Where do we go from here?

There is just no good news coming to us from anywhere. The national and international press and electronic media are harbingers of gloom and doom. If indeed the country’s creator and maker, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, did predict shortly before he died that each successive government of Pakistan would be worse than its predecessor he was a man of prescience and his words that have held good for over 60 years are truer today than ever before.

No one, just no one, other than the members of the PPP-Z who attempt to glorify their inaction, is denying that the system, as it is, is rotten to its core. It has rotted with incredible swiftness since the disastrous 2002 elections which brought in the government of the Gujrat Chaudhrys and Shaukat Aziz, surely the pits, which seemingly made the nation believe it could sink no lower.

But we seem now, as a result of the February elections, to have brought ourselves even lower than the proverbial pits. There is no government â€" there is one in name only, which is run by a medley of mainly unelected or indirectly elected people with little connection to the PPP of the Bhuttos. There is a prime minister, an elected man, who, poor chap, is far more hamstrung than Shaukat Aziz was and who has no say in the governance or non-governance of Pakistan, and the same goes for what passes as his cabinet. The prime minister has of late taken to travelling, at the behest of his leader (who himself spends far more time out of the country than in it), having no good reason to remain in the homeland.