Asif Mahmood

The incident at the District Headquarters Hospital in Jauharabad is currently being discussed on social media. The Secretary Health visited the hospital and reprimanded the Medical Superintendent (MS). In response, the MS gave her an even harsher reply, telling her that he did not want to continue in the job. If the price of keeping this job is my self-respect, he said, the job can stay right where it is. The debate now is about which of the two was at fault. I believe neither may have been at fault. The real problem lies in the distance between provincial capitals and far-flung cities.
Whether a secretary heads the health department, the education department or any other department, it is simply impossible for them to visit every city in such vast provinces and inspect the institutions, hospitals and other facilities under their jurisdiction. Since this is practically impossible, a routine exercise is carried out instead. An urgent message is issued announcing that the secretary will visit a particular place on a particular day. The Potohar region generally gets these visits on weekends, allowing the dignitary to proceed to Murree for a spot of tourism. As for other far-flung cities, their residents are occasionally fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the lord or lady of the land. Even then, there is no guarantee that the visit will be announced in advance. Sometimes, if the mood strikes them, they make a surprise visit to a city to see how their subjects are faring.
Since they know little about the area, have almost no familiarity with its problems and lack the time to examine, assess and understand matters in detail on the ground, they conduct a superficial exercise and move on. We have often seen a minister visit a department or a hospital, accompanied not merely by officials but by cameramen as well. Standing there, they publicly humiliate a doctor, an MS or the head of an institution. The video is then shared to demonstrate how compassionate and people-friendly the minister is, having personally turned up at this or that place.
When these dignitaries set out on visits to far-flung cities, they consider themselves no less than viceroys. Just a year ago, during the summer, teachers from as far away as Mianwali were summoned to Sargodha because some mid-level lord of the land was coming from Lahore and they were expected to be present. When His Lordship arrived in an air-conditioned official vehicle, he humiliated a few of them, asking why their clothes smelled of sweat.
Government institutions may well have problems, but this is no way to resolve them. You cannot turn up with cameramen, humiliate people on the spot, degrade them and then leave after staging a performance for the cameras. If there is a problem, it should be examined in detail. The people concerned should be heard, and a decision should be made only after that. You have the authority to make decisions, but you do not have the right to trample on someone’s self-respect.
The problem, however, is that the provinces are so vast that it is impossible for a secretary to sit down with people and listen to their concerns. Some of our provinces are larger than many countries in the world. Under these circumstances, we are left with this kind of administrative farce. Occasionally, we hear of someone whose sense of self-respect finally awakens and who dares to respond to a secretary, whether a man or a woman, in equally strong terms.
More often than not, people bow their heads and endure the humiliation. After each such experience, the bureaucracy begins to believe that it is entitled to play with people’s self-respect and humiliate them in public. Sometimes, officials humiliate people simply for their own amusement.
Ministers think along the same lines. They believe they can make a sudden appearance somewhere, conduct a cursory visit while passing through, reprimand a few people, humiliate a few others and then share the video with the public in a semi-literate society. The message is simple: look how hard we are working to serve the people. Today, we humiliated this person; today, we humiliated that person; and today, we suspended someone.
Such behaviour can never be counted as good governance. It is superficial, intended merely to provide a sense of catharsis and create the appearance of action. And so, one exercise in optics follows another. The sorry state of our administration is, in large part, the consequence of these very practices.
The provinces, in their present form, are no longer capable of being governed effectively. Smaller provinces have become indispensable for better governance.