By Syed Haider Raza Mehdi
While Sahiwal casts a huge shadow and a sad question mark, it merely manifests in the most stark, cruel and tragic way the absolute destruction and breakdown of our institutional processes, competence, accountability and governance structures.
If anything it gives us a huge warning of a potential unstoppable meltdown, where even those in the bureaucracy, who are competent, will not take action, as is happening now.
It reflects institutional breakdown, lack of merit, lack of competence, lack of training, lack of process and lack of controls.
And the consequences are horrific.
A future encounter with a terrorist now runs the risk of inaction.
Such is the situation we are in.
It also manifests, in this case, the consequences zero accountability of the infamous police encounters introduced by Shahbaz Sharif and Asif Zardari! The Abid Boxers, Omer Virks, Rao Anwars etc.
The solution.
Reform, reform and reform. Will not happen overnight, unfortunately.
50 years of destruction of governance structures and institutional breakdown will not be fixed overnight.
But we will have hope if at the least, we see actions which tell us we are heading im the right direction and we see competent administrators at the helm.
A Governance reforms committee under Dr. Ishrat, and CM Buzdar in Punjab, does not give us that hope and comfort.
-Haider Mehdi