LAHORE: We have seen in recent days that the ruling elite form a committee to probe scandals inviting public uproar, most probably to dilute public pressure; although the records are available with concerned institutions and faults could be identified in one day.
We continue to nourish the institutions that fail time and again and do not take cues from horse riders who dismount and discard a horse when it is unable to bear their weight. However, our governments try to keep their dead horses (public institutions) operational through various measures, including indefinite use of a ventilator. They go on whipping the crippled horse until it falls down forever.
It was through this practice that we have crippled our Railways, dismantled the Pakistan Steel Mill, and increased the liabilities of PIA to the extent that could raise another modern airline.
These days the Federal Board of Revenue is awaiting the same fate.
The measures taken are interesting and repeatedly applied by each government that follows. They blame the failure on the head of the institution, terming him weak and incompetent.
They hand over the institution to a strict administrator believing that he would make the institution functional in the same way a rider uses a stronger whip to force a dying horse to move ahead.
When all these measures fail, the entire management is changed, which is akin to changing a rider to move the almost dead horse unsuccessfully. It is at this point that horse owners give up and bury the horse, but not our government.
The rulers sit with bureaucracy to probe failure through an experts' committee (mostly composed of individuals that brought the institution to its knees).
Naturally, the remedies recommended by the committee could not revive the institution (dead horse).
By this time, the bureaucracy and the ruling elite find continuing with dysfunctional institutions beneficial. The failure of all these measures is taken as an opportunity by bureaucrats and the ruling elite to go abroad and study measures taken by foreign governments to revive similar ailing institutions.
There they usually find out that those institutions needed minor reforms and were not on ventilators.
The foreign trips, though, add to the credentials of bureaucrats but fail to make the dead horse alive.
They then play their last card, protecting the jobs of thousands of workers employed by the dead institutions. For this reason, they do not want these entities to be privatized. The bureaucracy argues that besides making thousands jobless, handing over institutions to the private sector would create a monopoly and increase the price of the services it provides. (They conveniently ignore that the inept institution is providing low-quality services and products or no service at all).
The end result is that they convince the rulers to let the institution operate on somewhat reduced losses. They thus reclassify the dead horse (read: dead institution) as living-impaired.
When they see that nothing has improved despite adopting the above measures, they hire foreign experts to make the dead horse alive again.
If the foreign expert is a genuine expert, he suggests closing it down, or if he also wants a share in the booty, asks for fresh investment that would be managed by the same incompetent and corrupt machinery.
That means additional funding and capacity building of the management of the institution, preferably in a foreign country. But reality cannot be changed; a dead horse can never be revived.