At The Crossroads
The welcome for the Chief Justice (CJ) of Pakistan Mr Iftikhar Chaudhry along the GT Road was unprecedented, clearly the common man who had remain quite aloof from the weeks of protests by lawyers all over the country had now started to join the fray, whether he will engage in earnest only the next few weeks will tell. This will also be directly proportional to the ham-handedness of the ruling party’s administrative minions. The protest was emotional and intense, certainly those who waited for over 24 hours in the car park of the Lahore High Court registered vociferous opposition to one-man rule, these constituted for the most part lawyers.
Leadership on Merit, not Patronage
Pakistan is home to conceivably the finest manpower in the world, it has also been proven many more times over that barring the solitary and unique magnificence of the Quaid we have had a succession of terrible leaders, only a handful can be counted as being above par. One wonders why when blessed with such positive potential on the one hand, we have repeatedly gone down the path of destruction by those whose negative attributes far outstrip their better qualities. The natural emergence of leadership is stunted because we only give lip-service to the merit system, relying mainly on a client-patron relationship to influence the choosing of our leaders, comparable to marriages among blood relations, the mating of similar genes leading to retardation and deformity. Choosing only from the narrow confines of one coterie rather than selecting from the vast reservoir of talent waters down the quality of leadership. This causes frustration among those with aspiration to rise on their merit, the upwardly mobile, causing a talent drain as people leave service or even the country for greener pastures where merit is recognized and rewarded.
Not recognizing merit and giving it its legitimate due is bad enough, worse is when merit becomes a disqualifier. From very early on those with merit are earmarked for getting “special treatment” meant to never let them rise in their profession, unless of course they have mastered the quality of being double or even triple-faced. The system forces people to have dual personalities, one face for your seniors and another for your subordinates. The best Annual Confidential Reports (ACRs) can only be written by your subordinates, those who see the true self of the individual, not the contrived one. Blunt people can never be appreciated in our society. For the company commander of an infantry unit there is no better judge of character and abilities than his soldiers, they are the best referees. In the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) a “Mutual Assessment System” is used (or was?) but this is only true in the initial stage, as cadets settle down into military life, they tend to be competitive and jealous, that sullies the purity of the exercise.