Promises to Keep

Promises to Keep
Promises to keepHow much can they talk!” I think whenever I hear our leaders speak. Maybe talking nonsense is an important requirement of being a leader in Nepal. Has anyone noticed how much Girija Prasad Koirala, Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Madhav Kumar Nepal speak? If they were not leaders, they probably would have been VJs or RJs who speak all the time.


But not even a tenth of the work promised in their speeches is done. Every single day, there is some leader promising something. I wonder who would win a talk fest among our political leaders! Maybe Dahal, because he never seems to care about what he says. When he resigned, he expressed his pride at leaving the government with his head held high. But barely a month had passed when he took to the streets, for the same reason that he had to resign.

There’s a saying, “Promises are made to be broken.” I don’t know who came up with it, but it must have been a work of some political leader. The leaders who promised the East West Railway cannot even come up with a smooth roadway. Then there have been those who promised to return illegally captured properties and some who vowed not to let the CA run properly unless that happened. But within the blink of an eye, promises were thrown down the gutter. And certainly nobody can forget the promises of turning Nepal into a Switzerland of Asia! American entertainer Will Rogers once said: “If all politicians fished instead of spoke, publicly, we would be at peace with the world.” Rogers was, of course, talking about the American involvement with the rest of the world. But he might well have been speaking about Nepali politics.

Nine times out of ten, the disputes we have with our neighbours are due to the ill-timed and ill-thought of public rants of our politicians. If they were to instead busy themselves into something worthwhile, we might at least not have our friendly neighbours fishing in our troubled waters.Not that it’s just the fault of those leaders. We citizens are equally responsible for letting them get away with it. Whenever we see a political leader addressing a crowd, we step aside to hear them, following their words blindly and weaving dreams that are never going to be fulfilled. But things have got to change.

So let us make a solemn promise today: from now on we are not going to hear a single word of those leaders. Let’s walk away if the leaders start speaking like mad. Only if we do this, will the leaders stop ranting and raving and devote their time towards their work.

Published in The Kathmandu Post 'Post Platform' on DEC 12