Shahbaz Sharif’s jugglery

EDITORIAL:THE FRONTIER POST

So hilarious is this jugglery of Shahbaz Sharif

. Not a day goes by when he doesn't rail against the "rulers" of doing this or not doing that, debunking them for pushing the country to the brink. But is he the manager of a coffee shop, not the chief minister of Punjab, the nation's most populous province and a formidable entity politically? Or, does he think he is a "ruler" who is exceptional and poles apart from the others in incumbency at the centre and in the provinces?But Punjab is definitely no island of opulence, progress and prosperity. It is echoing with public discontent and despondency as loudly as are the other parts of the land. Indeed, his watch has seen things happening that had earlier happened not. The people are horrified seeing government schools functioning on the streets and even in graveyards and colleges running in such unimaginable premises as vacated jail cells. Terribly, the province's rural landscape stays strewn with state-run schools, having no building, no furniture, no toilets, not even drinking water. And even the urban Punjab has scores of schools with dilapidated buildings. And the province still boasts of hundreds of ghost schools that stay as such even as he has been in office for more than four years.He makes so much of his daanish school contrivance. But where is the wisdom that you let the whole state schooling infrastructure to rot and build a school or two for the talented poor? What kind of a priority indeed is this that you secure the future of a select few and let the budding talent of a huge lot of students enrolled on the vast state schooling system get smothered and snuffed out? What kind of populism is this for which the future of millions of students studying in government schools is ruined and ransacked?He crows deafeningly about his unmistakably politically-motivated populist laptop bonanza. But the people all around are crying foul, smelling too much of rat in the scheme where the lucky awardees are handed over the laptop in a bag bearing his full portrait in big size on the front. And it is either he himself or his family members who award these laptops to the winners at gaudy functions whose bill is paid out from the state exchequer as is the price of laptops. And yet he has the audacity to feign as if he is not from amongst the rulers, whose filching of the state money for personal enrichment and political aggrandisement he is so enamoured of recounting at the drop of a hat. Ironically, he has lately taken to joining and leading the protest marches of demonstrators against the painful power load-shedding that has ruined the nation's economy and is playing havoc with the people's daily lives. But when would he start participating in the demonstrations of Punjab's young doctors who are often on the street in protest against his unfulfilled pledges to review and revise their deplorable service conditions? When would he become part of protest of his domain's police-brutalised nurses and lady health workers lamenting the raw deal being dealt to them by his own administration? And when would he start leading the street marches of district administrations' employees who are sour that his government is not regularly releasing their salaries? There indeed is too much of perfidy to his "rulers" chant. But he surely is failing to deflect the people's attention from his own debacles, foibles and falls. Ask the bereaved families of those felled by the killer dengue fever or the contaminated medication of the Lahore cardiology facility. The people died and he looked on listlessly, only trying to pass the buck on to others for the casualties that fell like autumn leaves on his own domain. He may yelp giddily, Ali Baba and 40 thieves. But the people are least amused. And that generation is still alive and in its prime of life that heard the stunning stories of staggering bank-loans write-offs and devastating bursting of cooperative societies in the mid-1990s when the Sharif Inc. was at its political peak. The people are anyway not impressed by his political rhetoric. They hold him as inept, as incompetent and as incapable as they view Zardari, Gilani, Hoti or Riasani. They see no difference in them all. They hold them all as the chips of the same block. Shahbaz should know this. His "rulers" chant will come of no avail to him. He stands as discredited in the public estimation as do all others.