Social Security Hospital adds to workers’ woes

OWING to the negligence and indifference of the administration, the 200-bed Social Security Hospital recently built at a cost of Rs120 million has become a chamber of torture for patients, including industrial and commercial workers.

The SS Hospital is located in Madina Town on an area of 84 kanals out of which 36 kanals have been earmarked for the hospital building. The main building has 236,865 square feet of covered area. The hospital is supposed to cater to the needs of industrial and commercial workers of Faisalabad, Toba Tek Singh, Jhang, Sargodha, Jauharabad and Bhakkar districts. Up to 650,000 people can avail of the facilities offered by it.

Originally, the building was scheduled to be completed by September, 1998. But it was handed over incomplete in September, 2002, to the Social Security Department. Construction work is still under way and the entire third-floor wards are yet to be handed over to the hospital administration by the contractor, causing great difficulties.

The hospital is supposed to be a 300-bed facility, but at present 200 beds are functioning as work on this gigantic project has been suspended halfway. It is one of the most precious and beautiful hospitals operating in the government sector here. However, the quality of construction right from the main portion, including walls, stairs, floors, roofs, general wards, private rooms, emergency and administration block, seems to be poor. A visit to the hospital indicates that various blocks are badly affected by seepage of water in the walls and roofs. A number of glazed tiles are found broken. The entire hospital building is uneven.

The hospital which has 15 specialists, provides 24-hour emergency ambulance service and diagnostic facilities like laboratory, ECG, ultrasound and eudiometry, artificial aids (e.g. hearing aid, intra-ocular lens) and vaccination. Most therapeutic facilities, including surgery, are expensive. Also available are services for treatment of hepatitis and cancer. Facilities like shifting of patient to the SS Hospital, Lahore, and other teaching hospitals for cardiac surgery and other unavailable services have also been provided.

It was noticed that an overwhelming number of patients were victims of tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases. The medical superintendent said the alarming increase in pollution, insanitary conditions in factories and non-installation of protective gadgets for shielding workers in factories from the effects of chemical smoke and other emissions were the main causes of chest and other diseases.

He said the treatment of TB patients was a costly one. But whosoever was admitted was provided all facilities, including free medicines and proper diet. In most cases, such patients have to remain under treatment in the hospital for 10 months.

He also admitted that the number of heart and blood pressure patients was increasing day by day and cardiac patients were suffering due to non-availability of a full-fledged CCU and cardiologists, adding the post for a cardiologist had been sanctioned for the current fiscal which was expected to be filled soon.

He said the government had agreed in principle to set up an independent and full-fledged CCU which would be of great help to the secured Social Security workers who faced extra burden for treatment at the Lahore Social Security Hospital.

A round of the hospital revealed that the medical store for outdoor patients which had been given on contract at a monthly rent of Rs22,000 lacked facilities to maintain the required temperature for certain medicines which had become ineffective for want of the prescribed temperature.

A medical store dispenser admitted that they did not have a refrigerator and other equipment for maintaining proper temperature required for medicines, adding they were already paying a handsome rent and could not invest more on such petty things.

Dispenser Muneer Husain said the patients referred by dispensaries and medical units set up in different parts of the city were entertained here while medical care was only extended in emergency cases directly.

Zulekhan Bibi, the wife of an industrial worker, said women had to spend one to two hours to get themselves enrolled, checked and provided with medicines in the hospital due to poor working of the staff. She alleged doctors and staff of the dispensaries forced the patients to purchase costly medicines from the medical store privately which was a violation of rules and an undue burden on the families of labourers.

Sughran Bibi said the shortage of staff and doctors in the gynae ward had been creating serious problems for women as there was no appropriate arrangement to handle emergency cases. Majority of the medicines pertaining to women’s diseases are not available in the hospital.

It is interesting to note that a six-bed ward adjacent to the MS office, equipped with modern equipment and space for the nursing staff was still inoperative despite the fact that a number of gynae patients were lying outside the wards or in verandas.

