With impunity
We bemoan our electricity shortfall but our governments are unable to do anything about large swathes of the country where people steal bijli with impunity. Like the colloquial “kundas” all over Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s Tribal Areas, and in Azad Kashmir. Recently, an official tried to get some of these defaulters to pay up and nearly got his head cut off. He was detained for days in the boondocks and reminded of the time when people stole electricity with impunity but paid off the local Taliban for protection. Part of the late Emir of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Hakimullah Mehsud’s booty came from this very source. A former spook confirmed to us recently that when “the authorities” went to Hakimullah’s den in Danda Darpakhel, North Waziristan, after his death in a drone strike in 2013, they found a huge stash of cash. It was over Rs 2 billion.
One-time benefactor
A group of Pakistani-Brits, residents of an ancient town north east of London, have turned against their one-time benefactor. This gent, one of The Man of Steel’s crew who’s currently in hot water, was said to have given this community an interest free loan of £ 200,000 to build their local mosque in the early 1990s. The community took the money with alacrity but have since turned their backs on their patron. They’ve now joined The Great Khan en masse and are crying foul about the “source of the funds”. If they’re so pure of heart, and so outraged a quarter century later, they should tote up the interest on the loan and send it to the Pakistani exchequer, or give it to a worthy cause – if they returned the original amount, that is!