Merit apparently has a charmed life … at least in Pakistan. Every now and then one scribe or the other, one analyst or the other, one speaker or the other, one book or the other keeps announcing the death of merit in the country and yet there remains enough life in it for the next scribe, analyst, speaker and the book to make the pronouncement one more time. More than six decades into our existence as a nation state, all our individual and collective efforts to kill the hydra-headed monster of merit once and for all have failed. Here is one more attempt!

The education system is one part of the story; the other being the search for a means of livelihood once the first phase is over. Merit in both phases can surely set many a thing right as, indeed, it has done in many a society. In our midst though, it’s easier said than done.

The education system often comes under criticism, and rightly so for its inability to produce men of letters, leaders of vision, a professional workforce, or even adults laying claim to basic intelligence. Mediocrity, it is said, happens to be the unfortunate hallmark of the entire structure. Harsh though it may sound, reality on the ground fails to suggest any other attribute for, one, the education system which is in a shambles, and, two, for the system of governance which treats merit as nothing short of a plague.

But that is only the beginning of a rather unsavoury story. If something is not working properly, anybody with any degree of sanity will either try to fix it or will try to locate the right person to do the job. In terms of education, the common man naturally does not have a chance of being effective. The way things are moving, he is fast becoming ineffective in his own everyday life, but that is beside the point.

That leaves us with the government and the bureaucracy to pick and choose from. The governments keep coming and going and so do their ministers. There are certain countries — quite a few of them, actually — where the government of the day knows how long it is going to be there and can plan accordingly. There are others where the governments do not have that luxury and, as such, long-term planning is something that nobody indulges in.

Short-term steps for short-term gains become the order of the day, with ministers preferring the one in the hand over the two in the bush. It does not take much to fathom whether Pakistan belongs to the former set of countries or the latter … or in some form of transition from one to the other.

By the very nature of its orientation and job description, the bureaucracy supposedly provides the running thread of administration regardless of the number of times a government is installed or dismissed in the country. In view of the generally irrelevant backgrounds that ministers bring to their assignment, it is basically the bureaucracy that runs the show, advising the minister on policy issues and then executing it in actual terms.

In a society where things tend to go awry more often than not and where malfunctioning is the normal state of being, it is like asking for the moon to expect the bureaucracy to do its job professionally. But there is little doubt that it has the power to make an impact if it chooses to. The problem is that the bureaucrats on whom we are pinning our hopes also come mostly through the ranks of the same education system that they are expected to change.

The CSS exam which once used to test the cream of the nation to select the best of the best and then train them to run the country is no more the target of the intelligent among the youth. The Federal Public Service Commission and its provincial chapters are often accused of preferring nepotism over merit — and there is no dearth of death-of-merit stories every time it happens. This only ensures that in the long run the already fragile system will continue to be run by even more fragile hands.

The product of such a brittle structure goes around with a piece of paper that is considered a passport to prosperity by the individual, and a stamp of mediocrity by the job market. For a massive majority of young Pakistanis the assertion holds good, and we are not dealing with the minority here.

This ever-widening gulf in perception of the two stakeholders is often bridged with selections that lead to death-of-merit stories.

With hardly any career counselling worth its name and the almost missing link between the academia and the industry, it is no wonder that youngsters end up falling in a heap once they have the degree in hand. Their dreams of a fruitful career stand shattered and it is not long before the dreaded process of disillusionment starts spreading its lethal tentacles.

Career counsellors, aptitude testing, placement offices, linkages of universities with the job market and such other tools come handy in societies that make use of them. These happen to be just the things that are missing in our environment and that explains the suffering of the students who have academic qualifications to show, but no jobs to get against them.

Though the issue has always been there, it is only logical that it gets more talked about in times of economic recession when one hears more of retrenchments, cost-cuts and even closures than employment opportunities. The students of today, especially those who are about to enter the job market, represent an unfortunate bunch. As soon as they pass out of their respective institutions, the tight-fisted, penny-pinching job market will make them pass out in a much different and rather unpleasant manner.

Is there a need to worry too much about the prevailing gap between the two important units of national activity? The answer quite simply is in the affirmative. In fact, we can’t worry more because the parameters between the situation in Pakistan and the rest of the world are radically different.

Having first detected the problem many, many years ago, the world today is concerned about raising financial resources at the university level to improve research, about protecting new ideas, and about understanding in exact terms what the industry needs.

At our end, the gap between industry and academia is of a very basic level. From the need to improve the standard of teaching methodology and devising a curriculum that may help the students to be in a position to serve the industry when they finally join the job market, down to the very argument about picking up the appropriate field of activity, the gap seems to be too wide to be bridged in a hurry. Till that happens, we will have to make do with the death-of-merit stories every now and then.

humair.ishtiaq@gmail.com