Quality of individuals

Mediocrity has grown to become a bigger problem in Pakistan than corruption. Even bigger is the issue of mediocre women and men not realising their limitations at all and overestimating their level of knowledge, skill and expertise. Exceptions are there to prove the rule but the graph has sharply declined over the years when it comes to having capable people running important institutions. Pakistan never had the critical intellectual mass but it did have people of high calibre who applied themselves to the best of their knowledge and ability and were successful in producing things of worth and long lasting value in all walks of life.

From spectator sports to academic disciplines to media and culture to military and bureaucracy, the downslide is alarming and conspicuous. While on the one hand, weak institutional systems make it truly difficult if not impossible to have progress in any area, on the other hand, the absence of visionaries and qualified professionals in leading positions compound the problem. Just to give you a few examples from the past, we had people like Air Marshal (retd) Nur Khan and Brigadier Atif running sports bodies, Zulfiqar Ahmed Shah Bukhari, Syed Rasheed Ahmed, Aslam Azhar and Agha Nasir managing Radio and Television, Prof Karrar Hussain, Dr Mahmood Hussain, Dr Salimuzzaman Siddiqui and Prof Manzoor Ahmed establishing and operating educational institutions, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Shaikh Ayaz developing cultural organisations and Altaf Hussain, Ahmed Ali Khan, I A Rehman and Razia Bhatti editing newspapers and magazines. In the face of an omnipotent Bollywood, our film industry still had directors like Pervaiz Malik and Riaz Shahid. You can see for yourself who has replaced them. And, therefore, the decline was imminent. Look at the armed forces and whether we lost or won wars and whether we had the right military policies or not, there were professional soldiers who would display their mettle on land, air and sea. Those who either laid

their lives or were prepared to and perhaps also not interested in seeking choicest plots of land and lucrative civilian jobs. Musa Khan, Asghar Khan, Tariq Mahmood of the SSG, M M Alam and scores of others. There was a time when children of this country would wave at a military vehicle and salute the soldiers. They were respected and adored by the masses. Likewise, just to name a few from the bureaucracy, we had people like Shaikh Mohammed Ikram, Mohammed Azfar, Hashim Raza, Agha Shahi, Saeed Jafferey and Qudratullah Shahab. Many of the actions of our bureaucracy are disliked by the common citizens of Pakistan but their competence was unquestioned. The most competitive exams in this country now fail to produce a significant number of officers who are among the best at what they do.

Come to those who have to run the country and set its course, the political leadership. Whether we agree with what they stood for or not, we had leaders in the past who were both scholarly and honest in their personal conduct. Pygmies and the unscrupulous were also there who were either adopted by the then Muslim League from the Unionists or were feudal and tribal chiefs running different political parties, but we also had people like Bacha Khan, Maulana Maudoodi, Mufti Mahmood, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan and Mir Ghaus Bakhsh Bizenjo. Even their second lines had incredibly talented politicians who could plan and implement their party programmes. Look at each of the leader I have mentioned and see for yourself who run their parties now.

I am not old enough to be nostalgic and say these things out of concern. I am all for affirmative action and job quotas and fully understand the importance of political loyalty. But there has to be a balance and the incumbent government must put talented, relevant and hardworking people to head state institutions. This would have a cascading effect on all other sectors. It is impossible that a country as big as Pakistan and a society as conscious and vibrant as our society is, does not produce such people any more.



The writer is an Islamabad-based poet and rights campaigner. Email: harris@spopk.org