There is no doubt that much of those 25 years were spent in planning how to get in power and not enough time was spent in what to do when power is attained.
I still have hope from Imran Khan but he made compromises to get in power and those have come to bite him in the first two and a half years. I pray that he is able to put last 2.5 years behind and steers the country toward the right direction.
I must say though he does not get enough credit for implementing the smart lockdown policy during the initial days of Covid. Country would have been in a disastrous situation otherwise. Hopefully, Pakistan steers out of the current wave too with minimum harm.
He does not get enough credit because he did nothing. He has been clueless right from the beginning.
For the first few months, he constantly downplayed the threat and called it “just a flu”. He would openly contradict the statements of WHO and spread ignorance among the masses.
For a long time, he would regularly appear in crowds without wearing a mask because he thought he was too macho to wear a mask against “just a flu”.
It was all about gimmicks and self-praise for him. The Corona Tiger Force was a cringe-fest. They were given white t-shirts with tigers printed on them as homage to Imran’s cornered tigers speech in 92 World Cup.
They achieved nothing and had no ground presence. We don’t even know if they exist anymore because we haven’t heard about them for a while now.
The lockdown itself was poorly managed. One day it was called selective lockdown and the other day it became a smart lockdown, all though there was nothing smart about it.
It was not implemented efficiently and the government was very late to act. There was no coordination between the federal government and the provincial governments.
Even the federal and KP health ministers were giving contradictory statements even though both were from PTI. It summed up the confusion of the government.
Imran was directly responsible for the surge after Eid-ul-Fitr 2020 when he took the nonsensical decision to ease lockdown restrictions in the last week of Ramzaan.
People go crazy with Eid shopping at that time, and it was the worst possible time to ease restrictions. As a result, it caused a huge spike.
Apart from giving warnings to people after he finally overcame his ignorance and realized that this is not “just a flu”, he has done nothing. There has been no leadership and strong decision-making.
There has also been no accountability over the actions of government ministers. 4-5 months back, in Peshawar, there was a massive wedding in the family of the KP health minister Taimur Jhagra.
SOPs were violated and there was no social distancing. In fact, it was not possible when the crowd was so big. As a result, COVID spread like wildfire and dozens died after getting infected in the wedding, including 3 members from Jhagra’s own family.
This should have been enough to sack him as health minister because if this how our leadership will act, you cannot expect anything from the public. However, no action was taken because Imran does not care about accountability. It just a drama.
Pakistan did not get hit as hard as it could have in the first wave, but it had nothing to do with Imran.
Now in the third wave, the mortality rate is going up and our vaccine distribution is among the worst in the world thanks to the incompetency of the worst PM in Pakistan history.
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