Education and the Nazim

jay #22 #23 #19 Thank you for your views.

When you write ``I am the Alexamder Flemming for pakistan, I am the incentor of BSP``, it is difficult to take your views seriously. You are entitled to the hatreds that lead you to make such statements, and by equating yourself with Fleming and by implying that your ``paki bashing`` amounts to anything you merely demonstrate the illusions you live in. Rest assured that the future of Pakistan and the Pakistani people is not dependent upon your goodwill. And for the record, I would also correct your assertion that I support honor killings. I do not.

tauheed sab

good to see discussion on this topic. however, are you serious that this is a panacea for developmental progress? please explain how so in theory and practice, with supporting arguements of how the entrenched political interests pariticipating.

and what the hell is a Nazim? is this some qoranic concept? or from the hadith? whats wrong with sarpanch, patwari, munshi or some other name people can indentify with? do people actually understand something by Nazim? Is this a commonly used term from Ottoman beurocracy? First caliphate?

kaurasuch # 24

Do you still see your imaginery freinds, or did you get some help???

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#17 by AhmadBilal o May 7, 2004 0.58am PT

Most of old book shops in Islamabad are run by the members of one big extended family. They started from the Round Market in Melody (latter moving to a shop next right under Melody Cinema) many years back and have since spread branches everywhere, Super, Jinnah Super, Ayub Market etc. They work as a cartel to monopolise the market and inflate the prices. Sometime you will find that an old book will be just 5-10 percent cheaper than a new one.

The story of new book shops in Islamabad is also not much different. Bookfair, Mr Book and many other shops are controlled by another family. Thus the price-fixing.

Every Sunday many stalls prop up in front of closed shops in ‘Pindi Saddar are also a good source of cheaper old books.

tauheed,

You have scoured the debri of a nation left behind by the mushy and his jihadic mob of kargill and found a gem, whcih is turning to ash in front of you in the sunlight of reality. Pakistans problem is not education, it is the type of education and all your attempts to find glimmer of hope in the shambles of a nation can only delay the eventual progress after a few thousand daisy cutters.

The foundation of a nation is the constitution, that sets out the institutions and the processes that take a nation forward. Mushy has trashed the consitution and he has put in place some arrangements to secure his future. Take it from me, no one man has changed a constitution for the good of its people. The nazim and all that crap you are talking about will deliver only more of the same crap, simply because there is no supporting institutional arrangements. Where will the nazim get the revenue, who will provide nation wide support and above all who will gie the curriculum that the schools are supposed to follow.
In the jihadic inferno fuelled by the madrassas, no ordinary school can survivr, only the elite ones in clifton hills will be shielded.

Pakistan has to rebuilt on a new foundation, and the only help that the pakistanis on chowk can provide is to demolish the xisting. Star with TNT and a few photos in govt buildinmgs.

HIS MASTERS VOICE

What breeds corruption



Whenever the question of corruption and bribery among government employees is posed to President Musharraf (most recently at an anti-corruption conference in Karachi), he answers that civil servants are low paid and are therefore forced to take bribes.

This unfortunately gives implicit moral sanction to a crime that is eating into our society like termite.

Moreover, when a government servant becomes addicted to taking bribes, there is no end to his greed. He doesn`t stop at the gratification of his basic needs but continues to amass wealth till the end. It is no wonder that now one of the richest sectors of our society is constituted by government employees who have stashed away millions locally and abroad.

KARAM ILAHI

Muzaffargarh

/////////////
tHE ABOVE IS FROM DAWN OF TODAY. Mushy a well educated man who rose to the top in military, the premier institution in pakistan, has explained away curruption as due to something for which there is no antidote. The solution is not better enforcement of the rules, education or changing of culture. Mushy has declared that it needs more money, implying that others in pakistan are better paid, the jobless and the farm labourers.

When tahmed maintained that honour killings are a tribal custom, when YLH argued that jihad is due to illitaracy, they were following their masters, mushy, attribute to something for which thare is no tangible remedy.

Pakistans problem is education, when mushy, tahmed and YLH the educated are providing diagnosis of the above type, I wish for the closure of all schools in pakistan, all educational facitilities, if the above are the findings of the educated.

legetimacy for pakibashing,

The last words of every pak apologist is that we are having problems, we are aware of it, and please leave us alone.
That would be a valid arguement for most countries, not for pakistan, when the jihadists are invading afghanistan, when hijackers are heros in pakistan, when pak immigrants are arretsde for terrorism in australia, when the chehnians leadres are collecting funds in pakistan.

