It does not take much to assess how Pervez Musharraf will treat Shaukat Aziz. The general will not tolerate him if he develops a big head
HAS anyone done the proverbial digging on Shaukat Aziz? Probably not. As finance minister, the world really couldn’t care less about his antecedents. As prime minister, lying-in-wait, we do care.
Because of the bizarre revelations that recently enlightened us — for instance, Bill Clinton starring in “parallel lives” straddling between his small town Hope in Arkansas and the White House or George W. Bush’s “sadistic”, “paranoid” and “megalomaniac” boyhood tendencies ballooning dangerously when he arrives at the White House in 2000 — placing our own future prime minister on the couch is so 21st century-like.
Don’t you agree?
So what’s our take on the man pet named “Munnu”? He grew up in Karachi. Son of a government employee working in Radio Pakistan, Shaukat lived around the Karachi zoo, on Garden Road, colonized by government officers.
My earliest dossier is of the ‘70s when he began his career in a multinational tobacco company located on the GT Road in Jhelum. First-hand accounts speak of a sunny, young man often sighted sitting on the bar of a bike being driven around the residential area that was adjacent to the factory where he worked as an entry level accountant.
Soon sated with rustic life, with ambition as his spur, Shaukat swiftly joined Citibank in time for the Singapore sling.
Fast-forward three decades, there is the svelte Citicorp executive from New York sojourning in Islamabad, sporting just the right amount of grey at the temples, making sure that it doesn’t add age to his persona, dressed in nifty designer suits, perhaps Armani, the couture favoured by big boss Pervez Musharraf.
Okay, we’re done with the appearance. Let’s move on to his resume that got him hired as our finance minister and now the prime minister designate. What did he bring to the table in Islamabad after packing up his personal belongings from his luxurious pad, the brownstone in Tudor City, New York’s swankiest?
Under lock and key is the blue passport with the golden bald eagle, only given once you “renounce all allegiance to any foreign state or sovereignty of whom you have heretofore been a subject or citizen”. You must swear the ‘Oath of Allegiance’ to “defend the US Constitution and bear arms on behalf of the US when required by the law; perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces.”
Remember citizen Qureshi from the eagle country? He took the oath as interim PM without a shanakhati card? Moeen Qureshi’s men went berserk getting his National ID Card issued before the press got wind of it.
Shaukat Aziz’s resume carries names of his American contacts from the world’s financial district in Manhattan to the dour World Bank and IMF in Washington DC; from friends on Capitol Hill to hawks at the Pentagon. In a nutshell, not only is he good news for Pakistan but also for his adopted country, the United States of America.
America has done it before. Fifty one years ago, when General Iskandar Mirza dismissed the then prime minister Khwaja Nazimuddin, Washington DC nominated Mohammad Ali Bogra, Pakistan’s ambassador to US, as the new prime minister of Pakistan, planting their own Manchurian Candidate.
We all like to pad our resumes with cliches like ‘team player’ or ‘problem solver’ or ‘result-oriented’, hoping to impress our prospective employer.
Shaukat Aziz can also add yet another adjective: ‘self-made millionaire’; a vogue word here.
Rising on the coattails of a man called Aftab Islam, Shaukat Aziz spiralled to the heights at Citicorp in New York. Islam, a Pakistani, was the Securities Market Inc. vice-president. He helped his compatriot reach the top of the corporate ladder, only to slide down the slippery pole himself.
It was Shaukat Aziz who came to his mentor’s rescue, hiring lawyers to fight his case and paying their hefty fees from his own wallet.
So what does this tell you about the man? A friend in need is a friend indeed! Right? As a people’s person, with a knack to impress those who matter in this world Aziz, while heading the Citibank in Malaysia, was the “smartest, slickest and sharpest” in Kuala Lumpur, remembers someone who saw him in action.
It’s not brain surgery to dissect how Pervez Musharraf will treat this man. The straight-shooter, no-nonsense general will not tolerate Aziz if he develops a big head. Simple.
The man who really hates his head examined is his friend in the White House. Justin Frank, a very serious psychiatrist, writes in Bush on the Couch that George W, who lived in an alcoholic haze until he turned 40, can’t differentiate between himself, America and God. “The White House is occupied by an untreated ex-alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies... though he’s a helluva nice guy, very affable and I like his sense of humour.”
The world’s biggest bully always has his mom looking over his shoulder. “Take your feet off my table,” Barbara Bush once commanded the president, when the First Couple came to visit with the senior Bushes. “As a kid, she had trouble connecting emotionally with her son”, Frank argues, while his dad’s “emotional and physical absence during his son’s youth triggered feelings of both adoration and revenge in George W.”
Bush has betrayed a “lifelong streak of sadism,” ranging from “childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs)” to “insulting journalists, gloating over state executions ... [and] pumping his fist gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad.”
Frank’s recommendation? “The sole treatment option — for his benefit and ours — is to remove [him] from office.”
How about Benazir Bhutto? Has anyone applied psychoanalysis on her? Can we convincingly build our case on how Nusrat Bhutto wanted Zulfi to promote son Murtaza instead of her, as Benazir would often confide to the media with highly persuasive and deeply disturbing family secrets?
Tracing the development of Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif or Shaukat Aziz’s character from childhood to the present first requires a close examination of the role of their parents — in Sharif’s case, we all know how Abbaji’s naked ambition for power led the iron-monger family from Gowalmandi in Lahore to the PM’s house on the hill in Islamabad, not just once but twice. Goodness!
Musharraf too lives with a dominant mother who oversaw his rise to power; instilling a high achieving sense within him during childhood, later to be emboldened by his training as a commando.
Benazir Bhutto hates the general’s guts. Last week she alleged that he was hiding Osama in his basement: “But you’ll have to ask General Musharraf if it is true,” she mockingly told the press in Geneva where she had been summoned to testify before the court on kickbacks she amassed (sealed in Swiss banks) from SGS Cotecna. Later BB said that she was ‘joking’.
But the gleeful Times of India refused to dismiss her comment as a “joke” quoting an unnamed Pakistani “senior source” in London insisting that BB’s “three decades in public life had never revealed a sparkling sense of humour”.
It does not take much to assess how Pervez Musharraf will treat Shaukat Aziz. The general will not tolerate him if he develops a big head 
