Former national security advisor Moeed Yusuf has said that we have to stop looking at our country as a rented house. We can’t deal with our country like this.
He was speaking at Think Fest at Alhamra hall. He said we have to teach civics to our nation, you go outside and see how many people put garbage in the dustbin and how many just litter anywhere they want. This is for society to decide how they want to behave. If we think of our country as a rented property then we are doing a fairly good job of ruining it.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to Pakistanis Im just worried for those who are living in this country and do not have the option to go to other countries,” said Yusuf.
He said that the development sector needs to figure out how to rise the bar in terms of export levels and other foreign exchange remittances. 80% of Pakistani who are abroad are essentially unskilled in the gulf. Why are not we switching to the model of skilled labour going to economies like Germany, Japan, and Malaysia? These are the shifts that we need to make now. We can’t be hearing numbers like 10 billion IT experts to be produced in 2 years that’s not going to happen.
He further added that We can’t do a lot of things in Pakistan at the same time so we need to pick our priorities, expert sectors and countries and then work around that to increase our foreign exchange earnings.
“Any institution in the public sector can start working if you put a good individual to run it, institute dies when you take someone mediocre or average to run it. If the elite and people like me are failing to run the country then let those run the countries that are going to stay here forever.,” said Yusuf.
Regarding the question about how to restructure the elite’s mentality and how to make them understand that this is not a rented house, he said the first question here is whether have you changed your mind which is required to make the policy successful. So I will start from a different point which is who is going to manage and govern? In terms of management if we are not going to bring domain knowledge into our civil service structure and if we do not have people in the system who understand that their main job is to facilitate not regulate then we cannot function.
“Once you strengthen the provincial government and once you have a bureaucratic structure which has experts who know about things then change can happen, otherwise you can create as many policies as you want,” he said.
