Pakistan - Guns vs books - Taking up Malala's Challenge

THE challenge that Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai has thrown down for us deserves to be taken seriously. The young and courageous campaigner for education said at a UN-sponsored education summit in Oslo that $39bn is all that is required to give 12 years of free education to every child in the world.

To put the number in context, she placed it next to global military expenditures, showing only eight days of military spending could pay for the education of every child in the world. This is a staggering comparison, and becomes even more important when one considers the growing role of child soldiers in conflicts in Africa and many other parts of the world.

Global military expenditures have been showing very slight declines in the past three years, coming in at $1.776tr last year according to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute. But these declines hide a fundamental reality: the centre of gravity of military expenditure is moving away from the Americas towards the Middle East and Asia.

Countries in our neighbourhood are arming themselves at an alarming rate. The US remains the world’s leading arms spender, but the list of the top 15 countries with the highest military expenditures today includes India, China, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

It is heartening that Pakistan does not feature on this list — we can hardly afford to. But each of these countries has a special responsibility to ensure their growing military expenditures are matched by equally robust increases in their education spending.

Pakistan too, as a rival of one of these countries and a strategic partner of the remaining three, shares a special responsibility to ensure that the competition it chooses to pursue does not come at the cost of educating our future generations.

The young Malala took enormous risks to underline some very obvious facts: that education is necessary, that girls are as entitled to it as boys. Now she is once again reminding us of our tragically misplaced priorities in which our hatred and thirst for power today trumps our investment in our children’s future.

If even eight days of military spending sounds too much of a sacrifice for the sake of educating every child in the world for 12 years, then our grip on humanity has withered to a great extent. The least we owe our children is to think about how we got to this point, and more importantly, how we might extricate ourselves from the situation.