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April 15, 2002 Monday Safar 1, 1423 The facade of transition! His favourite turncoat Towards a long, hot summer? Jumping the queue Children of a lesser god The facade of transition! WITHIN one week of launching his referendum campaign, President Gen Pervez Musharraf has completely demolished the facade of “good governance” with which he was taking this hapless nation on a ride for the last 30 months. To begin with, he has violated all the rules, regulations and traditions of his own institution by going to the general public in uniform and seeking their “yes” vote in the referendum. And by getting the corps commanders to accompany him in the public meetings he has violated a 50-year-old tradition of the armed forces to keep away from such gatherings when in uniform. In his first press conference after taking over he had promised that the only uniform which the nation would see in public during his tenure would be only his and his alone. This promise he has broken umpteen times in the last several months. He has been accusing the previous governments of abusing power and misusing the taxpayers money and has even sent some of them to jail and barred many from contesting elections for committing such crimes. Now he is doing exactly the same. Misusing the taxpayers money and abusing elected members of local government to extend his personal power in the name of continuity. The Chief Election Commission (CEC) has been reportedly given Rs900 million for holding the referendum. And nobody knows from which budgetary allocation are the referendum related public meetings of President Musharraf being funded? By the time he would complete his country-wide campaign seeking a “yes” vote in the referendum he would have spent another Rs100 million of the taxpayers’ money. So, going by even the most conservative estimates Gen Musharraf’s referendum is going to cost the nation as much as Rs1000 million for which there is no specific allocation in the budget. We are already making do with tight budgets for want of resources. Development budgets, specially those related to poverty alleviation, have been reduced over the years to almost nothing. So, the immediate impact of the referendum would be felt by the society’s p