order and one only wished the Captain luck in his endeavours. One is merely intrigued by the mention of the 90 day period. Why not 80 days or for that matter full 100 days?
One wonders if any of our other leaders have constructive ideas about accomplishing divers tasks in the period of 90 days? If so, they would be well advised to come up with these ideas soon; this being rumoured to be the election year and all.
Our TV anchors, who never miss a cue, may wish to ask the honoured guests at their talk shows what they or their political parties intend to accomplish within this hallowed period. And, while they are at it, they may wish to dilate on what happened to those who failed to live up to their commitments vis-a-vis the 90 day period.
But seriously, why is the period of 90 days figuring again and again in our archives? One wonders if the gentle reader recalls that the prevailing fashion was for important people to opt for accomplishing things ‘by half’. This is a circumspect method that provides ample flexibility when it comes to the crunch. Let us see how this mantra works out.
Talk of poverty, illiteracy, shortage of clean drinking water – you name it – whenever the person in charge chooses to allude to it, he or she invariably unveils a strategy aimed at cutting it BY HALF (it is never less or more, but precisely half). This is not merely confined to individuals or even to politicians. It happens also in much wider contexts. For instance, it may be recalled that the UN-sponsored World Food Summit in 2002 – amidst ringing calls to halt the scourge of hunger – had, in its collective wisdom, opted merely to repeat a 1996 pledge to cut the hungry people of the world BY HALF by the year 2015. Presumably, this pledge is being reiterated ever since.
At that Summit, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director General had been quoted as having averred, “Let’s start the race against time and show that together we can win the war against hunger and poverty, against skepticism and egoism”.
Brave words these and extremely well drafted! If such races could be won through multilateral diplomacy, then we – the peoples of the United Nations – would be well ahead of the game by now and the battle would be all over, bar the shouting.
High-sounding speeches and well-worded resolutions look good only on paper. With the benefit of hindsight, one can surmise that the pious resolutions of World Food Summits, as of other multilateral forums, are nowhere near achieving even their half-hearted goals.
In the Third World, most blessed planners, aided and abetted by economists and statisticians, continue to dole out pious resolutions to alleviate poverty, hunger and want BY HALF by a certain year. Makes a person wonder, why the stress on doing things by half? Why not one-fourth, for instance, or one-third or even two-thirds for that matter?
The truth of the matter is that HALF is not just any arbitrary ratio. It has a connotation with a history behind it – and not just a mundane one at that. There is science to back it up, for one thing. So much so that such a complex thing as radioactivity itself is involved in this equation.
Facts are as follows: all radioactive substances, it happens, are constantly losing their radioactivity. Also each such substance has a certain pre-destined and fixed “half-life”. In one of the mysteries of nature, the one constant in the life cycle of these substances is never the complete life or any odd part thereof but always the “half-life”.
Now, what this jargon implies is that half of the substance “expires” during a certain fixed period of time. Subsequently, over the same time period half of the remainder would expire. And so on ad infinitum. This is the immutable law of nature to perpetuate existence at least in so far as radioactive substances are concerned.
The aforementioned provides ample food for thought. In dealing by halves, nature has, in effect, ensured the survival of these otherwise highly volatile substances.
Had the “life” period of these substances been fixed instead of “half-life”, the physical shape of the universe as we know it would long have been transformed.
In other words, perhaps the dark forebodings of the doomsday merchants would have come to pass by now. The concept of “half-life”, therefore, is nature’s idea of a preservation package of sorts.
Be that as it may, one cannot help getting the queasy feeling that the idea of doing things by half implies that the problem in question is being shelved – put on the back burner so to speak. Political leaders, one finds, have readily fallen back on this handy formula.
And the multilateral actors appear to have grasped it too. It is enough to give one the creeps! Radioactive substances notwithstanding, talking of cutting anything back “by half” does smack of a conscious effort to sweep the matter under the proverbial rug.
Could a perspicacious reader help develop a similar perspective as regards the 90 day period aforementioned? If so it would be a giant step towards solving a matter that has remained a mystery for a long time now.
— The writer is a former Ambassador and former Assistant Secretary General of OIC.
