IN THE GENUINE INTEREST OF THE PEOPLE

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2018/05/14/in-the-genuine-interest-of-the-nation/

• What does it matter which party comes into power?

Education

Education, we all know it, is the most important requirement for any society. The Economist covered the subject of education in Pakistan earlier this year. An excerpt from their article says:

Pakistani education has long been atrocious. A government-run school on the outskirts of Karachi, in the province of Sindh, is perhaps the bleakest your correspondent has ever seen. A little more than a dozen children aged six or seven sit behind desks in a cobwebbed classroom. Not one is wearing a uniform; most have no schoolbags; some have no shoes. There is not a teacher in sight.

Pakistan’s gap between girls’ and boys’ enrolment is, after Afghanistan’s, the widest in South Asia. Those in school learn little. Only about half of Pakistanis who complete five years of primary school are literate.

The government spends more on higher education that on primary, which means that most of the people benefitting from this expenditure belong to the upper classes, not the section of the population where lack of education really exists.

Pakistan’s overall literacy rate has declined, and now hovers around the 58pc mark.

Health

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has indicated that an expenditure of 6pc of a country’s GDP is required as a minimum for basic health care facilities. According to a WHO report, Pakistan’s current spending is less than that minimum.

Defence

On defense, on the other hand, The Diplomat, an international current affairs magazine for the Asia Pacific region, reports that last year there was a 7pc officially stated increase in spending. The newspaper notes, however, that the actual expenditure is in fact probably about 50pc higher than that.

Human Rights

The Human Rights Watch reports in 2017 that most of those facing charges of blasphemy are members of religious minorities, often victimised for personal reasons.

The government continues to actively encourage legal and procedural discrimination against members of the Ahmadiyah religious community by failing to repeal discriminatory laws.

The reports says that journalists fear retribution from security forces, military intelligence, and militant groups, and that the Taliban and other armed groups threaten the media and target journalists and activists.

On Saturday, the leader of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement was not allowed to board a plane to travel to Karachi, where the PTM was to hold a rally the following day.

The organisations working for women’s welfare in Pakistan are all Non-Government Organisations (NGOs), The Aurat Foundation, Tehreek-e-Niswan, Shirkat Gah, and others

The media in 2016 remained under pressure to avoid reporting on or criticizing human rights violations.

Children continue to be used as suicide bombers by armed groups. That has to be the most awful sentence in the history of the written word.

Sexual harassment for women in Pakistan remains a huge problem, and the rate of child marriages is high.

In this society the word ‘honour’ has been twisted until the new meaning is a monstrous travesty of the actual. According to the Aurat Foundation, about 1,000 women are murdered in the name of ‘honour’ each year. The Foundation believes that the majority of the cases go unreported, which means the number is actually much higher. Acid attacks, rape and other forms of violence against women are rampant, and are often endorsed by jirgas.

Water

Pakistan is third among the countries most threatened by water shortage, according to the United Nations. The country has no organised use of water. In this country, only 30pc of the population can access clean drinking water, according to a UNICEF report.

According to an AFP report, nearly 60 million people in Pakistan are at risk of arsenic poisoning due to contaminated ground water. That figure was the result of a study. That is a massive number, about three times the population of the whole of Australia.

The same AFP report singles out two villages in the Punjab, where nearby factories are being blamed for contaminated the water. As a result people in the village suffer an abnormally high rate of bone and dental deformities.

Officials in the Punjab refused to comment, despite repeated requests by the news agency.

Air

According to a World Bank report, the urban air pollution in Pakistan is among the worst in the world.

Food

In his column in Dawn, Javed Jabbar says that About 44 percent of Pakistani children are reliably estimated by the Unicef to be suffering from malnutrition.

What are politicians doing?

Nothing.

Given all these myriad issues requiring urgent attention, the government and the politicians appear to be concentrating on nothing but power politics, and supporting what and whoever, for no other reason than building numbers.

Non-governmental contribution to Pakistan.

The positives are the private contribution to Pakistan. The Citizens Foundation and many other smaller groups have made huge contributions to education. Private hospitals provide a much higher quality of health care and often free services to the poor in a country where the bulk of the population lives well under the poverty line. At the villages that are most acutely affected by arsenic poisoning, it is a private charity that provides safe drinking water for the residents, while at the time the report was compiled a government plant for clean water was still in the process of being built, although the problem had been known for almost a decade.

The organisations working for women’s welfare in Pakistan are all Non-Government Organisations (NGOs), The Aurat Foundation, Tehreek-e-Niswan, Shirkat Gah, and others.

The Burns Ward at Mayo Hospital is privately funded, as is a Home for the Elderly in Lahore.

And of course, there is the Edhi Foundation, which clinches the argument.

Javed Jabbar in his column also suggests that ‘The July 2018 elections afford an opportunity to citizens and political parties to prioritise the provision of adequate food to the people, alongside critical issues of enhanced access to family planning services and innovative approaches to primary school education.’

So yes, elections are coming up.

What does it matter which party comes into power, there is little to choose between them. Still, it is hoped that the voting criteria for most rational individuals will be to support whoever acts in the genuine interest of the nation.

And who is that, exactly, if anyone?