Pakistan has to be solved by the world at lage, the people of pakistan have forefeited their rights to self government. At present it is run by the yanks from the 6 airbases, from the 700 milliuon dangling in front of them. Pkaistan has to be managed by all who seek a peaceful coexistance, by all those who reject jihad, and every one can contribute, some by bashing. Pakistan needs a cocktail of cures, daisy cutters, soft loans, technical support, targetted killings and broad spectrum pakibashing. BSP, broad spectrum pakibashing is similar to antbiotics, it can hit several germs at the same time. I am the Alexamder Flemming for pakistan, I am the incentor of BSP.

Tahmed

I appreciate your article which tries to put a positive spin on the Nazim and there abilities. I was in Pakistan recently and met up a few of my fathers freinds in various parts of Sindh who happen to be nazims, who spoke of absolute decrepit working conditions and the freeze on funds. I beleived in the idea of divesting power but increasingly the Nazims are starting to appear as plush showgirls sitting on the windows without much work or incentives. The other negative spin of is the hijacking of the Nazim structures by the political parties, the like of Jamiat and MQM have turned this into a sort of a battle ground specially dealing with the lucrative city of karachi. The govt and most of karachi MPs are MQM but the previous nazims were mostly from the Mullah Brigade as MQM did not participate in the Nazim Elections last time. This time they have and won the majority of the Nazim seats, will this reenforce and bring back the evil of MQM Bhatta eating gangs, remains to be seen. However this has certainly brought back the nightmare of early 90s as both MQM and Jamiat are killing key local Nazim candidates or their cronies. This is certainly worrying.

The problem is that the Nazim system is a good Musharreffic brain wave but one that has been left to rot and not effectively controlled. Today in the metropolitan cities you are only regarded something and have the political might if you wear a Brown Wardi, this is the antidote to the Nazim system, if you want the local political and civil setup to suceed power has to be given to those Nazims and administrators. Unfortunately more and more of our boys in Brown seem to giving up their defence related reponsibilities and taking up the challenge to and i quote `` sort out the civies``. Offcourse the fringe benefits of this sorting out are evident in large houses and flashy cars that seem to have the ID Army number plates driven around Karachi and other metropolitan cities.

The system is bound to fail and be abolished as soon as the despot loses power, for two simple reasons;

1. There was no national debate while instilling these institutions as Malik points out below.

2. The institution has failed to make connection with the people. The change of faces and the name of their designations have not changed the chracter of the institution that new system has replaced. It is still being used to implement the policies from top down whereas in democratic system the policies implemeted by these institutions are bottom up. People are still disenfranchised - how can it happen then?

#16 by veeresh on May 6, 2004 11:21pm PT

Speaking of used books, the old book shops in Jinnah Super Market, Islamabad are pretty nice. I once found a book (some volume of Talism-e-Hosh-Ruba) there which was published more than a century ago. It was written in poetic old Urdu. And some reader had even put comments in it (with pen and ink, which often faded towards the end of the comment) about what he would have liked the author to do with the plot. :) When reading it in long winter nights, I often wondered about the people who would have owned and read it before me. Every old book tells a story of its own.

Thank you Tauheed, for this view of Pakistan which I simply did not get.

On the subject of education, without belabouring the issue of expensive newspapers and magazines any further, what sort of growth do you see for libraries and bookshops in non-urban Pakistan? I mean, is there enough of a hunger for the written word to justify business models of small ``lending libraries`` from typical small 50-100 square foot shops?

Let me elaborate on this - I do not know how many Indians also know the value of a 1-day old newspaper in backward parts of India, how eagerly it is sought when a train rolls in. Or how many of the big publishers/bookshops/magazine stalls in India sprang from kabadi/second hand dealer outlets. I myself, as recently as the late `60s, and we were middle-class with enough reading material at home, recall walking from Defence Colony to Lajpat Nagar/National Park to read Indian magazines at the Lajpat Bhavan Library and also at the pile of old foreign magazines stockpiled outside the kabaddi shop in Guru Nanak Market/LPN-4, next door. And I was not alone, there was a generation who grew up doing that, with the shopkeeper not really bothered as long as we maintained decorum and stacked his magazines back.

Even today, with pavement dwellers and those living in slums nearby trying to spin out of their downward spirals, the habit of gathering in public places to study before exams or to read shared as well as slightly old magazines goes strong in India. And that is when weeklies cost 5 through 15 rupees and newspapers cost 2 rupees.

