| July 23, 2003 | Wednesday | Jumadi-ul-Awwal 22, 1424 |
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The recognition issue
Don’t fear the auditor
The curse of oil
New hope for the libraries
PAKISTAN and Israel have had their borrowed horns locked from a distance of more than 2,000 miles for more than half a century now. There are many reasons for this, such as the fact that we, not content with the staggering problems inherited at birth and yet unresolved, have never hesitated to jump into ever new muddy waters and wallow gleefully to make our lives more venturesome, and our times more interesting. Our quarrel with Israel is one of them.
WHY has Algeria been devastated by tyranny and civil war, while neighbouring Morocco is peaceful, relatively democratic, and no poorer?
AFTER a long period of despair there is light at the end of the tunnel in the library sector. A library support group has been set up by Saiban, an NGO, with the aim of strengthening school and community libraries in Karachi.
JOHANNESBURG has a new bridge that to many of its residents symbolizes the city’s emergence as a cultural centre and an economic powerhouse. Poverty and crime haven’t yet been conquered, but the despondency has dissipated to a certain extent. It is apt in more ways than one that the structure inaugurated last Saturday bears the name of Nelson Mandela. Because post-apartheid South Africa’s first president is a bridge-builder par excellence.
Which helps explain how the nation’s transformation from race-based minority rule to multiracial democracy was achieved peacefully. The absence of rancour after 27 years of imprisonment led to Mandela being hailed as a secular saint. The personal example he set played a crucial role in minimizing vengefulness against the upholders of apartheid. To forgive criminals, however, is not to whitewash their crimes. “Of course I despised them,” Mandela told the BBC’s David Dimbleby last March. “They were despised by the entire world ... They were beautiful outside but full of evil inside.”
The practitioners of apartheid were, no doubt, more or less universally abhorred. But they also had supporters in important places who, directly or otherwise, helped sustain the racist regime. Less than 20 years ago, Margaret Thatcher was still describing Mandela as a terrorist and the Reagan administration was extremely reluctant to institute any sort of sanctions against Pretoria. When a resolution was moved in the US Congress calling for Mandela’s release, a certain Dick Cheney was among those who voted against it.
Then there was the nexus with Israel, which recognized in apartheid a comforting reflection of its own approach towards Arabs — just as the African National Congress and the Palestine Liberation Organization realized they had much in common. As openly racist nations with semi-secret nuclear weapons programmes, South Africa and Israel were prototypical rogue states. Eventually, the former was almost completely ostracized and thereby compelled to reconsider its intransigence.
Israel, on the other hand, has never fallen out of western favour. Perhaps that’s why Mandela feels obliged to strive for a settlement of the Palestinian question. Last year, for example, he agreed to observe the trial of Marwan Barghouti, citing a parallel between the Fatah leader’s situation and his own past. Mandela hasn’t been able to make much headway in the Middle Eastern context because his towering moral stature cuts no ice with Israel — which couldn’t have failed to note that Jews in the ANC are its most trenchant critics among the diaspora.
It is also not particularly surprising that the Bushies in Washington are equally wary of Mandela, who used uncharacteristically strong language in condemning the invasion of Iraq, describing George W. as “a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly”, and Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld as “dinosaurs who do not want him to belong to the modern world”. He also dismissed Tony Blair as Bush’s foreign minister, and accused the US and Britain of racism, not least in their attitude to the UN.
Mandela’s occasional outbursts are not just a consequence of his liberation from the restrictions of high office; they also reflect a growing frustration with the direction in which the world is headed. In retirement, Mandela has become a tireless traveller, striving to make a difference. He was instrumental in brokering the deal that led to the trial of two Libyans for the Lockerbie bombing. After Abdul Basit Al-Megrahi was convicted and thrown into a Scottish prison, Mandela turned up in Glasgow to visit him, voiced concerns about the conviction, and recommended that Megrahi be allowed to serve out his term in a Muslim country.
Shortly before the Iraq conflict, he offered to travel to Baghdad to meet Saddam Hussein, provided the UN was involved in the mission. The trip never came to pass, and even if it had, it is unlikely Mandela could have stopped the war. But his willingness to try signifies a greatness lacking in most other international leaders. Many of them recognize it and aspire to bask in Mandela’s aura — as Blair and Bill Clinton sought to do at the launch of the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation in London early this month.
