Mirza Shahnawaz Agha
THE National Bureau of Statistics notwithstanding, there is an employee on the Government pay roll for every forty nine people in Pakistan. These employees are clothed, armed, fed and paid for, by eighty two percent of all the money collected through direct and indirect taxes plus the borrowing the country does unabated. Indeed this percentage includes those who are hired to legislate post elections! Strictly from an economic perspective 82% money is spent to manage 18% or 220 million taxed people serve for the salaries and benefits of 2.8 million people. This is at the root of the economic crisis in Pakistan and we people are in the line of fire to pay more!
In essence the people on the pay roll of the government to serve us the people, constitute the judiciary, the civil bureaucracy, the armed forces and the parliamentarians. What we see is that none of these institutions are working in cohesion to serve us, the people, because of the absence of a development plan for the country based on any ideology. They are also working cross purposes to retain their respective existence at the cost of us, the people. This legal justification they have managed to achieve on a rope-work fiddle spread over seven decades plus, where all attempts by the people to cause change has become impossible. The judiciary can take one in on contempt at will, the armed forces can indite one for subversion and the civil bureaucracy has the tool of sedition and a host of inherited laws based on a colonial philosophy of law making. The parliamentarians, of course, are politically elevated to be holy cows that protect, like war lords, different areas of the territory, with the militant power to quash any voice.
This canvas for governance and at the cost of us, the people make us hostage to a bunch of profit taking aliens who cannot be dislodged because they are legally protected to milk us the entire population, for ‘more’. The parliamentarians want more pay, the army wants more land and the civil bureaucracy wants more bribes to allow us the people to barely breath. This grand heist has to come to an end and we, the people, are about the only ones that must address the high handedness of our servants that have taken us hostage. The media engages us everyday in a cockfight blocking our focus on the real issues of the State. They shift our attention to slander and personality based hogwash, as if listening to and about, these people matter to our welfare, security concerns and or future development. This perhaps is by design. All they have to tell us is how the ruling elite have kept the donors appeased and how they have shelved their ideological basis to please the gods of money that keep an impotent establishment afloat. The present structure for governance is pushing the business community and the ordinary citizen who represent the life-line of any Nation-State to rebel and cease this domestic oppression. In my book “Current Chronicles” launched on the 29th of February this year this reality has been questioned and solutions presented for mitigating this dilemma.
We must understand that global politics is based on economic agendas that seek tangibles for intangibles and on terms, best described by an American saying: ‘whatever it takes’! Our survival is in the establishment of an equitable legal system free of the Executive entirely and by the assertion of our founding ideology that frees man from captivity altogether. We cannot and must not have institutions of the State be masters and the people retained as servants. This structure is an applicable formula for colonised territories not for free nations. Our freedom is decisively compromised and the retention of this status quo spells doom without a doubt. This is the biggest security risk and hazard to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The armed forces are ill equipped and ill directed inwards, the judiciary is with contradictory laws to adjudicate, the civil bureaucracy is a protected species to blackmail any citizen with draconian authority, and the parliamentarians are clubbing at leisure to defend their respective profit centres. What should have been instead is the expansion of the armed forces with indigenous weapons to defend aggression from any external quarters; What should have been is the stern accountability for the civil bureaucracy through a social contract with people as auditors; What should have been were parliaments that should have emerged free of captive political constituencies, and What should have been was a judiciary that could adjudicate without pressures from the Executive or any other institution of the State. Most what should have been would have been our commitment to our ideology free from the influence of any brand of Islam and free from the whims of clerics that represent an economic vested interest of their own.
Towards analysing this upset apple cart one can in the macro context only blame monetary subservience where people from any and all disciplines sell their value systems, beliefs, pride, honour and creative genius to slavery. We have opted for slavery in place of independence and this is firmly attributed to our accepting the diabolic global monetary regime which is against our ideology. Who authorised the acceptance of a ‘reserve currency’ for trading by us and who insures and upholds that we remain committed to it, is information we must demand to avert? While we talk about Islamic values and injunctions to fool the public sentiment our subservience to an alien asset base in the form of printed paper is a contradictory absurdity. Why are we not leaning on our own asset base is a major writ for all facets of the government to explain. As it meets the eye it is evident that it is the salaries and perks of the 2.8 million around which governance has been pegged, at the detriment of 220 million people, who are guilty. We seem nailed to serve these baboos and sahibs as were prior to 1947! Let us stop protesting and start building our image based on our material and human resource strength by back integrating our bureaucracies into civil society and resisting their hold over the status quo. They will surely convert our land into a burial ground for our independent future. This transactional based existence is no way to run an ideological Nation-State. Merit, merit and more merit in place of political rubbish please.
— The writer is an entrepreneur and author based in Karachi.
