The true meaning of governance

While newspapers and news channels continue to elaborate the political happenings in the country, including statements and actions by major politicians, as well as accusations and allegations of various kinds, there is real news which goes generally untalked about.

This newspaper has been among those to highlight one of these issues, which involves the large-scale manufacture and sale of pharmaceutical medicines, which threaten the lives of patients and contain no active ingredient at all. According to the report, these medicines which are being sold in the thousands in markets across the country are manufactured by companies which do not exist and aren’t registered with the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan. The question of how drugs manufactured by these so-called companies are prescribed is something that amounts to a major scandal which needs to be investigated.

Sadly, we see very few people in governments at either the national or the provincial level who are willing and active in tracking down such acts of criminality. The policies that allow such dangerous actions to take place are also poorly thought out and not followed up on sufficiently. It is known that many commonly used antibiotics and vaccines are among drugs that have been manufactured by companies which do not exist at all. In other words, a group of individuals or perhaps many individuals with no real company put together medications in backstreet operations and put them out in the market, often selling them at lower rates than was the case before the prices of non-essential medicines were deregulated.

The real task of the government should be to save citizens from harm of all kinds. Sadly, this is not happening. Our governments too often stick to their own scale of interests and base these around self-interest and the desire to accumulate as much power as possible. They simply turn a blind eye to matters that should in fact make headline news in news outfits around the country. This rarely happens and the public indeed seems to have come to believe that the only news worth talking about occurs in the political realm.

This is far from true. The real news that affects people and has an impact on their lives takes place in shops where articles are sold without check, in schools where education is imparted by teachers without any training, in hospitals where doctors with fake degrees operate, and in all kinds of other places including our roads and other points used by the public every day. True governance would need measures to check these activities and find a way to at least reduce their incidence even if they cannot be immediately halted altogether.

The real aim should be to bring them to a stop and save lives and the welfare of patients and other people who go about using all kinds of materials without knowledge of the harm they are doing. Few people, for example, understand that private schools may be offering a very low level of education. Instead of raising their voice against this or demanding that their representatives in the assemblies do so, they simply turn to tuition centres to try and make up for the lapses, thereby inflicting considerable harm on their children in many different ways. They also incur sizable financial costs which should have been avoided. This would be possible only if governments stepped in more into spheres where the public operates and where its main interests lie.

Sadly, it seems that these interests are of little significance to those who rule and who are elected by the people for this purpose. The ministers responsible for these various fields take little interest in running their ministries effectively or looking at the institutions which operate under them. This is a key reason in allowing so much to happen which would be checked if any true governance existed. We need to look at other countries at a similar level of development to see how governance can be improved and of course local governments are needed to act effectively in order to save people from the various harms that they face on a regular basis.

We also need people to be made more aware of the dangers they face. While citizens should not be expected to protect themselves against all kinds of damage, awareness about the problems that can harm them could go some way in allowing them to at least protect themselves. This is especially true in a country where law enforcement set up for the purpose of ensuring the safety of citizens is so ineffective. This has to change and the measures to do so should come from the top ranks of government.

While the chief ministers of all four provinces are eager to send out messages claiming their own efforts to improve the lives of people through schemes of various kinds, they do too little to check what is going wrong in the departments and organisations which fall under them.

Medication is a particularly serious matter. This is true given that in every household there are people who need one drug or the other and usually children who need to be vaccinated or given medicines that can save lives. The desperate shortage of some medications is simply adding to the desperation of people to get their hands on substances that are in some cases vital to save lives and prevent serious disease.

When genuine items are not available, they turn to whatever they can find. These often turn out to be entirely fake in nature. The problem is not confined only to medicine. In food items too, there are many that are of inferior quality and consist of very few of the expected ingredients. The same applies to cosmetic items such as hair dyes and indeed all kinds of other items across the spectrum of consumerism.

We need steps to check the sale of such items. This may not be an easy step at the initial level but it is one that has to be undertaken if we are to prevent people from coming to harm. Protecting the lives of people should after all be the first priority of those who govern the country. Some truly attempt to go about their jobs in a proper and befitting manner but these people are too few in number and do too little to solve problems that appear to exist on a massive scale and need intensive measures to prevent becoming even more widespread, causing even more harm.

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.

She can be reached at: kamilahyat@hotmail.com