Pakistan keeps chugging on

The writer is an analyst and
commentator.

Every day, dozens of great stories in Pakistan get buried underneath the enormous flood of bile that seems to be of national importance. My favourite recent story is the one about the alertness of a DMG/PAS bureaucrat to the abuse of the system, and his action to arrest it. It is a great story, but to put it in the right context, we have to dig up some old skeletons.

There has been a youth movement afoot in the PML-N now for quite some time. It probably started sometime around the third or fourth day of Imran Khan’s spectacular dharna of 2014. In those heady days, the young Khan serenaded large crowds camped out in front of parliament, pumping up the angst levels across the country, and making sport of the genuine and sincere emotions of Pakistanis of all shades, young, old, urban, rural, male and female. The angry Facebook status update, the expletive-laden tweet, and tirades of profanity about every politician other than the Great Young Khan became virtue. That was August 2014.

The most memorable moment in all of Kaptaan’s khutbas from the pulpit of D-Chowk was the “geeli shalwar”. It stands out as the purest and most unadulterated moment within the culture that was being crystallised during the dharna. That culture is simple: in an age of instant gratification, where clicktivism is equated to real activism, the tumour of contempt is good enough to engender a sense of entitlement. If you hate somebody hard enough, and deeply enough, you are entitled to their rapt attention as you call them names.

The PML-N youth movement has emerged from the embers of the fires that were started during the dharna. It was in the prime minister’s darkest hours during the early days of the dharna that it became obvious to Team Nawaz Sharif that it was woefully ill-equipped to deal with the sophistication, passion and volume of support that Imran Khan was able to mobilise for the dharna. Enter Maryam Nawaz Sharif.

The First Daughter has two qualifications to be quarterbacking the prime minister’s media machine. The first rightly causes fits to many people in this country’s urban middle class: she happens to be the prime minister’s daughter. This qualification gives her access, power, and a personal stake in the outcomes of the political contests of the day. The second is that she somehow managed to rescue the shambolic performance of the PM Office on media relations during the dharna. She oversaw a bold and assertive PML-N pushback that began sometime in the middle of September 2014. Prior to that, Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri had enjoyed an unmolested run of offence, with hardly a peep from the PM or his proxies.

The problem with both the initial success of Imran Khan’s dharna, and success of the younger Sharif’s counter-attack, is that it has validated the D-Chowk paradigm. Yell. Loud. When something the opponent throws at you sticks, find something (anything at all) that may have a chance of sticking and throw it back. In simple terms, this is known as mudslinging. Our political discourse has descended to an on-again, off-again crescendo of bitter and contemptuous attacks. The problem is not who is being attacked: some days it is the PM and his people, other days, it is Imran Khan and his crew. The problem is the quality of the attacks.

The PML-N youth movement’s attacks tend to have two qualities. First, the attacks tend to be defensive. Second, the attacks tend to be personal. This is not rocket science. If the entire genesis of the PML-N youth movement is in raising a voice in defence of the prime minister, then being defensive is, by definition, what this youth movement will do. Equally, since the PML-N youth movement is about the person of the prime minister, rather than any specific policy or vision, then the nature of attacks or counter-attacks will also be personal.

Conversely, the nature of the attacks on the prime minister is essentially policy-related. They may be expressed with an unhealthy contempt for the person of the prime minister, but the root of the attacks – both during the dharna and now – are essentially fair-game public policy issues. Critics of the PM are well within their right to demand a better electoral process, or for the PM to have credible and clear financial affairs. Even if you are entirely partial to the prime minister on policy issues, you cannot possibly argue that the PTI or PPP or any other political group should not be able to demand more transparency from the PM after something like the Panama Papers.

Which brings us to the story. The week before the Panama Papers were released, Fawad Hassan Fawad, the principal secretary to the PM, and the most powerful bureaucrat in the country, received a request from the ministry in-charge of the Islamabad Capital Territory (known as CADD) asking for the creation of 2,300 jobs for teachers in Islamabad.

Upon further examination, Fawad discovered that there were already over 1,000 posts for teachers in Islamabad that were lying vacant. Why would a ministry that has 1,000 vacant jobs ask for another 2,300? Since the geniuses who had asked for the big new bundle of jobs had no answer, the application was rejected, and the further ruining of the education system was averted.

The proliferation of primary school teaching jobs as an instrument of job creation for the political workers and servants of sitting MNAs and MPAs is the oldest (and most potent) cancer in Pakistan’s education crisis. Vacant teacher jobs tend to be those for which qualified senior teachers are required. Yet political workers tend not to be so qualified. It is much easier to hire them when the benchmark of qualification is lowered.

My guess is that someone managed to convince Dr Tariq Fazal Chaudhry, an MNA from Islamabad, and a core member of the PML-N youth movement, that the PM’s Education Initiative in Islamabad was a good vehicle to create a bunch of new jobs for his constituents (full disclosure: I am a member of the advisory committee for this initiative).

Creating jobs as a tool for political patronage is a long-term cancer. It has eaten away at the very fibre of the country’s education system. Yet there is good news. It is not winning. The cancer is losing.

Fawad is only the latest in a string of officers who have enjoyed the freedom to make good decisions, instead of being captive to a history of bad ones. Starting with Punjab in 2011, each of the four provinces has initiated schemes to hire teachers on strict merit. This has resulted in no fewer than 60,000 highly qualified, non-political appointments to teaching jobs in Punjab, over 25,000 similar appointments in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and a long struggle in Sindh and Balochistan to terminate thousands of ill-qualified political workers from teaching jobs they have no business having.

Who is doing this work? Bureaucrats like Fawad Hassan Fawad. In Sindh, this happens to be Secretary Education Fazlullah Pechuhuo. In Punjab, it was Aslam Kumboh and Abdul Jabbar Shaheen. In Balochistan, it is Secretary Education Saboor Kakar. And in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, it has been Secretary Education Afzal Latif.

What do these DMG/PAS officers (save Kakar, who is a provincial officer) have in common? First, they have been afforded the freedom to make good decisions by their political bosses. Second, they have been retained in their jobs for substantial periods of time. Three, they all belong to various ethnicities, and work for various political dispensations. The progress in each province is a manifestation of political will, on the part of the PML-N in Punjab, the PPP in Sindh, both the NP and the PML-N in Balochistan, and the PTI in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Why do I share this story within the context of the dharna, post-dharna and now Panama Papers political discourse? Because if our only source of information about government, and how it works comes from watching the idiot box, or participating in contemptuous social media narratives, we all risk becoming idiots.

The PML-N, PPP, PTI, and National Party all have a lot more to offer than the bitter and personalised attacks that shape the evening talk show discourse. The misbehaviour and immaturity of this discourse should not completely overshadow the painstaking and difficult work that Pakistanis have tried to do, through political parties, and government, across the country – sometimes in partnership with each other.

Pakistan is bigger than the tiny egos of supposedly giant men. The sad and paradoxical reality is that this grandness is so often ensconced within those tiny egos.