Hopes and Hurdles

By Imran Jan | March 2020

Steve Jobs in his 2007 commencement speech at Stanford said that getting fired from Apple, a company he had created, was the best thing that had ever happened to him. It had left him devastated at that moment but as time passed, he worked hard to start all over again. Jobs said that his pride of being the world’s top entrepreneur was replaced with the lightness of being a beginner again. Jobs pointed this out as a mindset of being “less sure about everything”. And that was the key to the future iconic success of his career.

Imran Khan’s promise and rhetoric gave people a hope unheard of in Pakistan in recent memory. However, ever since he came to power, the net result has been more difficulties for the poor than before. The struggle to make ends meet is a real one and it only became nightmarish under the PTI rule. The problem is that the PTI is still in campaign mode, while the rest of us have moved on. Words such as mafia and corrupt thugs are still heard even when the topic is the soaring prices of wheat and sugar.

The movie Shawshank Redemption has Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman arguing about having hope. Morgan argues that hope is a dangerous thing, while Robbins tells him how hope is the best of things. In my humble view, both the characters are right. Hope can ruin people as well as run them. PTI gave us a hope we had not seen in decades in Pakistan and some of the younger Pakistanis had not seen it in Pakistani politics at all. I was born in Pakistan during a dictatorship. Then came the magical chair styled democracy of the 90s, followed by another dictatorship. That is when I became eligible to vote but there was no real ballot in sight. Khan, running in 2018, was the first time for many in Pakistan with a real urge to cast their vote.

We all felt that we could make a difference and that we were no children of a lesser God. The hope rejuvenated us all and gave us a purpose to exercise an important element of our citizenship. It energized our patriotism. Sadly, however, the feelings of those days seem like a distant past. The disillusionment came in phases because we quickly bought the idea that the troubling times were an inheritance from the thieves of the past. Many of us rationalized every move that Imran Khan approved of, including the inclusion of Aamir Liaquat in the party. We remained quiet even when this despicable con artist was made a party member.

Furthermore, unrealistic claims were made, such as the 100-day agenda, which did more harm than good to the credibility of the PTI. Raising the bar sounds nice and, if I may add, one gets a kick out of it too, but meeting those raised expectations with tangible outcomes is what the PTI gave the least thought to. In any business, whether selling something or running a country, the easiest part is the noise-making (promotion) but the hardest part is the logistics to ensure that the deliverables match the noise. What PTI did, it seems, was to give its most energy to the noise and the least attention to the logistics. Once the rubber met the road, PTI missed no opportunity to vividly display sheer inexperience and incompetence.

If the PTI fails, the fallout would be enormous.

The prices of everyday commodities started soaring. Forget about how Imran Khan is promoting Pakistan’s image globally as this is a peace-loving nation. What the average Pakistani poor man needs is lower prices of food for his survival because he has a meagre and static salary. All politics is local they say. Shaukat Yousafzai, a founding member of the PTI, said that people should use yogurt instead of tomato if they cannot afford to buy the latter, an essential ingredient of everyday meals in Pakistan. Had imbecility and senselessness been crimes, Shaukat Yousafzai would be behind bars. A few nuts a day will go a long way against some of PTI’s nuts. The charm and glamour of the leader is not going to pay the bills of those who are at the receiving end of this inflation. Likewise, no economic mumbo jumbo spewed by Hammad Azhar will translate into relief for the poor.

Now, PTI is at a crossroads. It can either continue with business as usual and keep talking about never sparing the thieves of the past (although they have been cut loose) or it could do what Steve Jobs did - shirking off the campaign mode and getting down to the nitty gritty of the problem at hand. They could also stop acting like they know how to fix everything by sending their ridiculous members to talk shows for acts of ridiculousness. Many of us who have been made to smell the coffee due to the PTI’s continuous fiascos are not going to continue to rationalize that the mess is a making of the previous regimes. If the PTI fails, and I sincerely hope that it doesn’t happen, then the fallout would be enormous. Imran Khan resurrected our dead hopes. A murder of these hopes again would leave us absolutely devastated. Many of us expected nothing when the PPP was elected in 2008 and the PMLN in 2013. But we sure expected a lot this time around.

If Imran Khan doesn’t deliver, there is nobody on the horizon that the Pakistanis can look up and attach their hopes to. Even more alarmingly, we may not want to have any hopes again, just to avoid the disappointment. That could be more dangerous than an invading army.

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