Mandela-Rhodes sounds like a contradictory juxtaposition — the liberator and the colonizer rolled up into one. But, then, Mandela is not just a liberator; he’s also the great reconciler. In fact, during his tenure at the helm of South Africa, some people feared that reconciliation was being taken too far too fast, with insufficient attention being paid to the monumental task of correcting the white-black imbalance.
The perception wasn’t entirely mistaken and Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, has been considerably less reluctant to blame South Africa’s problems on the divisive past. On the other hand, Mbeki is unwilling to acknowledge the cost of the ANC’s decision, once power became a realistic prospect, to ditch its socialist inclinations. Mandela, too, was a party to this historic compromise, but the pace of privatization has picked up since his retirement. Yet he is still credited with exercizing a moral restraint, and it is feared that once he is no longer on the scene, free market enthusiasts will enjoy an even freer rein.
There is a degree of irony in this, given that Mbeki, unlike Mandela, served for many years on the South African Communist Party’s politburo. He has distanced the ANC from the Communist Party as well as from the trade union movement, and it is likely that a complete break will ensue once Mandela’s adhesive presence is no more.
Nine years after South Africa’s first democratic elections, economic power is still concentrated in white hands. A small black business elite has emerged, but the vast majority of blacks remain at the bottom of the heap; the phenomenal rate of unemployment helps explain the incidence of crime, and shanty towns still abound. Political freedom hasn’t entailed economic liberation.
Mandela, whose legacy will be determined by South Africa’s future rather than his forays on the world stage, undoubtedly bears some of the responsibility for the present state of affairs. He is also willing to acknowledge that he did not do enough to combat the Aids epidemic, partly because he had been advised that the issue wasn’t a vote-winner.
Mandela’s flaws, however, merely serve as a reminder that he is, after all, human. And they tend to pale beside his achievements. Mandela wasn’t averse to violent means of combating injustice, but he had the wisdom to realize that by the 1990s apartheid had grown so weak, a moral push was all that was required to consign it to the dust heap. Although racist attitudes remain widespread, it was always naive to expect that they would perish alongside apartheid. They will diminish and, hopefully, eventually disappear, provided that pluralism and democracy endure as shining examples of what Mandela helped usher in. And of all the examples that he set, perhaps the most important one was his decision to relinquish the presidency after just one term in office.
In his autobiography Mandela recalls that on his release from prison in 1990, while being driven through a well-heeled suburb, he found clusters of whites gathered on the streets. As his car passed, many of them raised their fists — not in aggression or defiance, but in imitation of the ANC salute. That must have been one of the most satisfying moments for Mandela — an affirmation, above all, that South Africa would never be the same again.
His significance in the wider African context was admirably summed up a couple of years ago by George Alagiah, who wrote in ‘A Passage to Africa:’ “Mandela was not the first of a new order but the last, and best, of the old. He was what Kwame Nkrumah promised to be; what Kenneth Kaunda should have been; what Hastings Banda might have been; what Robert Mugabe ought to have been; what Samora Machel tried to be; what Milton Obote could have been; and what Julius Nyerere very nearly became. He is special because he got it right.
His five years in office closed one chapter in Africa’s history — the era of national liberation — rather than opening a new one.”
When his old comrade, prison mate and ANC stalwart Walter Sisulu died last May, Mandela was overwrought. Sisulu had been the mentor who initiated him into the ANC. Shortly after the 1994 elections, he told an interviewer that the moment he met Mandela, back in 1941, he knew “that this is the man I need ... for leading the African people”. “By ancestry I was born to rule,” says Mandela, but Sisulu “helped me to understand that my real vocation was to be a servant of the people”. In a more formal commemorative statement, he noted: “We walked side by side through the valley of death, nursing each other’s bruises, holding each other up when our steps faltered ... In a sense I feel cheated by Walter. If there be another life beyond this physical world, I would have loved to be there first so that I could welcome him.”
At the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation function, a tired-looking Mandela had to lean on Blair and Clinton, but he’s generally a relatively sprightly 85 and could be seen jiving on the dance floor at last weekend’s star-studded birthday bash in Johannesburg.
He won’t be with us forever, but let’s relish his presence for as long as it lasts. They don’t make them like that anymore.
E-mail: mahirali@journalist.com
The two states, Israel and Pakistan, born only months apart, have some remarkable, even uncanny commonalities: both were carved out of a British colony, both were created in the name of religion; both were a scene of massive exodus and immigration during the very first year of their existence; both were born in the shape of a geographical oddity, that is, in blocks of three (Israel) and two (Pakistan); both got involved into territorial disputes with the neighbours immediately after birth.
