One knows not if to laugh or to weep, so coarse and outrageous is the hypocrisy, hyperbole and conceit of the Sharifs. Over these days, they squeak like a bird that the rulers have failed, as if they are no part of the ruling tribe, whereas they are very much of it, holding the reins of power of the country’s most populous and quite decisive province of Punjab. Of course, it is an unpardonable wastage of precious breath to dwell on the act of the Zardari & Co; such an utter failure has it demonstrably been in administering the country. But no better is the Sharifs Inc. Its hoax of good governance is receiving a cruel burial nowadays in the government hospitals of the province’s capital city of Lahore, where patients in scores are dying after taking the government-procured substandard medicines on the beds, horror of horrors, occupied by not one but two patients each simultaneously.
And yet the Sharifs have the gall of holding on unabashedly to their obscene pretence of running a competent, efficient, people-friendly and corruption-free administration in Punjab, even as this churlish posturing of theirs had been busted earlier revealingly by their confusion, paralysis and collapse when a fatal dengue fever struck the province and felled its residents in hundreds like a wind would the tree leaves in autumn. Indeed, if the Zardari & Co. is setting ever-new record in mismanagement, misuse of office and sleaze and corruption, the Sharifs Inc. is not lagging any notch behind. It too has set an unbeatable record of not even a single secondary education board of Punjab having produced an accurate examination result this year on its watch.
Surely, the Khaddam-e-Punjab will go down in history with the distinction of running a government primary school, of all the places, in a graveyard in Rawalpindi where its only two teachers were captured on camera by a contemporary teaching their pupils amidst the graves of their ancestors. While a gaudy costly media campaign, unquestioningly mounted for the personal projection of the Khaddam and his elder sibling at the poor taxpayer’s expense, tells effusively of the Sharif Inc. having launched on a daanish schools project for the talented poor students’ exclusive benefit, there are hundreds of thousands poor students studying in the province’s unkempt government-run schools that look more like animal pens than nurseries of schooling.
The pathetic condition of these schools in rural areas is though just unspeakable, so neglected and ignored are they. But no lesser gloomy is these schools’ plight in urban areas, particularly the downtowns. Schools are aplenty having no building worth the name and holding classes on roadsides and streets. And teacher absenteeism abounds as much in rural as in urban schools. Yet the Sharifs Inc. has not deemed them fit for their benevolent care, plainly because refurbishing them is hugely painstaking laborious job which is the two siblings’ no cup of tea. It is populism and pork barrel that comes natural to them. For, it is the vote bank, not the public interest that compellingly appeals to them.
Never ever the two Sharif Brothers have been found wanting in galling the people’s ears with their nauseating brags that thousands of laptops, albeit state-funded, they have distributed among “deserving” students and many more would they so distribute in months ahead. Of course, one cannot grudge the luck of the fortunate receivers of this gift. But couldn’t the two brothers conserve this state moolah for spending on giving, if not buildings and furniture which many a Punjab government-run school have not the good luck to have, at least science laboratories to some of them. Had indeed they been really public-spirited and people-friendly, they would have fretted hard for providing adequate facilities for science teaching in these schools. But a lot of them do not have even a science teacher.
But this spirit the siblings lack acutely, manifestly. Punjab is certainly the nation’s one huge food granary. But can you imagine even in this food-growing land its residents buying even vegetables at the gold price? There indeed is no control on price in the Punjab bazaar as well. It is as bad, if not worse, as the bazaars of Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, or for that matter, Islamabad’s. So where is the difference? It is all the same. No incumbent ruler carries any distinction. The only difference in them is in the skill of media management, in which the Sharifs Inc. definitely has a huge edge over the Zardari & Co.
Just imagine. Punjab by every account is in the lap of waltzing lawlessness and criminality. Street crimes, car-lifting, motor-bike snatching, thefts and dacoities are in a dizzy binge. Highway robberies are galore. The countryside is being robbed wholesale by thieves, dacoits, robbers and cattle-rustlers. The people of the province have indeed lost all their sense of safety and security. Yet the Sharifs Inc.’s conch, one Rana Sanaullah, a Punjab minister, has the audacity to brag that security of Mansoor Ijaz, an operator of the Memogate scam, can be entrusted to the Punjab government. Can anyone match this joke of the century?
But brag as they may. The people at large take the Sharifs Inc. as much part of the same league as the Zardari & Co: kleptocracy. Both the clans come to them people as kleptocrats, nothing less and nothing more. That is the bland truth.
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