In the old days the worst was 'bending the truth'. We have since progressed to 'burning the truth'- and "using the ash to create the perfect smoky eye" (Michelle Wolf on Press Secretary Sanders).In between we got 'post-truth' and 'alternative facts'. Finally, and unsurprisingly, the Trumping annihilator: 'fake news'.
As 'facts', 'manufactured facts', and 'counter-facts' pour in via the media, especially the social media that could well be fed by khalai makhlooq or the likes of Cambridge Analytica, you suffer a crisis of faith. Ultimately, what inundates you is what shapes your opinions. The quality of evidence ceases to matter.
In this game of smoke and mirrors, where truth untruth and half-truth dance naked, objective analysis becomes a casualty.
On our present and future we have an unambiguous divide: the hopeful and the despondent. To contextualize, take the youth bulge: is it a great opportunity (hopeful) or a grave threat (despondent)? With two thirds of our population below the age of 30, and the 60 years that will take us to reach 'zero-out-of-school' target, and the need to create a million jobs a year for each one of the next thirty years to stay at today's levels of unemployment, even the illuminating National Human Development Report (UNDP) hedges its bets. Its message, 'dire but salvageable', puts it bang in the middle of hope and despondency.
The hopeful think the worst is behind us. They are convinced change is waiting to happen, not because of their faith in any political leader, nor because it can't get any worse than this, but because they think we have reached the critical mass of change.
What Hopes lack in evidence they make up in conviction. Their case rests on the nation finally finding its 'voice'-vigorously articulated by a more outspoken, more persuasive, more determined civil society. This 'voice' cannot go unheard. The powers (political, military, judicial, media) will have to respond.
They have a point. Democracy thrives on dissent. You don't choke it. As the aphorism goes "democracy can take many institutional forms but none succeeds without open debate about values and principles". You engage. You convert or get converted. Hopes think the process has got started, slowly and grudgingly, a defanged media notwithstanding.
They also have a few victory signs to take heart from: the process of accountability, a proactive judiciary, the umpire mindful of the 'third umpire', the politicos making the right kind of noises, element of responsiveness in some recent policies (water, income tax, PERA).
The doomsayers claim evidence. It is an insolvent government. The debt-ridden economy, with growing fiscal deficit and depleting reserves, can at best keep sputtering. Industry is uncompetitive, surviving on dole, protection, cartelization, and rent seeking. So is Agriculture.
It is just not the economy, a highly overstated fault line. There is the appalling state of human development that finds us near the bottom of virtually all indices. There are the atrophied institutions, made the worse by an internecine turf war. There is the political polarization with MAD (mutually assured destruction) written all over. Shared values, that essential bond that holds a nation together, are increasingly becoming less shared. Social contract is withering.
But despite the overwhelming truths the despondent, too, live in hope. They are like UNDP: facts are daunting but it can be done. It must be done.
So how do we give hope a chance? First, accept our weaknesses. Discard the notion that we are the 'cat's whiskers', to begin with. Whatever our strengths, we have been left far behind. If we need outside help there should be no shame in seeking it. Leadership is important, but let's not kid ourselves that we would be the chosen few if we had the right leadership! We have our own individual faults and failings that have little to do with a dishonest leadership that we ourselves chose.
Second, scale down our ambitions. To find space at the top would require enormous effort, and if we overload the system it could short-circuit. Let's begin with a more manageable agenda, not the 'low hanging fruit' but one that lays the foundations for sustained excellence.
Developing a short-term reform agenda will obviously require considerable debate - and perhaps this is where we can do with some outside help, not for a cost-benefit analysis but determination of essentials that will ensure success.
Most will agree Human Development should be top of the agenda, with measurable goals and each penny properly accounted for. More than more financial resources it would require a paradigm shift in how we approach issues of learning (and citizenship!), nutrition and health, and population control.
Uplifting our productive sectors can't be far behind. Take any measure and we find ourselves on the backbenches of the global class. Protection and subsidies, justifiable in exceptional cases, are neither sustainable nor in our best interest.
What we need is a total re-write of the way government and private enterprise interact. Government policies have to be pro-business (for job creation if nothing else) and private sector careful what it wishes for. Perverse incentives will only dig the hole deeper.
The world may be weary of the 'Digital Ape' - a takeover by Artificial Intelligence or robots; Homo sapiens being transformed into Homo Deus - but we have been left so far behind in technology that we have some serious catching up to do. It should be high up our agenda. Both government and enterprise need to assimilate it, like yesterday.
Whatever the agenda, nothing will work without justice and accountability - and working local governments. And let us not forget no Nation has broken through underdevelopment without providing more productive space to women.
And how will we achieve all this? By demanding it. Elections offer an opportunity. We should demand of all the parties to announce their manifestos - not just the catchy topline, like the five Es or the five Ds, but concrete action plans with measurable accountability yardsticks.
Instead of rubbishing PTI's first hundred days' agenda the other parties should present their own. Let the people decide whose is Napoleonic ("promise everything deliver nothing") and whose comes with built-in accountability.
Let's put our heads down. Let's stop condemning business, bureaucracy, military, and politicos en bloc. It is a long journey ahead and they will be our fellow travellers.
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