Shahbaz’s buffoonery

EDITORIAL:THE FRONTIER POST

One knows not if to laugh or cry, so hilarious but so deceitful is this buffoonery of Shahbaz Sharif, Punjab’s chief minister. Not an hour goes by when he decries “the rulers” of doing this or doing that, as if he himself is no ruler but just the manager of a college canteen. He may be thinking with this buffoonery he is deflecting the public attention from his own poor show of governance in the country’s most populous province. But who will tell this eminence that in the popular estimation he sits very much in the league of the incompetents like Zardaris, Gilanis, Hotis and Riasanis, not in the club of Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of the Indian state of Bihar, and Narenrda Modi, his counterpart of India’s Gujarat state.

Kumar has transformed a chronically lawless backward state into a prospering place, for which the electorate has rewarded him with a fresh mandate for another five years. And Modi has turned a long laggard state of Gujarat into a flourishing economic powerhouse, for which even his staunchest critics, who are unforgiving of him for his diabolical role in Muslim massacres, acknowledge him, even though gingerly, as an excellent development administrator. So much so, both are being viewed by the political pundits as the possible next prime minister of India. But not even the most generous political observers are visualising Shahbaz as the putative candidate for this top job of the country, such an utter failure has he proved in governing the Punjab province and delivering its residents their wants and needs. It is a colluding media that is so lenient on him. But the people’s estimation of him is quite devastating. He may be dancing in the good graces of the flattering bureaucrats and party lackeys who he pampers and patronises. But the citizens’ take on him is very damning. They know him for his abysmal collapses, not for his self-touted successes.

They attribute their riddance from the deadly dengue epidemic to the mercies of the divine powers, not to his any effort as would he have it believed. And they still remember him for the contaminated medication that took scores of lives at a Lahore cardiology medical facility. And they know him not for any daanish schools, but for the wholesale ruination of the state-run schooling he has presided over in Punjab so nonchalantly. There indeed is hardly a spectacular accomplishment for the people weal and wellbeing that he can rightfully boast of.

His every morsel of pork barrel has run into infamy; his every show of populism has raised a storm of disrepute. His sasti roti contrivance turned out a huge hoax and earned him the stinking repute of blowing away billions of the taxpayer’s precious money on feeding the well-off, not the poor, the penniless and the impoverished. His laptop enterprise has drawn flake from across the segments of the polity. The huge moolah that he has expended so recklessly on this patently personal image-building venture, say the well-meaning critics, he should have spent on real educational pursuits like the promotion of science education in schools and colleges. And it is guffaws that his tenting expedition is presently eliciting from every nook and cranny of the province. Shahbaz in fact has nothing grand on his platter to show for performance. Be it governance or development, be it agricultural advancement or industrial progress, be it promotion of trade or commerce, be it law and order or combating crime, indeed be it any walk of public life, he has come a cropper abysmally. And his self-serving prattle is impressing no people at all. They need not him to tell, as he does perennially, how meanly have the Zardari & Co. run an inept, incompetent and corrupt administration. They know it all from their first-hand experiences and observations, of which Shahbaz indeed could have had no taste at all even in his wildest dreams in his tent offices and his palatial residential mansion. But if he thinks that with this telling he is winning the people’s hearts and minds, he is badly mistaken.