Both have borders that have yet to stabilize; both are hated by their neighbours for the same reason, that is, causing the partition of a larger historical entity; both have fought three major wars with their neighbours at times fairly close, that is, 1948, 1965/67, and 1971/73; both have had their political agenda distorted by religious extremism; both have had one of their prime ministers shot by a religious fanatic; and both are armed with nuclear weapons, and enthused with mandate syndrome. Curiously, St. George happens to be their common patron saint, as he is of England too.
The commonalities notwithstanding, the two states are not on speaking terms with each other. In fact, the two hate each other more than they hate any other nation in the world. Now, after 55 years of strangerhood (a word waiting to be used again after 1869) we in Pakistan are willing to discuss, not yet to recognize, the reality. The question that we have posed to ourselves is: should we recognize Israel?
The question of recognition is not a new one in the contemporary diplomatic history. The US, for example, took 20 years to recognize the Soviet Union, and 24 years to recognize the People’s Republic of China. We took four years to recognize Bangladesh. Afghanistan under the Taliban was recognized by only three countries in the world, and Taiwan faces similar non-recognition by the international community. There is, however, a distinction that should be kept in mind. In all these cases except Bangladesh, non-recognition relates to the government in power at a particular time not to the country itself.
Even in the case of Taiwan it is not a question of recognizing Taiwan as a separate country, but of choosing between Beijing and Taipei as the legitimate government of China, for both the contenders agree that China is one. In the case of Israel, the question relates to the recognition of the state of Israel itself. The question, therefore, is whether we acknowledge the reality of the state of Israel.
Initially, Pakistan decided not to recognize Israel to show solidarity with the Arab world. There was unanimity in the Arab world on this question, although the larger Muslim world was divided on this question, for Turkey and Iran did recognize Israel. Both of them had (Iran till 1979) very close and friendly relations with Israel, including in the field of intelligence and military technology. Although the Arab states were unanimous regarding non-recognition of Israel, religion, as we shall presently see, was not a decisive factor — in fact, not a factor at all, in the policy consideration of the governments of at least those Arab states that were in the forefront of the opposition to the state of Israel.
The Arab states that were fiercely opposed to the state of Israel (Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria) had secular governments known for their ruthless suppression of religious parties. The PLO (created in 1964) was, and remains, a secular party having closer relations with India rather than Pakistan. The rest of the Arab world, because of the popular Arab sentiment for Palestinian people, followed the lead given by the major anti-Israel Arab states, that is, Egypt, Iraq and Syria.
It is important for us, in Pakistan, to remember that the Muslim states that had very friendly relations with Israel (Turkey and Iran) were also our close allies. The leading anti-Israel Arab states (Egypt, Syria and Iraq) had an indifferent, if not hostile, attitude towards Pakistan. The only frontline Arab state that always had friendly relations with Pakistan is Jordan.
But Jordan always had a pragmatic approach to the question of the state of Israel, and continued to have secret, if not open, channels to Tel Aviv, all the time, since 1948. In fact King Abdullah, grandfather of the present king, believed that collaboration between Israel and Jordan (including the Palestinians) would be a powerful engine of economic transformation of the whole region, if not of the whole of Middle East. What has actually happened is obviously not more wholesome than what King Abdullah had dreamt of.
Thus, in our opposition to the state of Israel we were, most of the time, not in the company of the friendliest Muslim states, but in the company of states indifferent or hostile to us. Even so, returning to the immediate present, we could begin by re-affirming that non-recognition of Israel by Pakistan was one way of showing our solidarity with the Palestinian people on moral grounds, not necessarily because of the religious affiliation with those Palestinians who are Muslims. One could also argue that there was justification for that stand till the early 1990s as there was need, till then, to show solidarity with the Palestinians through non-recognition. What has changed now to justify a review of our stand regarding Israel?
Well, a lot has happened since 1979. In that year Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty and agreed to recognize and respect each other’s right to live in peace within their recognized boundaries. In 1993, Israel and Jordan formally ended the state of war between the two countries and, in the same year, Israel and PLO signed an agreement to recognize each other. The latest tally is that 29 Muslim countries recognize Israel. So does the PLO itself.
What are we quarrelling about?
E-mail:tvo@isb.comsats.net.pk
THEY say that accountability is now part of the Constitution through the Legal Framework Order. In fact, those who don’t like the LFO — the political opposition — say that the Constitution is now part of the LFO.
