A sheep in a sheepskin?

(Buk-up)
My beloved mother happens to be of Seraike origin as she was born in Bahawalpur exactly on
the day Allama Iqbal passed away. So obviously, my knowledge about the Seraike people
begins at home. Out of several unique things I know about the people from Southern Punjab,
one is surprisingly strange but authentic. Pretty much every Seraike speaker who looks
innocent turns out to be very shrewd in reality. This has been so true that it has evolved into a
myth by now. Not even once has this been proven wrong. However, Prime Minister Yousuf
Raza Gilani is an exception. He is more innocent even than he looks. Very unlike Shah
Mahmood Qureshi, who is graded by his political adversaries in Multan as a "wolf in a
sheepskin", Mr Gilani looks more of "sheep in a sheepskin" to me. There is no doubt about the
fact that he is one of the most decent, soft-spoken and well-groomed politicians this country has
ever had, but as the dictum goes, you have to pay the price for being too good too. Most of
PPP's political pundits and some of the leading "bureaucratic bandits" tend to take the Prime
Minister for granted. This I have experienced during my three-day stay in the Federal Capital
this week. I am also traveling with him to London and Washington these days with a fear that
this might be my last overseas trip with any entourage. And this column may be the last nail in
the coffin. Surveys show that as many as 70 percent of PM's orders go down the tube without
implementation. They are either delayed till eternity or sent back with at least half a million
objections of a typical bureaucratic nature. This had been the biggest problem the Government
has faced during its very first quarter. The worst was yet to come, had somebody not given a
wake-up call to the PPP leader, Asif Zardari, who has shown his muscle foor the first time so far
by allowing the removal of some top bureaucrats with a huge pro-Musharraf label tagged to
them. The much talked about Chairman CBR, Abdullah Yousaf, who became a celebrity
overnight the moment his "mujra" fame videoclip ran on the Net, was the first to be shown the
door. The most controversial Fed Secretary that ever appeared on the bureaucratic scene, here
was Wakeel Khan, of Religious Affairs. This guy should have retired a long time back, perhaps
before the partition, (of Bengal, not India), but had been surviving on artificial breathing called
extension. Yousuf Raza Gilani's government shall claim credit for at least one thing, that of
pulling the plug on this bureaucratic fossil who had virtually plagued the Ministry of Religious
Affairs. The Secretary Finance is the next to follow. A handful of other secretaries are also on the
move and may take a month or less to be replaced. But the initial damage has already been
done. I wonder why did the government take so long? Yousuf Raza Gilani should have taken a
leaf from Shahbaz Sharif's book, who started making changes in the Punjab bureaucracy
perhaps as early as on the night of February 18. Anyways, by the time you read these lines, I
would probably be flying over the Atlantic, on board the Air Force One (poor man's), heading
for Washington which means no column next Monday. Email comments and queries
to:aftabiqbal7@hotmail.com