A number of visiting labourers and their family members complained that they were not being properly treated in the ENT, skin, eye and dental wards due to the shortage of staff as well as non-operation of the required machinery.

Amjad Ali, a worker of the local sizing unit, said he had been visiting the hospital for the last six months to get treatment for his broken arm, but he was not being properly medicated by the doctors due to which his injury had become permanent.

Complaints of cheap and low quality medicines supplied by the head office of the Social Security were rampant. There seems no transparent check for ensuring the quality of medicines. The needy are undoubtedly given medicines, but majority of these are of poor quality and instead of making any improvement and curing patients are aggravating their problems.

Currently, three posts of anaesthetists, one gynaecologist, medical specialist and ENT specialist have been vacant for long. Likewise, out of 30 medical officers, only 18 are working. Similarly, against 13 women medical officers, nine are working. There is a shortage of 56 paramedical and nursing staff. The sanitary staff is also inadequate causing insanitary conditions all around.

It is alleged that a mafia operating in the hospital gets costly medicines prescribed and then sells them in the market at higher rates.

Declaration of assets

DO you think anyone in Pakistan, whether he is in politics or business or government service, or was born with a silver spoon in his mouth as a feudal, will ever tell the truth about his assets? Only the Almighty knows what is in people’s hearts, but knowing my countrymen I would not hazard a yes.

Perhaps the solitary saint in our midst would do so, but his reply would be without colour. Like Oscar Wilde who said “I have nothing to declare but my genius,” he might exclaim, “I have nothing to declare but my piety”. Who wants to know that?

Perhaps the most interesting news to come from Islamabad in a long time was the revelation that many of the new senators, testifying to their assets before the Election Commission, turned out to be billionaires. This inference is based on their own admission. Do you believe they were telling all and not holding back anything? These declarations were a constitutional requirement. However, like all past good governments, this one too has also warned public servants to file statements about their assets. While a politician may speak the truth without fear, how can an officer do that? Have a heart and let him be. How much can he pile up?

I was posted in Peshawar as a newly promoted assistant director of information when, for the first time, the martial law regime of President Ayub required all of us to declare our movable and immovable assets. I can still recall the pride with which I recorded on the form that, except for 51 rupees in the bank and some loose change in my pocket, I owned nothing. Later, as this became a regular annual feature, I found that nobody in the government was really bothered about what the forms contained. My pride seemed to have been wasted.

I am sure that if, after a couple of years, I had declared that my assets had suddenly gone up 10,000-fold, or that I had become a pauper, no surprise would have been caused in either case to the government, for the simple reason that these forms were never scrutinized. They were meant to keep officers from adding to their assets by unlawful means, and in that lofty aim they failed. As for anyone in the establishment sympathizing with me in my penury, that was out of question. If by any chance they did look at my sworn testimony about my means, they would have said: “Serves the fool right for not looking after himself.”

I admit that there was an element of gloating in the triumph that I felt while writing out my first declaration. But as years passed and my assets refused to go up, the foolish boast turned into sober regret, till, just before retirement, it was replaced by a grouse against the system and a feeling of shame and failure to increase my resources. When at last I did become the owner of a small house four years after superannuation, I felt cheated that there was now no declaration in which I could record the fact of my being a man of property like all my brother officers. It was too late.

This element of bragging at being different from everyone else maybe the reason why the late Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan allowed his assets to be publicized by his secretary on being elected to the National Assembly in 1993. This was in pursuance of the requirement that legislators should come out with their means if they wished to enjoy the privilege and pleasure of sitting in the assembly. He was the only elected member who made them public.

I had noted down the details. They were 700 kanals of agricultural land, an ancestral house in Khangarh, a 1984 model Honda Accord, and (hold on to your seats) the princely sum of five rupees in the bank. If the Nawabzada had any money or loose change in the pockets of his various sherwanis, or in the lining of his Fez cap, the secretary failed to mention it. I wonder if the election commission took note of this discrepancy.

