CANADA’S richest province Ontario, with a GDP of a trillion Canadian dollars, purchased a 10-year-old jet costing 28 million Canadian dollars (Rs5.46 billion) for the official use of its premier. Critics quickly dubbed it the “gravy plane”, taunting Doug Ford’s long-standing political rhetoric about eliminating government waste. The premier was quick to take responsibility. He promptly returned the plane. Far away, in a country where 48 per cent of the people fall in the ‘extremely poor’ category, a chief minister acquired a spanking new Gulfstream 500 — twice as expensive as the plane of the Ontarian premier. It was also followed by similar public outrage. The chief minister, however, vowed to continue using the “gravy plane” as her legal right.
On Sept 30, 2026, something seriously went wrong with the execution of Christa Pike at the Maximum Security Prison in Nashville, Tennessee. The two doses of the lethal pentobarbital injection failed to achieve their intended result. Pike did not die. Just two days later, Frank Strada, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Correction, resigned on grounds of moral responsibility. Only a few weeks earlier, 14 newborn babies had been burnt to death in a hospital fire in Islamabad. No one resigned. The executive director had to be forced to step down.
Why is it that countries possessing very similar constitutions, parliaments, democracies, and laws end up achieving radically different outcomes? The ones doing poorly can be recognised by a distinct common denominator: a ruling class deeply deficient in character, values, and moral responsibility. Such nations forever remain in search of new laws, new faces, and new messiahs, rather than seeking a new code of conduct for their morally deficient leaders.
Laws devoid of morality find enough loopholes to justify abuse.
For centuries, slavery was legally permitted. Women were legally denied their right to vote and property. Racial segregation and discrimination were once legally enforced. Children working long hours in hazardous jobs was legally permitted. Workers dying or being seriously injured in mines and sewage gutters was treated as the cost of doing business. But all these ‘legally’ sanctioned practices were inherently unjust and morally decadent. It took decades of determined struggle by the abolitionist, women’s rights, civil rights, and labour movements to establish that legality alone could never legitimise practices that violated the fundamental principles of equality, dignity, safety, and justice.
While Pakistani laws adequately address equality, safety, and dignity, the ruling elite has remained resolutely impervious to any of these considerations and continues to rule with remarkable immorality. Governance has become synonymous with self-enrichment, self-projection, and self-indulgence. Questioning the conduct, wastefulness and misuse of state resources is considered unpatriotic. Pakistan thus faces a grave moral and institutional crisis that cannot be resolved by any new sermons, slogans, changes in government, or enactment of new laws. An ecosystem overflowing with laws but devoid of morality will always find enough loopholes and justifications to perpetuate its questionable practices.
Much as the abolition of slavery required society to move beyond what the law permitted, Pakistan needs a moral consensus on rejecting practices that may be legally permissible yet remain immoral, unequal, undignified, unsafe, and irresponsible. A useful starting point would be to recognise that expenditures such as aircraft and bullet-proof vehicles for the luxury and convenience of the ruling elite, even when legally sanctioned, are downright immoral, and should be withdrawn. The excessive self-sanctioned salaries, perks and privileges of judges, parliamentarians, and government officials, even when backed by legal notifications, are im-
moral. Billions of rupees spent on self-publicity, ads, billboards, posters and pictures on every imaginable free space, even when approved by a sycophantic finance department, are wasteful and unethical.
Likewise, naming every building, bridge, school, hospital, and ration bag after a serving politician is morally reprehensible. Sending workers into sewage gutters, even when legally practised for 80 years is despicably immoral and needs to be eliminated forthwith. Not to mention that pathological addiction of borrowing and begging from foreign donors and friendly countries, even when endorsed by law, is demeaning and immoral.
Pakistan must pause, introspect and agree on how to weed out immorality amongst leaders. An agenda for moral reforms that binds the rulers to higher standards of conduct may be far more consequential than a new or recycled set of laws and leaders.
The writer is an industrial engineer and a volunteer social activist.
Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2026
