PEOPLE
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY π€ π°
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
From: East Coker by T.S. Eliot
There are now many government-run authorities in Pakistan. Pakistan has a massive bureaucratic machinery at the top of these authorities. Quite innocently, when we think that the hundreds and thousands of bureaucrats and their minions must somewhere be engaged taking care of our health, education, security, financial worries, sanitation, transport etc, these officials are busy doing something very peculiar.
Actually, Pakistan's officialdom mostly keeps contriving newest ways and means to further extend the size of the government. Self-interest acts as motivation. Top officers considering their end time to be nigh, compel the politicos into setting up authorities where these officers see themselves post-retirement.
Wary of the pressure from the IMF and other international cops with regard to downsizing, the top bureaucracy always succeeds in convincing the government of the day that salvation lies in jettisoning the lower officials
This mindset has led to the creation of dozens of regulatory authorities both in Islamabad and the four provincial headquarters. Officers posted in these authorities get fat salaries. Such salaries would make Adam Smith whine and writhe in his old grave!
One such authority is called National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA). Common people hear this acronym only whenever they are burdened with an increase in their electricity bills. Otherwise, this authority has been found out to be only trying to making the filthy rich private power producing companies the filthiest richest.
NEPRA recently came into limelight when after a secret huddle, its officers got themselves a more than one hundred per cent raise in their astronomical salaries.
'A rich man is an honest manβno thanks to him; for he would be a double knave to cheat mankind when he had no need of it.'
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)
One odd upright and smart person in the media got the news. He perhaps got it under the Right to Information Act which Pakistan has enacted under pressure from the international community. NEPRA immediately announced not to comply with further requests for information under the Act.
Many other powerful institutions in Pakistan including the judiciary consider themselves too sacred to be asked to share the information about their workings. Pakistan's constitution says all people are equal, but our judiciary says they are more equal than others in their monetary gains.
God's plan is higher: God is almighty and wise. (Repentence) Chapter 9, Verse 40
Those trying to enrich themselves while befooling the public are not mindful of God and His power. The Qur'an tells us how those accumulating gold and riches while opting to stay oblivious of the Divine injunctions will be punished.
Jesus is said to have proclaimed, 'Assuredly, I say to you that it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel πͺ to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.'
Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA), like NEPRA, is another authority that stings the common people like a cobra π. The government, rarely if ever, implements the OGRA's advice for a decrease in prices of the basic utilities like oil and gas. But every spike in rates proposed by OGRA is enforced before one can say knife.
One wonders why a job that can be performed by an efficient clerk under the administrative control of the federal secretaries with the help of a mathematical calculator is seen to by an army of officials at a great cost. Authorities would normally argue that they earn their own revenues through licensing etc, but the cost in any case is borne by the public.
The provincial government in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) is presently considering a proposal to set up an authority for the cultivation and promotion of hemp (bhang). This is what must be called as a very ridiculous idea because the province already has an agriculture department with a massive workforce and extensive infrastructure.
Another controversy brewing in the province is with regard to the proposed establishment of an authority to oversee the exploration of minerals. Again, the nincompoops appear to have suddenly woken up to the reality that KP has vast untapped reserves of minerals. One may ask what was the Minerals Department doing for years if it didn't know about these latent treasures.
Every single Pakistani is bearing the brunt of the capricious upward revision of toll rates by the National Highway Authority (NHA). Such revisions totally run contrary to what the government could be heard crowing about that inflation or the cost of living had come down to less than one per cent as of March, 2025. Does the State Bank of Pakistan not take into account the NHA's shenanigans while calculating the rate of inflation, one may ask?
During our untellable torturous ordeal in the private hospitals in Pakistan we found out the farce that the Health Regulatory Authorities both in Islamabad and KP happened to be. Often during our round-the- clock stays in the private hospitals, we would find out the doctors and their staff running helter skelter.
No, not that they would be in the midst of an emergency dealing with the sick. But to the contrary, as the lowly-placed officials would tell us, the hospital was expecting a 'special guest.' That 'special guest' would not be the angel that Abraham and his kind wife would be preparing for to receive. But some officials from the health regulators for whom everything was being made spick and span in addition to a sumptuous meal
People in Pakistan in general and in KP in particular have little time to read anything other than what they have to learn by rote from the textbooks. Making the best of the public's loathing for reading, those at the helm would spare no effort to befool us.
Presently, there is a kind of madness in evidence in Pakistan where the federal government and all the provincial governments could be seen doling out laptops and other attractive and fanciful gifts among the students. May one ask, the prime minister, all four chief ministers, the respective chief secretaries and hundreds of their secretaries when did they last check their own email accounts? And if they did, in which one singular case did they reply to the sender?
One shouldn't feign not to know. This is all gimmickry aimed at buying the sympathies of the prospective voters. All this extravaganza will only add to our miseries, rendering us to approach the IMF with even bigger begging bowls in the coming months. The rhetoric that this or that would be our last application to the draconian lender is little more than balderdash.
Nobody is writing about this. Media in Pakistan, both the print and electronic, is controlled by the big business.
Dr. Mehdi Hasan, brother of Dr. Mubashir Hasan, once said that the petty shopkeepers who put up hurdles in front of their shops to prevent parkings were also our feudal lords. There are many different types of feudal lords in our country. Even the chowkidar who stands guard at the entrance of his Sahab's office and the chauffeur who drives the sahab to and fro also consider themselves entitled to the titles of 'feudal lords.'
The pseudo intellectuals in the Pakistani media have largely gone unnoticed as the rightful claimants of the title of 'feudal lords.' After remaining confined to the print media for years, these feudals have now invaded the TV screens in our living rooms. They may not be more than a hundred but they treat themselves like the other four stakeholders in the Pakistan's scheme of things.
At the back of these pseudo intellectuals are the business interests. They get salaries in millions. A TV producer who recently quit his highly paid job, because his conscience was pricking him beyond his control, revealed that the anchors would reach only two minutes before they went on screen. They knew they hadn't got anything new to say!
They simply had to be the heralders of the doomsday scenario or one odd gospel that suited the business interests of their employers. Otherwise they are too proud standing alone like the puddle, as George Eliot would have called them, as the river of wisdom rushed by.
This is the story of the rich.
When I asked AI to let me see an image of the Biblical metaphor of the camel and the rich man, the machine asked me, man of which ethnicity would you like in the image? I told him/her, of any ethnicity because all rich people were alike.

posted by Nasser Yousaf @ 23:18
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