Shahbaz Sharif: Cheap publicity stunt

thefrontierpost.com

Has the incumbent chief minister of Punjab too to emulate his predecessor remorselessly and play

a cheap publicity stunt to mock at otherwise a very sublime cause? Pervaiz Elahi blew away millions of rupees on a gaudy expensive media campaign under the banner that his image-makers labelled grandly as para likha Punjab. They said it was a motivational drive. But that was just a ruse, a huge lie. Obviously, the well-off or the middle class needed no prodding or a nudging to send their children to schools. The target could only be the downtrodden and the disadvantaged who for their difficult conditions find it hard to put their children to schooling. Yet the full-blast campaign was mounted on the television channels, to which these poor classes had had hardly an access, as well as in the print media, including the English press that by no stretch of imagination could be construed as having even a modicum of readership among the disadvantaged, very many as illiterate as unable to read even an Urdu newspaper. But Elahi was least pushed. He dipped deep in a World Bank loan for the spread of education in the country to fuel this patently lewd campaign that even a witless would easily discern as nothing else but a cheap self-projection drive. And now Shahbaz Sharif is on this game. He is biting into the cash-strapped treasury of Punjab to mount a similar obscene media campaign. Honouring the nation’s talented students is definitely a worthy project. Cash awards for the position-holders in the boards’ examinations is a praiseworthy enterprise too. Recognition of the heads of their institutions with monetary awards and letters of appreciation is worth it, as well. But taking out huge advertisements in the media on the venture is a contemptible squandering of the taxpayer’s precious money, and culpably offensive as Elahi’s was. This takes out his venture indisputably from the realm of a noble cause to throw it abominably in the domain of personal projection, although the Khadam Punjab has mercifully spared his advert from the atrocity of his portrait, which his predecessor had not. His advert had his own and his mentor Pervez Musharraf’s images mounted prominently on it, albeit to the great chagrin of the citizens, aghast at the daylight robbery of a loan-money for building up personality cults instead of spending it on the spread of education it actually was intended for.But such niceties do not occur to the minds that are neither committed to a cause sincerely and dedicatedly nor hold the public money in their trust as a scared treasure not to be misused or misspent. Certainly, Shahbaz cannot be faulted for including other provinces and other regions in his award venture; but the political overtones of his move cannot be overlooked either. But had he been any wiser, he would have won plaudits countrywide and set an example for his counterparts in the rest of the country by concertedly setting upon the sprucing up of the state-run schooling on his domain. It is as rotten as in other provinces and regions. And it is rotting deeper as in them, unchecked and unrelentingly. Refurbishment of this ruined and collapsing schooling system is doubtlessly a very painstaking and arduous job.But had he rolled up his sleeves and taken the plunge, he would have set himself apart from the common rung, showing himself up as a true reformer and nation-builder. But he too has gone for mere cosmetics. He seems thinking that with just a string of daanish schools, he can pull a marvellous feat in school education, which definitely he cannot. It is only by improving and refurbishing the widespread state-run schooling that he can hope for the blossoming and nurturing of the hidden sea of young talent on his domain. His pet daanish schools at best can serve a sprinkling of that surging talent. Then those schools, make no mistake, are ultimately doomed for that junkyard that has seen similar cosmetic ventures over the time going into its sprawling graveyard or surviving on a life-support inefficaciously once their sponsors are gone.In any case, he must understand vote-banks do not grow up from media campaigns. They build up on people’s personal experiences and observations of the efficacy of a government in delivering their basic needs and urgent demands. A better state-run schooling system would win him votes, not any blaring image-projection drive.