This really made me sit up and think. I asked myself, how does the Honda Accord run when its owner has no cash to buy petrol? Since he doesn’t drive himself, where does he pay his chauffeur from? And apart from the day-to-day expenses on running the house (he couldn’t be living on party funds) and the salary of his secretary, who pays for the cigars that he incessantly smokes? My conclusion was that the great democrat had taken the establishment for a ride, and was chuckling over it while drawing at his inseparable hookah.

The Nawabzada had two other assets for which there was no section in the declaration form: his account in the vote bank and his heavy investment in democracy. The latter was a fixed deposit from which he received, after every few years, a dividend in the shape of opposition to the ruling regime. Actually this was his only notable asset, otherwise he was just a small farmer.

However, his detractors insist that after becoming an integral part of Ms Benazir Bhutto’s second coming and de facto deputy PM, the Nawabzada was no longer the poor man that he once claimed to be.

I finished my government service in April 1988. Since then it is said that officers have become so rich that some of them vie in the matter of wealth with medium-sized heroin dealers. Now that they are again asked to declare their assets, how do they bypass the requirement of truth, failing which they have to suffer from some mysterious “dire consequences”.

A statistician friend says the declaration forms of public servants and legislators collected since 1958, if laid end to end, would cover the distance from Landi Kotal to Keamari. Is that the only thing they are good for? Have they no other use at all? What are the election commission and the establishment division going to do with these thousands upon thousands of forms? A whole new department will be needed to scrutinize them and another to find out if the statements are true or not.

I am thinking of asking my rags-and-paper man to bid for the declaration forms lying in the above two offices and with the four provincial services departments. Nobody has so far thought of exploiting this vast reserve of waste paper which could be a much-needed addition to the country’s revenues. That is, if some enterprising section officer has not already sold the whole lot and pocketed the receipts.

Nobody will miss them. The only time you or I may be surprised is when, on buying pakoras from a hawker, we find them wrapped in the declaration form of a friend or even our own. Which would mean that some rags-and-paper man has succeeded in securing the contract for lifting the lost from the government’s godowns.

Australia prepares to revive blackbirding

ONE aspect of the Australian government’s neo-colonial policy toward the island nations of the South Pacific is a proposal to exploit the region’s people as a source of cheap labour — a practice which has a long and sordid history. In the second half of the 19th century, tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders were dragooned to Australia to work as cheap labour on sugar cane plantations in the tropical north east of the continent.

The recruitment of island labour was called “blackbirding” — after the term “blackbird shooting,” which referred to the barbaric practice of English colonists who hunted down Australia’s aboriginal population. The term “blackbird-catching” was also used to describe the African-American slave trade.

The proposal for a modern-day revival of “blackbirding” is contained in the recent Australian Senate committee report, “A Pacific engaged: Australia’s relations with PNG and the island states of the South West Pacific.” In a section titled “Labour mobility” the report recommends that the Australian government “support Australian industry groups, State governments, unions, non-government organizations and regional governments to develop a pilot programme to allow for labour to be sourced from the region for seasonal work in Australia.”

The Senate cites a number of submissions to its inquiry in support of such schemes.

Reference was made to a 1997 government inquiry that recommended granting work visas to Pacific Islanders, as it “may prove to be more cost-effective than continuing high levels of aid in perpetuity.”

In the 19th century, the major colonial powers-Britain, France, Germany and newcomer America — expanded their empires throughout the South Pacific. After profits from the easily harvested sandalwood, pearls and beche de mer began to dwindle, the plantation system developed, with copra, sugar, coffee, cocoa, vanilla, fruit, cotton and rubber all being planted commercially.

Indigenous people living near these plantations, who could rely upon their own subsistence gardens and hunting, refused the long hours and bad conditions on offer. It thus became necessary for the plantation owners to seek an alternative source of labour.

It is estimated that nearly one million indentured labourers worked throughout the South Pacific from the 1860s to the 1940s. As well as Pacific Islanders, some 600,000 Asian workers were brought to work in the region. As many as 380,000 workers were brought to German New Guinea between 1884 and 1940, 280,000 to British New Guinea and 12,000 to German Samoa. Up to 60,000 Indians were transported to Fiji between 1879 and 1916. Plantations within the Solomon Islands employed around 38,000 people between 1913 and 1940.