I find this too subtle for my comprehension. That is why I am tempted to advise the opposition not to worry. Why should they be afraid of the LFO? If the constitution has not been able to save itself since 1958 (when the first martial law came) what makes the opposition think that the LFO can preserve itself from the ravages of time?
Anyway, there are two groups in the country which can be afraid of the big bad wolf of accountability — politicians and the bureaucracy. Observers watching the national game from the sidelines, say that while politicians somehow manage to wriggle out of the accountability net (witness that some of the “accused” are now federal ministers) it is always the poor government officer who is caught in the end. Please note that I use the word “poor” metaphorically, otherwise nowadays there is no such thing as a poor officer, at least not among the be-whiskered top cats.
Accountability is the ruling regime’s answer to corruption, which, so far as the government servant is concerned, can be roughly divided into two categories: bribes and misappropriation of public funds. No officer with any self-respect take bribes nowadays, but he gladly accepts commissions and kickbacks, which is quite another thing. Misappropriation or misuse (and even misplacing) of departmental money is not difficult. If you have a clever accounts man in your office he will teach you how your budgetary allocation can be manipulated to your personal advantage.
There is a permanent institution in Pakistan to take account of financial misdemeanours by officers. Actually there are five of them: the Public Accounts Committee at the centre and a public accounts committee in every province, each presided over by an elected representative of the people. However, the outstanding feature of a PAC is that the man in the dock has to account for the deeds and misdeeds of his predecessors in office, never his own. I’ll tell you why.
You see, the process of auditing of financial matters in the administration is so complicated that only the most important issues that have not been settled at the lower level go up to the PAC. By that time, five or even ten years have passed. Unless you have not been promoted or transferred, or the post occupied by you is so unattractive that nobody else wants it, your chances of being there after that long time are next to nil.
From what I remember of service days, the appearance before the PAC used to be more terrifying than the time you appeared before your future father-in-law for interview. Some officers linked it to the Day of Judgment and approached it in the same spirit, of night-long prayer, humility and seeking forgiveness from the Almighty. The chairman of the PAC, an MNA or MPA, was determined to show that he didn’t give a tinker’s curse for the mighty bureaucrat sitting so humbly before him.
Actually he was as nervous as the public servant in the dock. He had the future in mind, picturing himself as an ex-legislator standing meekly before the Commissioner of his division which this officer might well become one day. Only the officer does not know that his adversary, the chairman, is also apprehensive, otherwise he might not be so frightened. The whole exercise thus inspired terror.
The PAC is a far cry. Even an ordinary routine annual audit gives government officers the jitters, and you should see how they fawn on these yearly account-takers. The head of department is usually a senior officer, and compared to him the auditor is very junior indeed. But looking at them you would think it was the other way round.
The auditor and his team are made much of and are repeatedly assured of the staff’s fullest cooperation. This usually consists of a five-course lunch and heavy tea every two hours or so as long as the audit proceeds. The staff car is withdrawn from the officer’s begum and placed at the disposal of the audit party. Cinema shows and other feasible entertainment are also laid on. All said and done the auditors have a jolly good time. Even if they feel obliged to record a few objections at the end of the show they also tell the office how to cope with them.
The late Zafrul Ahsan was one of the most gifted of the old CSPs, and a very fine man otherwise too. He once told me during a press tour of the Thal that he had found a way of dealing with the Accountant General’s office. Mr Ahsan was given to unorthodox and quick-action administrative methods when he was chairman of the Thal Development Authority, and his way of working did not find favour with the AG’s office. Whenever he was asked by that office to quote the rule under which he had incurred an unauthorised expenditure, he would invariably write back and ask to know the rule which prevented him from doing so. He never got a reply.
In every government department there are superintendents and senior clerks known for their expertise in answering audit objections. They acquire this expertise by indulging in various kinds of irregularities themselves. I like the story of the rubber hose pipe which the head of an office had taken home because the begum needed it for her garden. The words in which the absence of the pipe was explained by the wily superintendent are a masterpiece of dissimulation. He said that with the constant flow of water the mouth of the pipe would give way, and a few inches had to be snipped off every now and then. As a result of this “every now and then”, the 100-foot pipe had been gradually eaten away!
Expensive office carpets have been known to have melted away during shifting of offices, while an entire tea service, rather a fancy one, ostensibly purchased by the head of office for visiting pressmen, was reported to have been shattered by the tremors set off by railway trains passing in the neighbourhood and had to be written off. Or so the audit party was told.
