BB has been swindled. The general has bought her back with her own billions. After wasting millions of the people’s hard earned forex on a futile legal chase he gave up moral ground in favour of ground realities and struck this absolutely Kafkaesque deal free of charge with no other but the pragmatic daughter of the Quaid-i-Awam who had preferred shaking hands with Tara Masih to haggling with the Amirul Momenin.

It’s a swindle less than half so because her willing repatriation from self exile has been purchased with her own money but more so because in the bargain she has also packed her heritage. Ziauddin in the say-it-all concluding para of his report from her London press conference says her press secretary was avoiding eye contact with fellow journalists and glum-faced Shah Mahmood Qureshi reminded one of Z.A. Bhutto at the signing of the Tashkent Pact. Senior journalist I.A. Rehman in his beautifully worded front page comment has been more blunt: “Quite a few people believe that on the fourth of October, in the year 2007, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s party was stabbed in the back by none other than his daughter”.

But to be honest these comments are coming from people who have never had any money or actual knowledge of its value or first hand feel of its power. When you hold what the Americans call a grand in your hand the thrill runs through the trillion cells of your flesh to the core of your soul. The sheer weight of a million grands should be enough to crush the mortal soul itself. Then all that one sees is the secure future of generations of one’s progeny in the remaining 993 years of the third millennium. Shall we then say the late Chairman’s sacrifice was entirely wasted! Looking at it from the point of ground realities the auction of heritage that the idealists among the partymen are lamenting has brought a neat billion and a half not in terms of our crumbling currency but in stiff American bills. This is what an uncontested but not necessarily a reliable report which is circulating on the internet claims, complete with account numbers and addresses of properties and a rough estimate of the total wealth. Compiling such details out of imagination also looks crazy and improbable. Pray sir, is there nothing confidential? Can’t decent people have a moment of privacy in this land, one asks.

Paradoxically the reconciliation package is the outcome of extreme privacy in which the secret trysts in foreign climes were held and are still being denied coyly by both sides even after the birth of the baby who is yelping embarrassingly in the public lap. But strange as the ways of love are, the passion, despite its undeniable goodness, is always nurtured in secrecy. Piyar kiya to darna kiya is a proclamation that even in this age and time can only be made on the silver screen. John Donne had perhaps the dealings between political paramours in mind when he described love as diabolical swindling. But look, adherents of realpolitik say, the swindle or whatever you may like to call it has achieved what expensive Interpol red warrants could not do. Triumph has replaced the chains in which the Daughter of the East was being manoeuvred to stage her come back.

Now being the daughter of the West also her homecoming may even feature a good send off. All in all this devil’s concord may have a silver lining in store for those unfortunate lakhs also who are rotting in the filthy confines of our crowded jails for petty crimes committed in desperate circumstances and who may benefit from an equitable distribution of the fruits of this monkey business. A faint hope indeed! For the poor of the Ummah there is no mercy. Princes do not come from the sacred sands to transport them in chartered flights to palatial exiles.

And so though it may be termed a long shot it is not entirely out of the realm of its fall out if the dark forebodings of Shujaullah, our reclusive human rights fighter, may come to visit upon us. He warns that this pacification stunt played to bring moderates to the fore is going to be counter-productive as civil society will now have only the extremists to look up to for fair and honest governance. Military takeovers have been welcomed by the people in the past because they promised to bring the corrupt to book and hold across the board accountability. Now after this baptism of the banished and detergence of soiled currency ending an eight-year ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ chase at the taxpayers’ expense, what hope might civilians cherish a redeemer from the barracks would come marching up to clear the Augean stables. This is something the American think-tanks should also have looked into when arranging such dubious marriages of convenience between the so-called moderates of Pakistan.

The doctrine of expedience which has now replaced that of necessity and the philosophy of ground realities that in the name of national interest is being paraded as pragmatism does not sit well in the common and backward ethics of the great unwashed. These simple folk who still believe in crude virtues like honesty, truth etc., cautions Shujaullah, may one day in their desperation gulp down the sugarcoated green pill after successive failures of the bitter khaki one.

(PS: And now that the NRO is being described as a ploy to dupe the opposition it can be said the swindle was not only diabolical but also real. BB has been taken on a ride she is not going to forget any time soon.)

The collapse of the 70-metre Baldia loop of the Shershah Bridge just three weeks after its inauguration by General Musharaf claimed over a dozen lives. Painfully, the National Highway Authority, the National Logistic Cell and the consultants Engineering Consultants International Ltd were categorically told by several structural engineers and the NHA’s own general manager to dismantle the loop as it was structurally unsafe.

