Syed Babar Ali – What Pakistan Needs Is Leadership

By Babar Bhatti | December 21, 2009 | No Comments

“You can’t build a country if you’re not thinking beyond your own lifetime,” Syed Babar Ali said. Pakistan’s biggest problem, he believes, is one of leadership. This post is a humble mention of  an icon in Pakistan leadership: Syed Babar Ali. His interview (and the photo shown here) recently appeared in New York Times.

I have met many leaders who have worked closely with Syed Babar Ali and many of them were personally persuaded by Babar Ali to come to Pakistan and work on projects which were important to Pakistan. I had the honor of meeting him once as well. Only if we had a few more personalities like him, we would be in a much better shape. Read below from the NYT article where Babar Ali talks about the need for education, justice and leadership. His straight talk is balanced by pragmatic actions and the results show that determination and resolve can achieve. I consider him among the top 10 greatest Pakistanis in its short history. Kudos to Syed Babar Ali for a life full of dedication to noble causes and for bringing about a change in the life for many generations of Pakistanis.

Mr. Ali is an institution in Pakistan. He has started some of the country’s most successful companies. But perhaps his most important contribution has been his role in creating the Lahore University of Management and Science, or L.U.M.S., begun as a business school but now evolved into the approximate equivalent of Harvard University in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s biggest problem, he believes, is one of leadership. A corrosive system of privilege and patronage has eaten away at merit, degrading the fabric of society and making it more difficult for poor people to rise. The growing tendency to see government positions as chances to profit, together with the explosion in the country’s population, has led to a sharp decline in the services that Pakistan’s government offers its people.

“Nobody is bothered about the masses,” Mr. Ali said.

It did not start that way, he says. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s visionary founder, criticized Pakistan’s system of feudal power, in which rich landowners reaped profits from land worked by impoverished peasants, calling the system “vicious” and saying it made the rich “so selfish that it is difficult to reason with them.”

Pakistan was created as a haven for the Muslim minority of the Indian subcontinent, but Mr. Jinnah was adamant that the country should protect all faiths and be a fair society, where the poor, through hard work, could advance themselves.

But 62 years later, many of those ideals seem just as distant. Attempts at dismantling the feudal system were halfhearted, and decades later it is still more or less intact and landowners still form the bulk of the political elite. Other powerful groups that have governed, the military and wealthy industrialists, fared no better.

“You can’t build a country if you’re not thinking beyond your own lifetime,” Mr. Ali said.

Pakistan’s education system has been one of the casualties. Good public education can create opportunity in societies, but in Pakistan it has been underfinanced and ignored, in part because the political class that runs the country does not consume its services. Fewer than 40 percent of children are enrolled in school here, far below the South Asian average of 58 percent. As a result, Pakistan’s literacy rate is a grim 54 percent.

Pakistan’s young people, Mr. Ali said, should be “citizens of the world, not narrow-minded or intolerant.”

L.U.M.S. has produced about 4,000 graduates since 1986. Of those, a large number are in graduate programs abroad. Almost all are employed, many with lucrative careers in the West.

While L.U.M.S. is an elite institution, largely inaccessible to most Pakistanis, it does have a program for underprivileged students and is currently offering full scholarships and admissions help to about 250 students, Mr. Ali said.

One hope is that the university will help inculcate a sense of merit and fairness that has all but disappeared from Pakistani society, crippling its growth.

“Merit and fairness are gone,” he said. “The whole system is getting bogged down.”

Admission to L.U.M.S. is strictly on merit, he said, and Pakistanis who try to use connections to get in are turned away.

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