In Australia, the use of indentured labour from the Pacific took place primarily in the colony of Queensland, which was established in 1859. While the vast tracts of fertile land in the river valleys in the north-east of the continent presented opportunities for agriculture, there was a chronic shortage of labour.

The Queensland government passed the Coolie Act in 1862 that set out conditions for indentured Indian labour, but few Indian recruits could be found.

In all, 61,160 Pacific Islanders were brought to Queensland as indentured labourers between 1863 and 1906. The majority were Melanesians or “Kanaks,” as they were called. They created the Queensland sugar industry, which today produces A$2 billion worth of raw sugar annually through the back-breaking tasks of clearing and ploughing new land.

In the early phases of this brutal trade in human labour, some Islanders were kidnapped. Most of the indentured workers, however, were recruited by agents who painted false pictures about how long they would be away, the nature of their work and their destinations. The Islanders who worked on the plantations sought to acquire industrial products and the status accorded those who had travelled overseas. Many expected to be away for just 12 months, only to discover they had been indentured for three years. The working day was at least 10 hours, six days per week.

THE END OF “BLACKBIRDING”: The second half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of Australia’s trade unions. The unions were hostile to the indentured labourers, claiming they were being used by the employers to undermine the conditions and wages of non-indentured European workers. While this was true, the unions never fought to improve the lot of the Islanders. In fact the unions and their political arm, the Australian Labour Party, founded in 1891, were the most virulent racists.

The Amalgamated Shearers Union’s rules of 1890 banned “Chinese and South Sea Islanders” from membership and the Amalgamated Workers Union, founded in 1894, extended the ban to “Kanakas, Japanese and Afghans”.

In 1901, the six British colonies were federated to form the nation of Australia. The ideological cement binding the nation was the White Australia Policy, championed by the Australian Labour Party. Edmund Barton, the first Australian Prime Minister, declared at the Federation ceremony: “I do not think that the doctrine of equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality.”

One of the first pieces of legislation to be passed by the new parliament was the banning of the virtually redundant indentured labour system and the establishment of the framework for the racist expulsion of the Pacific Islanders from Australia. The Pacific Islands Labourers Act 1901 banned island labourers from entering Australia after 1904. From 1906 all Islanders were to be deported. The only exemptions were those few who had lived for five continuous years in Queensland before 1884.

In an effort to oppose this legislation, Islanders organized themselves, for the first time. In 1902 and 1903, they presented petitions with over 3,000 signatures to the Queensland Governor and to the British king. In 1904 the Pacific Islanders’ Association was founded. As a result of the protests, the number of Islanders exempted from deportation was increased from 691 to 1,654. Between 1904 and 1908, however, 7,068 Islanders were deported.

The current Australian military takeover of the Solomon Islands has been named Operation ‘Helpem Fren’ (Help a Friend). But its real content is to revive Australia’s past colonial relations with the Pacific Islands-the plunder of their human and natural resources. In the 19th century, the essence of “blackbirding” was the exploitation of the Islanders’ labour for the development of the wealth of Australian imperialism. Today’s proposals amount to a continuation of that same process.—Courtesy: World Socialist Website

Under-19 Asia Cup is a stinging rebuke

The fact that Pakistan is hosting the Under-19 Asia Cup is a stinging rebuke to such of the cricket boards who show concerns about the security situation and are reluctant to tour Pakistan.

The precedent had been set by the West Indies and Australia and matches against them were played at neutral venues and then a bomb blast in a hotel adjoining the hotel where the New Zealand team was staying in Karachi provided the perfect excuse to call off the match in Karachi, pack their bags and go home.

Then it was South Africa’s turn who used the pretext of a bomb blast in an abandoned office-building to cancel its tour. The tour was revived after an alternative itinerary had been presented but which saw Karachi and Peshawar dropped as venues. South Africa’s tour went smoothly and one hopes that they had at least the courtesy to feel foolish.

