The poverty pandemic |
PAKISTAN’S poverty is usually discussed in terms of income, inflation, unemployment, food insecurity, energy prices and the declining purchasing power of households. These are visible and immediate forms of deprivation. But beneath them lies another, less visible form of poverty: a deficit of leadership, ideas, vision, capacity and courage. This may be one of the most consequential forms of poverty because it determines how effectively a nation responds to all the others.
A country does not escape poverty merely by increasing expenditure. It requires leaders capable of making difficult choices, institutions capable of implementing them, intellectuals capable of generating new ideas and culture capable persons, recognizing competence and rewarding results.
Pakistan has not always been short of such people. In political arena, earlier generations produced figures of very different substance —Mohamed Ali Jinnah, Liaqat Ali Khan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Abdul Wali Khan, Mufti Mahmood, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, among others. Taller than many. They disagreed sharply, sometimes fundamentally, but they possessed political identities, convictions, character and intellectual substance that shaped national discourse.
The issue is not whether the past should be idealized. The important question is whether our present system is producing enough people of comparable intellectual and political weight to meet the complexity of today’s challenges. The same concern extends beyond politics.
A functioning society needs independent thinkers, serious writers, investigative journalists, scholars, academics and artists who can expand the boundaries of public discourse. Pakistan has produced major intellectual and scholarly traditions, represented by figures such as Allama Iqbal and Abul A’la Maududi, Mehboob-ul-Haq, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, Dr. Qadeer khan, Shoaib Sultan, justice Durrab Patel and many others who preferred principals over personal interests, among many others. Their ideas could be debated, challenged or rejected, but they could not easily be ignored.
Today, despite a much larger........