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[Spearhead Research]

UNHAPPY LAST YEAR

By F.S. Aijazuddin

New Years should begin on any day other than 1 January. From the moment the Australians begin their spectacular firework display over Sydney harbour at their midnight, which is hours before everyone else in the world, they generate in other nations a mood of euphoria, of optimism, an expectation that this coming year will be better than the outgoing one. If only that were true.

Time has shown that it cannot tolerate peace and tranquility, order and social betterment, peace and harmony for too long. Ayub Khan remarked on this during his farewell speech in 1969 when he commented – more in sorrow than in anger – that he could understand why a nation could get tired of continuous economic growth and stability after a decade of reforms.

For us Pakistanis, 2008 the year in which Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto could have been Prime Minister was akin to 1660 - the year of the restoration in Great Britain. That year, the exiled son of Charles I (whom Oliver Cromwell had executed eleven years earlier) was recalled from France and restored to the throne. The macabre difference between our two histories is that in their case the returnee lived to rule. In our case, the returnee returned to die.

The second significant variance is that Charles II's reign flowered into a period not only of the restoration of the concept of kingship but into an age of prosperity and good living. Although Charles II had more mistresses than Bill Gates has Mercedes or BMWs, history remembers him less for his peccadilloes than for the unity he was able to forge in his deeply divided kingdom, split as it had been by loyal Royalists and the republican Puritans.

What golden period may we look forward to? Is it the salve that will heal our national wounds? Will it be the elusive adhesive that will bind our four provinces and attached parts like Azad Jammu & Kashmir, FATA and the Northern Areas together? Is the year 2009 the dawn that will end our night of blighted darkness?

If WAPDA, the IPPs, and / or NTDC have anything to do with it, that is very unlikely. We will be able to shed kilos of unwanted body weight more rapidly than the providers of our national power will be able to end load-shedding. Living with interrupted power supply, low gas pressure, and shortages of fuel and CNG shortages will be the norm, certainly into the foreseeable future – if one can see the future that is by candlelight.

Had Quaid-e-Azam been alive today, he would have to read his memorable speeches by torchlight. Had Ayub Khan been alive today he would have need a hurricane lamp held above his head by an orderly. We are moving into the 21st century backwards. That is not the way a nation progresses. That is not the path to prosperity. That is not the way 170 million Pakistani deserve to live, rationed of petrol, rationed of flour, rationed of hope.

If the shortage of power – whether from hydel or thermal or nuclear or from any other source – will remain with us until at least 2012 (the date of the next natural general elections), can we hope there will be some level of power-sharing between the political parties entrusted with our governance?

Visitors who dare to come to our country fuel the suspicion of those political pundits who perform their ritualistic analyses of our political situation from a safer distance. They view us less as a failed state than as a state that accepts failure as the fourth word, the unsightly addendum to our national motto - Unity, Faith, & Discipline.

Are we moving towards the provincial camaraderie that is such a necessary prerequisite for national cohesion? It would appear not. Political parties are finding it increasingly difficult to see eye to eye except to exact an eye for an eye. The differences in the Punjab between the PML–N and its uncomfortable bedfellow the PPP remain. If anything, the truce between them has become a stalemate.

Sindh, Balochistan and the NWFP rattle along, rather like Pakistan Railways – the only national service that actually connects all of them physically to each other. The extremities of our country are frayed and ragged, waiting for someone to darn them with a political settlement.

The economy is in a sense on autopilot. Our economic managers are battling on the war-rations of a hope and a prayer. A hope that we can meet the undertakings that we have given to the IMF and a prayer that in case we cannot meet them (as many who know better suspect we may not), the IMF will help us even though we will have failed to help ourselves.

Perhaps the most dangerous of the threats that face us as a nation during 2009 is the petrification of our education system. We are teaching our children from outdated curriculae, neglecting to recognise their potential, and perhaps worst of all, spewing out a product that in environment terms would be deplored as intellectual pollution. Yet, hundred and thousands of our graduates emerge from their cocoons unable to realise that the world does not need any more butterflies.

Western do-betters would have us believe that the cancer in our society is caused by the madressahs. There is no denying that they are a cancer, but they are only one form of cancer. Not all madressahs produce terrorists no more than all Catholic seminaries produce gays. Talibanisation is less a political ideology than a social reaction to values that were once liberal and enlightened and on being challenged are found wanting.

Anyone who has had the privilege of teaching at Pakistan schools anywhere across the country will have recognised the intellectual hydrocarbon just waiting to be ignited – by an idea, a thought, a word of encouragement, the glimpse of a role model.

Adults who have ushered in 2009 will probably have done so with a degree of ennui. They have seen it all before and feel condemned to reliving it for yet another year. To their young, though, 2009 is truly a year of hope. They have to look forward, if only because they have nothing to fall back upon. Just because our generation has failed does not mean that they are unfit to sit the examination of life. It is vital that we equip them to do so, for in their success lies our own salvation. New Years are best celebrated after they are over. Like the VIP who preferred to lay completion rather than foundation stones, we should look back with pride rather than to the future with a misplaced optimism.