WE can’t stop the squawking and bleating and barking and squealing that’s about to come, but we sure can tell them what we think of them. So, by way of semi-catharsis, a word to the four who would rule us all.

Nawaz – Really? I mean, really? You have a damaged ticker, fine. You’re miffed some folk think you’d fake heart problems to distract from your Panama woes – fair enough.

Some of us would be annoyed if we were in your place. But someone’s gotta tell you: you’re slipping into African-dictator realm of out-of-touchness.

It’s not the special plane. It’s not the shopping around for fancy watches and luxe suits. It’s not the dining out in London. It’s all of it. All the time.

To hell with whether the pics of you wandering and shopping and eating around London are new or old, fake or real.

You’ve got a problem when there’re more grainy videos and dodgy pics of you doing rich-man stuff floating around than even the shiny, slickly produced stuff of you meeting ordinary Pakistanis.

And it never ends. You’ve already managed to botch your return, even before you’ve returned.

Try explaining to anyone – Pakistani, doctor, idiot, rich or poor – how it makes sense for the family to jet out to spend Eid with you only for the lot of you to fly back home THE DAY AFTER EID.

A gazillion interviews and questions later and you still can’t figure out the difference between a terrible answer and an OK one.

Are we only good enough to be ruled, but not posh enough to spend Eid with? You’ve got a London problem and because you have a London problem, Pakistan has a Nawaz problem.

We get it: it’s nice there. You can relax and not worry about the ISI bugging your home. You can chat with friends and strategise with your team. It’s probably nice to be relatively anonymous again.

And you’re probably happy knowing that you’re still ahead of the pack for the next election. There’s only one thing better than three-term PM: four-term PM.

But when you’re sliding towards winning an election while losing the people, you’re in that most unwise of realms: an out-of-touch winner. Pull it together, man.

Imran – oh, dear. Where to begin?

OK, let’s try this. We get it, you’ve got some loopy ideas: Taliban are misguided, Fata was milk and honey; we should hang crooked politicians and give militants a hug.

But you’re not exactly alone. Nawaz didn’t want Zarb-i-Azb and doesn’t want his Punjab disturbed. Asif and the ANP gave us Nizam-i-Adl.

Plus, it doesn’t really matter what you think about the Taliban and Fata: the boys have made their decision and you’re not going to change their minds. Small mercies, then.

But must you be so offensively ignorant?

Some loons in your KP government thought it smart to give Samiul Haq some cash. Maybe it had to do something with the PTI’s rivalry with Samiul Haq’s rival Fazlur Rehman. Maybe they just thought it a good idea.

What was definitely a wretched idea was your response when asked. You could have left it at, I don’t know why and I need more information. Or said, we need to reform madressahs and this is a part of that.

Y’know, like your freaked-out minders desperately spun afterwards and got you to say later. And that’s the problem.

Not that you have minders to attend to your mishaps. Not that you spoke your mind. BUT BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT YOU SOUND LIKE WHEN YOU SPEAK YOUR MIND.

A gazillion interviews and questions later and you still can’t figure out the difference between a terrible answer and an OK one.

There’s the stupid way and there’s the Imran way. Can we have a less of the two being the same, please?

Zardari – just because you’ve gone quiet, doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about you, oh no.

Look, we get it. You don’t give a toss what anyone thinks. You are what you are, you’ll do what you want and the rest of us just have to suck it up. But that’s not it.

You love collecting property like Monopoly squares, you adore shiny towers and you live like a billionaire. We’ve got used to it.

But could you just act – just a teeny, tiny bit – like you’re still responsible for Sindh? Because, y’know, you are?

Yes, yes, we know that the boys have taken over Karachi and they’ve squeezed your inner circle. By all means, fight that fight.

But Sindh is not Balochistan. It’s not some godforsaken backwater. It’s got Karachi and 50 million people. And it doesn’t deserve this.

That Pathankot attack? Two of the four came from your interior Sindh. The great jihad penetration into northern Sindh may be controlled from elsewhere, but it’s happening on your watch.

Karachi? It’s about more than political murders and militant hideouts. It’s about one of the world’s largest cities imploding into a vast civic nightmare.

If you can’t bring yourself to anything right, try doing one less wrong, governance-killing thing every month. You may be surprised by the effect. Have a heart, man.

Raheel – oh, don’t act like you don’t know why you’re on this list.

Saint Raheel. The man who could be king forever, walking away from it all, right at his peak.

But here we are – again: a few months from a scheduled exit, speculation is rising, in the middle of a simmering political crisis, of decisions being reconsidered and of ways of keeping the crown.

If you could say it in Jan, say it again now: I’m going home, folk. Done. Decided. Written in stone.

Whoosh. Just like that the conspiracy bubble would disappear and we could get on with trying to become a constitutional realm.

Do the right thing, general. Look within, not at the other three.

The writer is a member of staff.

cyril.a@gmail.com

Twitter: @cyalm

Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2016