EDITORIAL:www.thefrontierpost.com
Just imagine. A briefing was reportedly arranged on the country’s worrisome economic condition for the parliamentarians, four each from the parties sitting in the parliament. For the briefing, the government had lined up a 25-member team of relevant senior officials led by finance minister Hafeez Shaikh. But only seven parliamentarians turned up out of the 55 who had accepted the invitation, showing up in a damning exposure in true colours the oligarchs crowding the parliament wearing the masks of the people’s elected representatives. Over these past four years, gratingly they have been galling the citizens’ ears with their incessant chant of democracy, vaingloriously flaunting themselves as uncompromising democracy champions and posing to be the people’s great friends.
But with this shameful show of absenting almost wholesale from a briefing that meant so much to the citizens going through the worst-ever economic times of their lives over this period, the parliamentarians have displayed what a stock of charlatans they all are made up of. Wallowing in streams of personal wealth and family riches, the oligarchs can certainly neither feel the pangs of the masses pitched in gruelling economic conditions, nor even would they care to know of their anguish on this count. It is their own personal prosperity that comes compellingly to them. Not of the masses, who indeed in their reckoning figure up no more than their family serfs and slaves and their personal servants and valets.
Congenitally imposters, they indeed have been parading deceitfully as democracy what in essence and substance is out-and-out a plutocracy, a rule of the elite, for the elite and by the elite. They even know not that democracy’s centrepiece is the mass of the people, the commoners around whose wellbeing the entire system revolves. Economy thus occupies the central position in a democratic order for making the lives of the masses easier, happy and livable. And it compulsorily forms the focal point of lawmakers and governments alike. “It’s economy, stupid”, once said famously former US president Bill Clinton, underscoring the tremendous import of economic rejuvenation, vibrancy and robustness in a nation’s life. And he did give his people strong economy to live comfortable and happier lives.
In China, they have in fact gone to the extent of compromising on their communist ideology to liberalise their economy, open it up to private enterprise and foreign investment and have emerged the world’s leading global economic giant, with America in its great debt. With this economic miracle, they have also brought an economic miracle to their over-one-billion people’s lives. Even in several African countries, which are no democracies, their autocratic rulers have at least given their peoples flourishing economies that, despite their autocrats’ rampant thievery, is doing a lot economic good to their otherwise oppressed lives. And in the western and other established democracies, their national economies and their citizens’ economic uplift is the top priority of their legislators and governments.
But not here in our own land. The PPP has ruled over these four years without even a semblance of a defined economic policy. Amazingly, for quite big part of its rule, it had run the crucial finance ministry on ad-hoc basis without a regular minister in charge. It has seen the national economy sliding steeply down the hill and the country slip deep into a black economic hole with not a streak of worry on its forehead. In every manner, the country is in a fathomless economic chaos and virtually on the brink of economic collapse. But if Zardari and Gilani have demonstrated themselves to be so illiterate in economics, except their own personal and family economics, their opponents too show themselves to be no lesser ignorant. They too have no recipe to prevent the country’s this fall. Ask any opposition party or leader about what they have for an economic policy, an empty stare is the response.
Hilariously, Nawaz Sharif, now assuming the airs of the country’s putative next ruler, often moans he had given a 10-point economic agenda for national economy’s rejuvenation but the government didn’t implement it. Go through it; if you do not conclude it to be more about politics than about economics, then you will have to infer from it only shallowness of mind and superficiality of thought of Mian Sahib as an economic thinker. It is not generalizations, which this agenda was in substance, but specifics and details, which it was not, that really matter. But then criticism is the easiest part, which is as yet the regime opponents’ specialty. The difficult part is to suggest solutions, which they are palpably bereft of. For pulling the nation out of its woes, most of them are now screaming for early elections as if those are some kind of a magic wand which when rubbed on Islamabad’s floors would swish off the people’s all economic pains just like that.
But such things come natural to oligarchs and plutocrats who have made mounds of fortunes from hefty food-grain support prices, kickbacks and commissions, bank-loan write-offs and such like good things. They will flourish whether rain or winter; and so long as they are strutting on the national landscape, the mass of the people will continue becoming poorer even if it is sunshine or summer. It is as simple as that.
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