Stop the press, because the fix is in – the solution to every citizen’s misery has been found. Best of all, putting most of it into action will not cost much. Like all good things, the core idea sprang from the collective wisdom of the best and brightest of our country. I am, of course, referring to the most honourable members of our parliament and provincial assemblies.
For years, ordinary Pakistanis have faced long odds when they applied for visas. Recently, even applicants with decades-long travel histories and no instances of overstays have faced rejections. If you have experienced these odds yourself, you know that the source of this misery for ordinary Pakistanis is their ordinary (green) passports.
But there is another way – and in April, being the ingenious lot they are, members of the KP Assembly realised and piloted a solution: Grant all members of the assembly (and their spouses and their children) the lifelong privilege to hold an official, blue passport which comes with benefits like visa-free or on-arrival visas to many countries. Recognising this great idea and not to be left behind, the able members of parliament are now moving to secure the same perk for spouses and children under 28 years of age of ex-lawmakers.
To ensure more Pakistanis can benefit from this new law, all we need to do is cycle people through provincial assemblies or parliament to make them all eligible for this lifelong privilege. If this is too much of a hassle, make another quiet change to the law and dispense with the ordinary passport entirely and just start issuing everyone blue passports. Travel headaches: Solved!
I am, of course, being scathingly sarcastic, fuelled by my utter disgust at the complete tone deafness of the present lot of parliamentarians and assembly members rewarding themselves (quietly) with even more privileges as if they have achieved some grand accomplishment. Everyone in charge of running this country seems to be pulling the ripcord to secure themselves a nice, soft landing – rip and pop and glide!
As readers will have heard by now, the bill uses the same template used in other areas of daily life where most citizens face difficulties. Are you afraid you may have run afoul of the law a little bit and indulged in a little criminal activity? Not a problem! Become an MPA and be exempt from preventive detention for criminal acts.
Tired of standing in lines and rubbing shoulders with the unwashed masses at the airport when you travel? Same solution: become an MPA and earn yourself the privilege of spending your time in airport VIP lounges. And because we are such a family-oriented society, spouses shall now also be entitled to ‘assembly identity cards’ (although I cannot recall the last time I cast a vote for a candidate and his/her spouse). There are minor differences in these perks from one province to another, but as soon as members figure out their perks lag behind their peers in another province, that is addressed from time to time. Rip and pop and glide!
And it is not just elected representatives. Everyone in charge of running this country is doing everything in their power to set themselves up to exit it.
It has never been as lucrative to be a civil servant as today. In the last few years, well-connected members of the civil services have been enjoying a new perk: They are selected for graduate programmes at the world’s top universities funded, fully or in part, by the taxpayer.
A few days ago, the Civil Services Academy (CSA) conducted a policy review and produced a report examining the education sector. The report concluded that the declaration of an education emergency in 2024 has failed. Among the long-known issues, it identified poor policy execution, weak governance structures, fragmented administrative systems, inadequate financing, poor data integration and disparities across provinces. Its policy recommendations include performance-linked funding, incentives for teachers working in underserved regions and decentralisation of education authorities to the district level, among others. None of these recommendations is new.
People often ask what should be done to address the education emergency across the country, hoping for some quick, clever, inexpensive trick that would fix it all, but there is no such quick fix that can make up for the decades of neglect. Everyone, including the people running the system, knows it and knows the vast scale of challenges and seems to have come to the conclusion that the situation is hopeless.
I am also reminded of an exchange on a social media site some time ago. Someone observed that, at one time, it was the norm for children of civil servants to attend public schools, which kept their management accountable to some extent. However, over the years, that norm has been abandoned, and working for the government is now sufficiently lucrative (all perks and benefits added up).
Rare is the civil servant in the officer cadre who still opts for public over private schools (and, more recently, domestic over foreign universities) for their children. Someone commented that instituting a policy that civil servants’ children must attend public schools could arrest or even reverse that backslide. That suggestion was sufficiently triggering for the wife of a senior bureaucrat responsible for the public school system at the time to chime in along the lines of, “What have we done to deserve such punishment?” Rip and pop and glide!
Personally, I believe all parents ought to have the right to choose which school their children attend, regardless of their position. But consider what that says about the confidence in (the public services of) the country of the people running them when they themselves characterise using them as ‘punishment’, yet are never shy to claim credit for any work done.
The most privileged lot of this country, the people running it, are heading to the exits and grabbing anything they can get their hands on along the way. Everyone in charge of running this country is pulling the ripcord - rip, pop, glide - while the rest of us are flapping our arms because we don’t have chutes (Splat!).
The writer (she/her) has a PhD in Education.