Since ancient times, failures have occurred in new and old constructions, but not without severe consequences for the designers and builders. Human desire to punish such callous culprits is found as early as 2250 BC in the Hammurabi code:

“If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death. If it causes the death of a son of the owner of the house, they shall put to death a son of that builder. If it destroys property, he shall restore whatever it destroyed, and because he did not make the house which he built firm and it collapsed, he shall rebuild the house which collapsed at his own expense”.

All over the world failure of public structures, homes, bridges, places of worship, fires, sinking of ships and so on have usually resulted in better designs, better materials, better construction and navigation procedures. But banana republics, with short or no public memory, remain the exception.

Most of the facts related to the September 1 collapse remain shrouded in secrecy. Attempts to unearth facts or raise a voice against the culprit run a peril of contempt and defamation suits. Nevertheless it is an established fact that the construction of this ring-road, originally planned by the now defunct Karachi Development Authority, was handed over by the NHA headed by Maj-Gen Imtiaz Ahmad without inviting tenders to the NLC headed by Maj-Gen Syed Haider Javed while the design consultancy was awarded to a controversial ECIL firm. Six years ago the construction started without the mandatory ‘Environmental Impact Assessment’, also necessary for site mitigation measures.

Communications Minister Shamim Ahmad Siddiqui publicly acknowledged that in June 2006 the construction activities on the bridge were suspended as the pre-stressed box girder could not be placed on the columns of the inner track properly and remained detached on one side, thus transferring the load centre towards the outer track that collapsed through crushing of the column below.

It’s an open secret that the consultant and contractor went around shopping looking for local experts to rectify the fault but were unanimously advised by reputed structural engineers that it couldn’t be done and they needed to dismantle the troubled sections. Instead, they sought foreign aid whereby after some remedial measures M/s Hyperstatic Design Services of Cyprus, Greece, gave them a clean chit of stability of the bridge structure.

Twenty-four hours after the collapse, National Disaster Management Authority chairman Gen (retd) Farooq Ahmad on a mission to get to the bottom of the bridge collapse was led to the site by Governor Ishratul Ibad. He, however, started by praising the track-record of the NLC and went on to assign the FWO headed by Maj-Gen Javed Iqbal the disposal of the debris.

According to a copy of the ‘charter of duties’ and the NLC’s job description placed on the Senate floor in response to questions raised by Farhatullah Babar in December 2005, the NLC was commissioned to work in seven areas, including ‘transportation of commodities, procurement of transportation trucks, building of truck bodies, hiring of storage facilities, engaging local and foreign consultants, raising of organisations necessary for the performance of the mission assigned and engaging staff and labour’.

The NLC admitted that it did participate in nation building but projects were given through open tender/competitive bidding. Contracts were only given to it on a single contract basis when the government launches development works in remote/inaccessible regions and most of the building firms shy away from them. However, there was no answer when asked if Karachi was considered a “remote /inaccessible region” that persuaded the NHA to give the contract to the NLC without bids.

Over the years, the NLC has become a huge business and commercial enterprise engaged in construction, operating dry ports, manning toll plazas (also without bids), power generation, coal mining and much more operating in the country and overseas -- none of which is mandated by its charter.

The ECIL has been accused of foul play and had moved to the verge of being blacklisted in the past, depriving ‘Usmani and Company’ of the Master Plan for the Malir Development Authority or causing a massive loss to the NHA when M/s Put Sarajevo proved in court that it was the design by the ECIL which was the cause of failure of the ‘Nowshera-Peshawar section’ just after its opening.

Despite its past lacklustre performance on roads and low-marks during technical evaluations, the ECIL still managed to get the Rs5 billion project for re-construction of several hundred local and major roads in the mountainous region of Azad Jammu and Kashmir running over 900 kilometres. The number of the roads was later reduced to a mere six major roads and outlays enhanced to Rs24 billion, resulting in fivefold increase in the consultants’ fees on a pro-rata basis.

The hodgepodge Northern Bypass Bridge collapse inquiry committee does not include any member who has ever designed a bridge, not to mention a bridge of this magnitude and complexity. The committee is holding all its meetings, record, evidences and proceedings at the NHA office situated on Sharea Faisal. There is no surety if the evidence (strand wires, steel, core etc) was genuinely collected and sealed or photographs of broken structure were taken. The FWO is now being accused of selling off tons of scrap.

The names were neither publicised nor did anyone really believe Farooq’s announcement that certain persons belonging to the ECIL and the NHA had been put on the exit-control list. The issue has been systematically taken out of public scrutiny.

Gen Musharaff has often accused the previous governments of corruption, nepotism, sycophancy and cronyism. He has claimed that the number one priority on his seven-point agenda was ‘ensuring swift across-the-board accountability’. But inquiry reports on the Tasman Spirit dumping of 37,500 tons of crude, the fires in the PNSC building, the stock exchange crash or the wheat scandal among scores of other cases are still awaited. One only wonders if the buckling taking place is due to structural defects in the bridges or in our society.