No Prime Minister of Pakistan has ever completed a full 5-year term, and none has ever been sentenced on corruption charges that he has been attacked with from the day he takes office. Politics is no doubt a costly business and the day a politician enters this profession, he is surely setting himself up as a target for drowning under an avalanche of rumours of corruption and character assassination made possible by the easily believing naive population. There is no unequivocal code of conduct laid down in the constitution for politicians or state institutions and their interrelationship. Several promises for remedying all the ills afflicting the country are made which are never fulfilled, at the same time those who begin to take steps in the direction of a solution for remedying those problems are shot down from power in one way or another. Power ultimately falls into the lap of the most powerful institutions of the country (especially the civil bureaucracy which has possessed a hardened corrupt mindset since colonial time) and therefore the critics deduce that all the turmoil is actually sustained by the machinations of these very institutions. The result of this continuous turmoil has been that our country has yet to achieve a true semblance of a stable state and its people remain steeped in ignorance, poverty and tribalism. The balance of payment has consistently remained in the negative putting the country at the mercy of lender countries. The population of illiterate people continues to multiply and they become a liability rather than an asset for the state, escalating local taxation has kept the economy suppressed and thus the growth of the export industry has remained dream so far. In my humble opinion a national development plan which should include making each and every school-age child eligible enough to attend school (this step will also result in population control as only an educated family can achieve this aim), exports must be raised above imports through continuous physical infrastructural improvements. Administratively, all previous two divisions should be merged in order to turn each such unions into a province (whose structure may be rearranged to prevent parochialism) and each with a small assembly and local government. The parliamentary form of government should be continued at the centre and for the next one decade at the end of the tenure of each government a military accountability board headed by the chairman of joint chiefs of staff should audit its moral and substantive performance record to take action against any corruption found, while the process of forming and installing the next elected government should go right ahead on time without drumming up any excuse for its postponement. 

ABDUL GHAFFAR, 

Muzaffargarh, October 30.