Our next visitors are New Zealand who will play a few one-day internationals though not at Karachi which seems to have acquired the reputation of Dodge City in films about the Wild West in the pioneering days of the United States.

By modern standards, Karachi is as peaceful or as lawless as any big city of the world. It also happens to be Pakistan’s main cricket centre. In the future, no tours should be approved if the visiting team refuses to play at Karachi or any other venue. We must restore to ourselves the right to plan a cricket tour according to our own best interests.

I watched Pakistan Under-19 play against India Under-19. Pakistan lost by 10 runs in an exciting match that went to the wire. Even at an Under-19 level, the cricket played has all the intensity of a game between the senior string, which is both a good, and a bad sign.

At this young age, cricketers should not be carrying the excess baggage of a rivalry that is fuelled by extra-cricket considerations. There were some positives. Pakistan had done well to bowl out for 148 and it seemed an eminently achievable target until Pakistan’s batsmen, emulating their elders, proved to be poor chasers and one stage were five for 13, almost half of these runs coming from wides.

Then Salman Qadir, the son of the legendary leg-spin wizard showed that he was a chip of the old block. Abdul Qadir used to take his batting seriously and though his batting style lacked the elegance of a Mark Waugh, he would bat with great flourish and when he would play a forward defensive shot, he would exaggerate it, as if, demonstrating it at a coaching clinic and the crowds loved him.

But he played many a heroic innings and none more than the one against the West Indies in the 1987 World Cup match and he won the game for Pakistan in the tightest of finishes. His son, Salman has a better batting technique but he has his father’s temperament and his guts, the same belief that it’s not over till it’s over. Salman Qadir almost won the match for Pakistan.

Youth can be forgiven its exuberance but loutish behaviour should be nipped in the bud. When the Indian wicket-keeper caught Zulqarnain Haider, he chose to give the batsman an abusive send-off. The Indian captain Rayudu tried to restrain him and when the ‘keeper’ continued, Rayudu slapped him.

Television did well to show the entire incident in a replay. To hell with the umpires and match-referee, Rayudu took the law in his own hands. He displayed exemplary leadership qualities. It is the captain who has to curb the enthusiasm of his players when they are in danger of getting carried away.

The clip of this incident should be sent to Graeme Smith, South Africa’s captain who, instead of reprimanding Andrew Hall joined in the fray and earned a one-match ban. It is quite remarkable how young cricketers ape their seniors and in this respect, television sets a bad example for these habits are picked up by watching their more illustrious seniors.

The Under-19 Asia Cup matches need to be seen by many more people than were present at the Qadaffi Stadium for the India-Pakistan match. Perhaps, the PCB could make special transport arrangements to bring school children to the ground and, perhaps, these future cricket fans could be given T-shirts displaying the national flags of the four countries competing in the Asia Cup with a suitable message of peace and goodwill through cricket. The Under-19 Asia Cup should be accorded the status of a major cricket event.

I watched both the matches that India played against Australia in the on-going triangular tournament. It was good to see India beating the cocky Australians at Gwalior and then Australia returning the ‘compliment’ at Mumbai.

Tendulkar was playing before his home crowd at Mumbai and clearly he enjoys the stature of a cricket god. He had only to field a ball and the crowd would erupt into a rapturous applause.

Clearly, Sachin is a cut above others for he has nerves of steel and he handles the adulation that borders on worship with aplomb. He has handled his celebrity with great humility and dignity.

I first saw Sachin Tendulkar play when he came to Pakistan with Srikanth’s team in 1989, a school boy but in the few runs he scored on that tour told us plenty of his immense talent and in my commentary, I had reminded the viewers of the awesome prophecy of a Czech proveb:” Today’s cub, tomorrow’s wolf.

At a function in a Mumbai hotel the previous evening, he had expressed his delight at the resumption of cricket links between Pakistan and India. It seemed like a stamp of approval from the highest authority in India. It will be good to see him in Pakistan.