If you want expats to return home laden with their talent then the govt needs to do more: Anjum Niaz. — AN Photo

President Zardari has offered Pakistanis living abroad to return and serve their country. A noble gesture, indeed. They shall be rewarded financially and professionally. Sadly such promises by our rulers have now almost become a jaded cliché; a kind of deformed joke for Pakistanis ‘dying’ to return home and serve their country.

Many committees, commissions and ‘experts’ have burnt the midnight oil formulating fancy plans to reverse the brain drain. Expats have been lured to their homeland in the past decade or two only to face discrimination, jealousies and a dead end career. Their peers, inferiors and superiors, don’t welcome Pakistanis who left home for greener pastures and now want to return. Period. Unless Islamabad is sincere in attracting Pakistanis back home, the plan may well die an early death just as its predecessors.

America is home to thousands of Pakistani immigrants, some with excellent credentials. And several with hefty bank accounts. Until 18 months ago, many ‘movers and shakers’ in the PPP government lived in America as political émigrés. Some are naturalised citizens holding American passports or Green Cards. Their homeward journey began at the Pakistan consulate-general in New York 18 months back where the officials must have swiftly rolled out a red carpet treatment to the overnight-turned-power horses after February 18, 2008 elections. Good for them, but what about ordinary Pakistanis today visiting the consulate for their consular work?

Let me begin with the bad news first: The Pakistan flag hanging from a swank Fifth Avenue building sends your spirits soaring. Sure! You’re in jaunty New York to get your passport renewed. The pre-war (World War II) consulate general gives you a lofty look as you step inside with great expectations of desi bonhomie. But the staff inside doesn’t even acknowledge you. They look bored and disinterested. ‘Go to the basement and get a money order made,’ shouts a chap from inside the glass window when we push our papers towards him. He doesn’t even look at us. Where in heavens is the basement? We ask around. No one answers.

A helpful fellow Pakistani standing in the line points towards the entrance door. ‘You go out of the building and go down.’ As we step outside, we notice a shoddy handwritten notice pasted on the rickety iron stairs saying ‘Basement.’ The woman attending on us is equally distant and expressionless. We return to the chap upstairs and stand in a line to hand over our papers. The copying machine next to us has conked out. The unhelpful staff tinkers with it and gives up. Should they not put up a sign saying ‘out of order’? I remember Consul General Abbas Haider Zaidi had won our kudos when way back in 1999 he had installed a copier (that worked!) and many other facilities for a smooth and seamless consular process. In fact he had spruced up the chancery and made it more welcoming to his fellow Pakistanis entering in scores daily.

Today the chancery is battered. An ugly dark oil painting covering one wall showing a shepherd tending to his sheep takes one back to the medieval times. The two light brackets look pathetic--one is upside down delicately balancing an energy saver bulb while the other has the same old glass shade that looks as ugly and antiquated as the painting itself. The paint is peeling on the walls and the naked wires around the ceiling look awful. Bang in the middle is an elongated ceiling light whose plastic cover has turned brown with age and dirt. It’s no longer in use but has not been removed. Instead two naked white neon lights are pinned up next to it that provide the big room light. The floor is covered with a dark brown felt carpet that must not have been cleaned in decades and must be home to millions of dust mites.

Now the good news! Pakistan will no longer pay property tax on this Fifth Avenue valuable real estate building housing the consulate-general and the permanent mission to the UN in New York. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has exempted all foreign governments from paying real estate tax on their properties in New York. And Mayor Bloomberg is fuming. He’s had to return a $30 million cheque from the city of New York, charging the Czechs on their chancery in the city. Question: Will the millions now saved from tax be spent on cleaning up the chancery? Will we finally have someone responsible enough to answer the phone when we call for information? So far we’ve drawn a blank. A crude voice on the answering machine tells us to leave our name and telephone number and that ‘someone will get back as soon as possible.’ I’m still waiting for that ‘someone’ to get back to me!

If you want Pakistani-Americans returning home laden with their talent, skills and dough, then the government needs to do more for them. Let our Foreign Office send directions to its officers posted in New York to pull up their socks (literally) and start behaving like public servants and not typical laidback bureaucrats who are accountable to none. There are some 30 staff members posted at the chancery. We, the tax payers are contributing to their salaries and perks. Should they not act more professionally?

On anoither note, the mass media today has spawned billions of dollars living off discussing events 24/7 and profiling celebrities nonstop. Conclusion: Are all the top guns in the paper and electronic business a bunch of twits? I can’t vouch for others except Walter Cronkite, the iconic face of television journalism who recently died. Almost to the day 40 years ago he became the first to break the news to the world that a man had landed on the moon! He died in New York at age 92. I chatted with him nine years ago when I stopped him and his wife Betsy as they were coming out of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Centre after a performance of Carmen.

They posed, they chatted, they answered anything I asked. Cronkite, the anchor of CBS television channel was widely respected: ‘He played a role in our national life like no other broadcast journalist... and all the rest of us are still following in his footsteps’ said his former colleagues. Humility was Cronkite’s greatest quality. We can all learn from him.
 
www.anjumniaz.com