What happens to yesterday`s newspapers, last week`s magazines and ``returns``, and do you see, people, what I am getting at?

re: Tauheed

Here are some questions that flashed through my mind when reading your article:

1) When you say that local self-governments have improved public schools in their locality, are you referring to urban localities or rural localities?

2) In many remote areas of NWFP, the local maulvis and maliks (landlords) do not want public schools because they will weaken their hold on the people. The Nazims also rely on the support of these maliks for getting elected. Has the local self-government system addressed this potential clash of interests?

3) The provincial elections are held on party-basis, but local bodies elections are not. As a result, the party that wins a heavy mandate is unable to implement its agenda because the Nazims may resist their political agenda. Doesn`t the local government system encroach upon the mandate of the elected provincial government?

4) If we want to strengthen the Nazims, shouldn`t we make Police and district administration subservient to the Nazim (instead of Provincial government)?

mumbaiker #2 Thanks for the link.

jiyajayale #3 Couldnt agree more. That is why it is so important that district governments be given a larger share of the public sector funds - since, as I mention in the article, although it is still too early to tell, it does appear that schools sponsored by local governments actually seem to work. And moreover, it has also been demonstrated by private schools in Pakistan that when people have a choice they would rather have their children given marketable skills rather than fed islamist ideology. And your advice on investing in education is on the mark. Military expenditures are at best a necessary evil, while every penny spent on educating a child is a blessing for all concerned.

AnOrdinaryHindu #4 Thanks, glad you liked the article. If it succeeds, this introduction of democracy at the grass roots level would certainly be a major stop forward.

rozaiba #5 The fact that there are so many forces in the way of this initiative, makes the subject MORE not less important I think. And to be fair - this initiative was taken by the military government. Elected governments in past years were simply unwilling or unable to tackle the powerful CSP class. But you are right, the same military tinkering may kill this initiative. Although at this time it seems it is the provincial governments that are putting hurdles in the way of the local governments.

ahmedzai #6 Thanks for taking time off from your family reunion to write. You make an important point when you say that replacement of civil servants with elected officials is part of other structural changes taking place in Pakistan. And taken together, these changes can bring about sweeping changes in the country. These changes include improvement of relations with india with all the accompanying economic and cultural benefits; the laying down of a modern transport infrastructure (a part of which, the motorway, dost mittar commented on in his article below) with Gwadar hopefully serving as a major port for landlocked states; the empowerment of the poor through expansion of the microcredit schemes; the restructuring of external debt to reduce the debt burden; the list goes on. While there will no doubt be setbacks, I think the force of all these changes will prove irreversible over time.

On the economic front, I think a lot of credit goes to the economic team musharaff put together, who are basically dedicated people who gave up successful careers in international agencies to take on their current jobs, and from all indications they have taken the long-run view of things.

PanjabiZulu #7 Just when I was beginning to feel good about things in Pakistan, you HAD to mention my good friend Jay. But far be it from me to speak ill of him behind his back.
;-)

kaurasuch #8 I think, sir, that you are perhaps being a tiny bit too cynical of human nature. :-)

malik #9 It would certainly have been better if we had a democratic government replace the DC with elected officials. The fact is that none of the democratic governments did this. So, I think we should give credit where credit is due.

dost mittar #10 That is a good question. To the best of my knowledge, while panchayats have been useful in resolving minor disputes, they have not wielded real power. Real power has been with government officials: the patwari (who had control over the all important land titles which he could get away with fudging) and the police. With the DC gone, the head of the dragon has been chopped (and this is only a mild exaggeration), but the police and the patware remain strong as ever. I suspect the patwari will lose power once land records are properly computerized (as some states in India have done successfully, as I understand). But computerization of land records represents a major task - the technical aspects are simple, but the political hurdles are enormous.

AhmedBilal #11 There is no doubt that a change of such proportions will bring about confusion. Indeed, the provincial-district tensions that I mention in the article are a perfect example of what you say. The provinces are indeed too large. One viable alternative in my view is to simply get rid of this ``middle management`` layer of provinces since their is no real logic to them. The central government takes care of managing foreign relations, defense, monetary policy, regulatory framework, and the local government take care of law and order, health and education service delivery. Many of the things the provincial government does could probably be better done by local governments - and they would be more responsive to the people.

Zamir1 #1 Thanks for the link. This squeezing of district governments by the Sindh provincial government is clearly emerging as a problem, and is evident in that interview as well.