Pakistan: Fiddling leaders

EDITORIAL: THE FRONTIER POST

What kind of a democracy are we that even the people’s basic needs of education and health, which in recognised democracies are in the deepest sights of their political leaders, are not even in the remotest thoughts of ours’ even at these election times? Even as in the western democracies they have strong delivering health services and educational systems, health and education are invariably hot topics of the hustings. The power contenders lay out in concrete terms to the electorate what they have in their plans to further revamp the health and education sectors so as to convince them of their intended programmes’ benefits and woo them over to vote for them. In the 2008 US presidential race, candidate Barack Obama’s healthcare plan was in great dispute. He was feverishly selling it to the American people, telling them it promised them better healthcare facilities. His Republican opponents were denouncing it equally vehemently as a bad plan. And his healthcare plan, now in force after he had got it through the Congress in the teeth of the Republican’s stiff opposition, is once again in bitter contention in the current presidential race. And the Republicans are vowing to quash it if their man Mitt Romney makes to the White House and they secure a decisive voice in the midterm Congressional elections. In Britain, they have very vibrant health and education services. Yet the politicians there keep all the time fretting how to spruce them further. And almost every government brings in whatever it deems would improve the facilities for the British public’s larger benefit. In fact, more often than not the power contenders’ education and health plans make or mar their fortunes at the ballot box. And in all probability, the education reforms that the incumbent Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has introduced will become the next election’s hot issue. The opposition Labour party contends that instead of doing good, these have hurt the education system. But here in the country both education and health are two orphans that draw a lot of lip service from the politicos across the spectrum but none embraces them affectionately or sincerely. They all only fiddle with them, meaning not what they say about their uplift in reality. The pathetic state in which both exist is no secret. It is an open reality, calling emphatically for doing all urgently to pull them out of the rot they have sunk in and are sinking in unchecked. When a disease like dengue fever breaks out, it snuffs out numerous lives in no time. The incidences like contaminated medication in a cardiology health facility push patients in droves to the jaws of fatality. And just a short visit to any government health facility is a lifelong searing experience in inadequate healthcare attendance and dirt and filth. And it is a mere wastage of breath to dwell on the sickening condition of education in the public sector, when no concern is even in evidence in any of the political echelons on this score. The state-run schooling in particular is just an insult to education. Dilapidated buildings or no buildings at all, rampant teacher absenteeism, near absence of science teachers and laboratories, moonlighting teachers, almost all political appointees, and ghost schools are its distinctive hallmarks. The system, indeed the entire government-run education, is screaming for cure. But its wailing has no takers at all out there in the political echelons across the divide. By their acts, the politicos, whether in or out of the government, have demonstrated inexorably that none has a heart in improving education or healthcare in the country. Vaguely, they all talk of increasing the share of health and education by this or that percentage of the GDP. But all that is unmistakably by way of sloganeering. When it comes to actualities, these two sectors are blithely starved of funds. The PPP government in fact inflicted its first economy cut on the Higher Education Commission by hefty billions and scrapped its predecessor’s plan for establishing nine science and technology universities, dismissing it peremptorily as impracticable. And as we are hearing the din of daanish schools, laptops and what not in Punjab, the state-run schooling there has been left to go to the dogs. Of education in Sindh and Balochistan, what we have heard is the closure of hundreds of schools, termed being of no use. And the public is in shrill in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa over state-run education’s ever-worsening condition in the province. But the sorriest part is that even in these election times neither education nor health is figuring at all in the demagoguery of the political elites across the spectrum. It is the accountability, dual nationality and if elections will be held or not that is hogging the politicos’ all discourse. But then we are no democracy but a plutocracy. And in that system, it is the elites, not the people, which matter.