For the government officer audit is a nuisance, and so is every kind of accountability. Fed on the myth of grandiloquence associated with the word “officer”, a new entrant joins public service with preconceived notions of having his own way in everything. But when he is confronted with rules and regulations he feels cheated and tends to rebel against them. That is the only rebellion he is capable of.
P.S. In my last column “Legalised loot” I did an injustice to the late General Ghulam Jilani by failing to mention that he was the only Governor of Punjab who did not avail himself of the facility of getting a car from abroad without paying import duty. I can only apologize to his spirit.
Similarly, why is Angola, once Portugal’s richest African colony, a wasteland of poverty, violence and corruption with enclaves of glittering wealth, while Mozambique, its poor relative in colonial times, is now peaceful, fairly equal, and politically open? And why was Iraq under Saddam Hussein even more violent and repressive than Syria, its near twin that has also been ruled by the Baath Party for over three decades?
It is so because for countries in the developing world, oil wealth is usually a disaster: Algeria, Angola and Iraq all have a lot of oil, while Morocco, Mozambique and Syria do not. All of these countries had fragile political structures, ethnically complex populations and difficult colonial pasts, but the ones that descended into a full-spectrum nightmare were the ones that struck it rich with oil. To see how it works, consider Sao Tome, which began its descent last week.
Sao Tome is a small island state in the Gulf of Guinea left over from Portugal’s African empire. It fell on hard times economically after independence in 1975, but recently undersea oil was found straddling the seabed border between Sao Tome and Nigeria. Current estimates suggest that there are between 6 and 11 billion barrels in Sao Tome’s section — enough for a production of around a million barrels a day.
Since there are only 140,000 people in Sao Tome, that would yield enough revenue to increase their current per capita income of $280 per year twenty-fold if it was divided up evenly. Divided up much less equally, however, it would make some people disgustingly rich. Last week some people with guns decided that that was a much more appealing prospect.
Sao Tome has been a multi-party democracy since 1990, but as oil wealth loomed the local political parties began accusing one another of being under the influence of foreign oil interests. By last year’s parliamentary elections, some militants of the rival parties were going around armed — and in January President Fradique de Menezes dissolved the parliament before it could limit his powers to negotiate oil contracts with foreigners.
De Menezes had just signed a deal settling a long-standing dispute with Nigeria over the two countries’ undersea frontier that gave the latter 60 percent of the oilfield, and his opponents were convinced that he had been bought off. In April some former mercenaries from Sao Tome who fought for South Africa’s apartheid regime in the infamous ‘Buffalo Battalion’ joined a minor party called the Christian Democratic Front (FDC) and called for a rebellion. And then on 16 July, while de Menezes was visiting Nigeria, there was a coup.
The coup leader is a well-known army officer, Major Fernando Pereira, but his partners are the guns-for-hire of the FDC. As de Menezes says, “It’s only for the oil that they have seized power” — the first big flow of revenue, at least $100 million, will come with the sale of rights to nine offshore blocs in October — and so Sao Tome starts its descent into hell. Or maybe not, because the outside world’s attitude is changing.
The other Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa, backed up by Nigeria and South Africa, have threatened to use force if the soldiers do not allow President de Menezes to return. The United States, which plans a military base in Sao Tome to protect the growing share of its oil imports that comes from countries around the Gulf of Guinea, also opposes the coup. And the oil companies themselves are under pressure to clean up their act.
The days of huge bribes as standard operating practice for Western oil and mining companies in the Third World are numbered, because investors, human rights activists, and even the companies themselves are starting to insist on full disclosure of payments made. BP has taken the lead, posting its production-sharing agreement with Azerbaijan on a website and disclosing ‘signing payments’ that it made to Angola.—Copyright
The group has already begun its work by collecting and distributing 816 books among five schools and one community library in Orangi. In one year it plans to reach out to 50 Orangi schools, which have already been earmarked. In the absence of a book reading culture in our society, one would consider it courageous on the part of Saiban to have undertaken this venture. Sceptics might find the move to be ambitious and expect it to run out of steam soon. But what gives rise to hope is the fact that the driving force behind the library support group is the untiring Tasneem Siddiqui, the non-bureaucratic bureaucrat who is the director-general of the Sindh Kachchi Abadi Authority and chairman of Saiban.
Working in his characteristic low-key style, he did not announce the formation of the group until it had actually started functioning. He refused to go in for high-profile projects — such as a city library about which many library enthusiasts are concerned and impatient, as they fear that the plot of land allotted for it on the University Road might be grabbed by some avaricious builder with the right connections. Above all, Tasneem Siddiqui is a man with a reputation of integrity and political commitment. He has the necessary administrative skill and the projects he has launched — Hyderabad’s Khuda ki Basti being the most notable — have continued to function successfully.
