People in positions of authority look for an excuse to go on foreign trips paid for by the State. As the country suffered its worst natural disaster in October 2005, our members of parliament went on foreign junkets, presumably to seek foreign assistance.
CEOs of State-owned corporations have made it a habit to go abroad on the most flimsiest of excuses. While the chief executive of national airline has never gone to Peshawar, Lahore or Rawalpindi, to interview airhostesses for recruitment, he considered it appropriate to go to London for five days in March 2006, for interviewing British-born recruits to serve as stewardess.
How can the foreign trips, be justified and why does not Islamabad ask questions about them. It is time such expenditures are curtailed and funds diverted to provide the much-needed relief to the common man.
The poor victims of earthquake in Kashmir need to be rehabilitated. We need funds for schools and hospitals, clean water for the millions living in rural Pakistan. The scourge of illiteracy haunts the future destiny of the nation.
Every paisa must be accounted for, in a country like Pakistan, where people are driven by desperation to commit suicide, or sell their body organs to feed their starving families.