The people of Pakistan were savagely punished for their ill-placed trust in their representatives when these representatives (arguably among the most ill-educated and incompetent persons in the country) raised their salaries three-fold and their allowances to phenomenal figures.
In Pakistan’s democracy, the highly demanding job of law-making and governance is awarded to those persons who somehow manage to beat their opponents in their constituencies, not on the basis of merit but on the strength of numerical superiority.
For other areas, one needs educational qualification and the required degree of knowhow and expertise to earn one’s bread and butter and improve one’s quality of life. You can’t become an engineer without having studied engineering and acquired the relevant degree. You can’t become a doctor without MBBS degree, nor a Chartered Accountant, Marketing Chief or a Management Consultant without the required degree or qualification. But you can make laws for the country and govern it also, even if you can’t write a paragraph without half a dozen mistakes. All that is necessary to do is to secure one vote more than the nearest one in an electoral contest in your constituency.
This is Pakistan’s democracy. People are punished in many ways in this system.
They realize a few days after they cast their votes that they will be ruled by persons not good enough to get a decent job in a decent profession on the strength of their merit.
Mian Nawaz Sharif’s Assembly has voted to punish the country’s tax- payers by raising the emoluments of its members to monumental proportions.
The question that many among these tax-payers are asking one another is: “Can’t we survive without these tormentors of ours?”