One hopes that this group will lay the ground for a much needed library movement in the city. This is important for three reasons. First it would create a book culture in our society which is the fundamental prerequisite for setting up and sustaining a library network.
Secondly, a vigorous library movement providing easy access to books would lend positive support to the education sector. A librarian who has rendered yeoman services to his profession and is also a member of the support group, Mr Moinuddin Khan, describes libraries as an extension of their school classes for the neo-literates. He also points out that libraries are a vehicle for life-long learning.
Thirdly, the success of the support group in its initial efforts would give it credibility and thus win public confidence. Thus alone can people be motivated to donate books to libraries where they would become accessible to many more readers. Conversely, greater public interest in books and libraries is important if the library movement is to gain momentum and strength.
And this is not such an impossible task for it is not so much the scarcity of material and financial resources that is the constraining factor. It is the absence of management and organizational skills and the commitment to work that has hampered the task of setting up more and more reading facilities.
The library support group is optimistic about receiving books and donations from the public. There are people — even though not as many as one would have wished — who buy books to read but have no place to store them. There is also a huge stack of textbooks which families with school-going children discard at the end of each school year. With the nucleus of a library movement in place, the people of Karachi could donate the books they no longer need so that others can read them.
The challenge is to identify and reach out to the rudimentary library infrastructure which already exists in the city and then strengthen it before the process of expansion begins. The support group has made a modest beginning with the Orangi Pilot Project’s education programme. Of the 750 or so schools in Orangi Town, 300 have library facilities of sorts and it seems rational to focus on them and develop them as the first priority. The community libraries can also be extended support.
Another institution which has joined hands in this worthy cause is the Liaquat Memorial Library. With its stock of over 100,000 books, newspapers and a large children’s library, Liaquat Memorial has remained largely under-utilized. It has the potential of developing into an institution round which the library movement could be centred. The support group is planning to raise resources for a bus to transport students from different schools in low income areas to the Liaquat Memorial Library to spend the afternoon in the company of books once a month. Thus, 25 or so school children could be introduced to a new experience in their life.
Although the support group is highly motivated, the success of a venture of this kind also depends on the degree of motivation of those running the libraries. Given the government’s neglect of the library sector and its failure to allocate sufficient funds for it - Sindh has earmarked only 0.04 per cent of its revenue budget for 2003-04 to libraries — librarians have also developed an apathy towards the institutions they are supposed to nurture. If the initiative taken by Saiban grows, the librarians should feel motivated enough to display greater dynamism and initiative in generating resources directly from the public. This is possible as has been demonstrated by others working in social sector institutions who have supplemented their budgets by mobilizing public donations.
The support group has done well to identify the schools whose librarians are the most motivated. As trailblazers they would inspire others to follow their example. Such projects offer the advantage of providing an opportunity to librarians to interact with fellow-professionals and learn new management techniques from resource persons. This becomes a learning experience for them which strengthen their motivation.
However, not much of a purpose would be served if the books are made accessible to library users without stimulating their interest in the printed word. Books are not meant simply to adorn shelves.
They are to be read and a good librarian should also be a good teacher with a mine of information who should try to keep the readers’ interest in books alive. People who have acquired a life-long love for reading invariably owe this to a librarian or a teacher who probably discussed books in classes and stimulated the students’ curiosity in them.
The support group did well to arrange a briefing for the librarians of the schools which received the first batch of books. In fact, by asking them to submit a monthly report on the working of their libraries, the group has set a pattern which should be followed by others too.
It is also important that a move is concurrently made to get the government to promulgate a library law. Dr Anis Khurshid, the doyen in the library sector, had at one time drafted a model library law that was designed to create a system to ensure the availability and continuity of public libraries and enable them to play the
role of mobilizing and motivating the people, while serving as centres for education, information, recreation, leisure-time activities and reference/research.
The law was to have two central provisions. One, it would create a central authority to administer the library system. Two, it would facilitate the financing of the library network by making it mandatory for local authorities to allocate at least two per cent of their budget for public libraries.
With the legislative assemblies in a limbo as the politicians argue about the LFO and the president’s uniform, it is too early to expect the legislatures to take up this issue. But one can at least call on the authorities — the federal, the provincial as well as the town governments — to enhance their library budgets. That is the least they can do to encourage public interest in libraries.