THIS has been a cruel summer. The senseless murder of a gentle Sufic soul was followed by the death of a saint. While the killing of Amjad Sabri shook the nation, Abdul Sattar Edhi’s passing away has left Pakistan poorer in more ways than one.

A humble soul who dedicated his life to selfless service of poor, ordinary Pakistanis without any discrimination, Edhi Sahib’s death has left a hole in our collective existence. While it would be wrong not to honour the countless others who have dedicated themselves — and do so on a daily basis — to helping the less fortunate and those in need, by running hospitals, clinics, schools, food kitchens and countless other initiatives, Mr Edhi and his foundation stood like a colossus over all these honourable efforts.

At the same time, Mr Edhi’s life, work and death are unstained and unblemished mirrors placed against our collective failings. His work and legacy not only hold a mirror to the deficiencies in public well-being stemming from uncaring governance, but equally important, also show how much can be achieved by a single person and his dedicated network — let alone by the magnitude of well-intentioned state effort. The scale of his work and the impact it has had over the years on the lives of millions, magnifies the cumulative failure of the state in its primary responsibility.

One departed with respect, the other arrived on the wings of self-entitlement.

In life, and in death, Edhi Sahib showed us another stark difference. While he touched the lives of countless souls during the course of being among the people, those in lofty positions who seek power in the name of serving the people, have perhaps never looked more morally bankrupt than while attending his funeral under cordons of security. Many of those standing shamelessly to honour a man who had made serving humanity his life-mission had not even an iota of public service to show for in political careers spanning decades.

On the same day Edhi Sahib’s cortege arrived in a humble ambulance of his foundation (before being transferred on to a gun carriage for burial with full military honours), the prime minister flew in from London with his entourage on a specially shanghaied PIA Boeing 777. As one Pakistani was being carried with respect and honour on the shoulders of a grateful nation, the other was flying in on a flight of self-entitlement. Edhi Sahib, in his death, showed us the unbridgeable distance between Mithadar and Mayfair.

Should it matter that the prime minister and his entourage saw it as their ‘right’ to order PIA, whose losses are being footed by taxpayers, to make a revenue-generating wide-bodied aircraft available for their personal use? Some apologists have suggested it does not. For them, the millions in lost revenue for PIA and inconvenience for passengers booked on flights to be operated on that particular aircraft (at least one domestic and one long-haul flight to Manchester and New York) is a “non-issue”.

While the foregone revenue is certainly a matter that should not be overlooked, a far more fundamental issue is the egregious display of the sense of entitlement and privilege by the prime minister and his family. The same mindset has drawn widespread criticism and opprobrium in recent instances in South Africa, where President Zuma thought nothing of spending hundreds of millions from the public coffers on furbishing his personal residence, and in Turkey where President Erdogan recently moved into a custom-built presidential palace that reportedly cost $700 million.

This sense of entitlement and privilege, which is a hallmark of elite-captured societies and has been on display in Pakistan since independence, undermines democracy as well as economic development. Arguments have been presented that democracy is all that matters, corruption is a non-issue and does not hold back development, or that it is unavoidable and we should learn to live with it.

The fundamental point these well-meaning arguments are missing is that there is a difference between a flawed system of elections that throws up elected kleptocrats and their scions, allows them to loot the public exchequer and then protects them from prosecution and enforcement of the rule of law, and an ‘institutional democracy’. True democracy cannot exist or function without a strong institutional foundation. The institutional framework ensures a legal basis to the absence of discrimination in the application of the rule of law. When enclaves of privilege exist in a ‘democracy’ where either the rule of law does not apply, or where obligations to state and society are not enforced on a few, that cannot be classified as rule of the people.

Another feature of real democracy that makes it so appealing as a system of governance is the sharing of the fruits of economic growth and development. Any system that only ensures participation in elections or in discharge of obligations (such as paying taxes) for the majority but does not ensure the wide sharing of economic gains beyond the ruling elite cannot be regarded as genuine democracy.

The current system of governance which ensures power and privileges for the few is unlikely to deliver for the majority, nor is it likely to be changed by ‘insiders’ — unless the current beneficiaries recognise that the status quo is unsustainable. From the outside, ‘people power’ (including the influence of civil society) will need to be exerted to make wholesale changes that make the system truly work for the majority. The system itself has to be fixed before elections will deliver democracy. The holding of regular elections within a flawed system that has been rigged and captured is unlikely on its own to flush out kleptocrats. That is the unfortunate experience of a host of countries ranging from Argentina to Zimbabwe.

The writer is a former economic adviser to government, and currently heads a macroeconomic consultancy based in Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, July 22nd, 2016