Wisdom of empowerment

Weakness is a curse. It invites others to deprive you of your legitimate rights and resources. The poverty, indignity and injustice that people suffer from are symptoms whose causes lie elsewhere. These are symptoms of the weakness and disempowerment of the people and these will keep hanging over their heads until their disempowerment is replaced with empowerment.

That is the crux of the message of the poet-reformer of Sindh, Shah Abul Latif Bhittai. "Empower yourself with knowledge and work ethics", went his clarion call, "and nobody will keep you poor and downtrodden. Instead, you will be able to hold the state accountable to work for the wellbeing of the people".

He followed his clarion call with a roadmap for the empowerment of the people, and to rid them of the dangers of disempowerment which was a hangover from medieval culture. His roadmap calls for a culture change – to create the enabling environment that highlights the importance of knowledge, hard work, and respect for time while encouraging inquisitiveness because curiosity is the mother of inventions, and questioning the status-quo opens doors that otherwise remain closed.

During his extensive travels all over Sindh and neighbouring regions, he observed first-hand the lives and living conditions of people – landless peasants, farmers, fisherfolk, and people associated with various trades and skills. The social scientist in him had studied the problems of poverty, and the indignities and injustice people faced everywhere. And the reformer in him realized that no superficial measures would help solve these problems until their root cause is addressed and eradicated.

And the root cause, he diagnosed, lay in the absence or poor quality of the knowledge, skills and capacities of the people. In today's language, it is called ‘human resources’. So, the root cause of their disempowerment lay in the poor quality of their human resources.

His lament about the poor state of human resources in Sindh 300 years ago seems as valid today as when he observed it; and he summed it up in this iconic verse: mahroom thee maree vaya, maher thee na moa" (they lived their life without acquiring knowledge, skills or capacities and passed away as they came. Disempowered as they remained, they were not able to solve their problems).

But if people's conditions have not improved despite such a clarion call from their most loved and respected person, and they remain disempowered even after a lapse of 300 years, there must be a method in this madness.

While the empowerment of the people and developing human resources is good for the country, often it is not an appealing idea for the status-quo forces still clinging to medieval culture, who see it as a zero-sum game and fear that with an empowered people, they may lose their control over the national pie.

Pakistan has generally followed this course. Instead of developing a massive base of quality human resources to lift the country –- as other developing countries have done and benefited from – its status-quo forces have taken to importing ready-made solutions from abroad with back-breaking loans which have now become the albatross sinking the whole economy.

Who suffers the most if the knowledge, skills and capacities of their own people are not developed? None other than the weakest sections of society. And today's Pakistan provides proof of the wisdom of this verse of our poet-reformer. But first the verse: "paani mathe jhoopra, moorakh unj maran" (look at these ignorant fools). They are living in the huts over the water but are still dying of thirst. They suffer because they have not developed the capacity to solve their problems – even when the solution lay in front of them.

Let us apply the same verse to our present predicament. It would now say: look at these ignorant fools; they are sitting on one of the largest coal reserves of the world in Thar coal, but they are destroying the lives of millions of people with the most expensive electricity from imported fuel. They suffer because they did not develop cheap electricity from it when it was available to them 30 years ago at 2.4 cents/unit and are now forcing people to pay 10 times more for the same electricity from imported fuel – over which the country has neither any control nor any dollars to pay for.

The electricity bill today is more than what millions of families are able to earn in a month – leaving them wondering how they will meet other expenses of their bare existence. One of the byproducts of such a cruel system will be the people slipping down the poverty line, increase in street and other crimes and creating low- hanging fruit for dubious organizations. Our policies are creating liabilities instead of assets for the country.

But if we have not invested in developing our human resources and are paying a severe price for that neglect, have we learnt any lesson and taken measures to rectify past mistakes and accelerate the pace of development of our human resources?

The first building block in human resource development is education – the first pillar of the empowerment of people as our polymath poet had identified. Here is a list of some developing countries with a percentage of their GDP going into educating their citizens: Cuba 12 per cent, Namibia 9.0 per cent, Bolivia 9.0 per cent, Botswana 8.0 per cent, Saudi Arabia 7.0 per cent, and Pakistan with 1.7 per cent of GDP (2022-23 allocation) going into education comes at 154th position out of 200 countries.

What it means is that the country is not yet empowering its people with knowledge, skills and capacities to build the foundation for a quick take-off in the foreseeable future. So, for whom has this system been working, if not the people of Pakistan?

Amazingly, our polymath poet had seen the situation in his time when rulers were sweet-tongued and deceptively friendly towards the people but on the inside were actually working against their wellbeing and empowerment. In yet another iconic verse he describes these medieval rulers: “Munh ta Moosa jhahro, andar mein iblees, ahro khaam khabees kadhi koh na chhadje” (It is better to change the rulers who appear innocent like Prophet Moses but are devil incarnate against the people).

Our colonized minds have been tuned to block any message of wisdom from our indigenous thinkers, poets, philosophers. But we are eager to lap up any such idea coming from our former colonial masters. To satisfy such colonized minds, let me clarify that the ideas of the empowerment of people that Shah Latif espoused were also voiced by contemporary European thinkers and reformers like John Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu and others.

Let me close this series of interpreting the poetry of Shah Latif by his message from another iconic verse: “Take my poetry seriously. These verses are not merely for entertainment but would lead you to the path of enlightenment.”

The writer designed the Board of Investment and the First Women’s Bank. He can be reached at: smshah@alum.mit.edu