Oh, My Dear Government !

 Oh, My Dear Government!

I would like to start with an honest confrontation, I am not someone who has complete knowledge of political trajectory of Nepal. But, every day, I do try to keep myself updated on what’s happening in my country, that too, out of general concern as citizen of Nepal. The restructuring of the country aimed at making the government’s presence ubiquitous within Nepal will be one of the major events in the history of Nepal. More power to local government who then shall work for people addressing their grievances at source was the main objective of federalism. Troubles came in the process when deciding the provincial capital or even while agreeing to the name of the province. I understand it might take effort and energy while deciding on provincial capital as people think that it will have major impact in development. But isn’t federalism adopted to ensure overall development anyway. However, I couldn’t quite process why naming a province was such a herculean task since ultimately, we are all together in this with sole objective to make Nepal and Nepalese prosperous again.

At difficult times we, people, tend to look up to its government like never before. This pandemic rightly displayed how poor my government is and probably the dictionary my government refers to has word “accountability” missing in it. Lockdown was supposed to be a measure to buy some time during which government comes up with strategies to tackle the pandemic which is COVID-19 in informed manner for instances, conducting COVID-19 tests, expanding its health care facilities, buying Personal Protective Equipment for front liners etc. in gist make necessary preparations with experts’ advice as deciding factor. Nepal went into three months long lockdown but we lacked preparations, we were ignorant towards expert’s advice and suggestions. As a result, we have already crossed 150K cases while prediction looks even depressing. It looks like my government has wasted all of the available lifelines in the fight against this pandemic. We were also given the cheat sheet where we could have simply followed the strategies from the countries that came strong in containing the corona virus but my government failed and so did, we. Another sad part revolving this COVID-19, is the fear of being stigmatized once you tested positive. There were so many sad stories where doctors and nurses faced humiliation due to risk of exposure of contracting virus due to the nature of their job. Although, there were social messages encouraging people not to hate COVID patients but the fear of virus surpassed the basic humanity. I would like to add one story I heard from one of my acquaintance who is basically involved in politics. He recently visited his village from Kathmandu and around same time another person also came from Kathmandu in the village. However, the other person was made to stay in quarantine along with his whole family who were already in village while my acquaintance was not asked to do so. This is the sad reality of our society and COVID-19 has just further widened the fissures that already exist in our society in the form of inequality, access to power etc.

Criticism surrounded the government for being so insensitive and ignorant towards its people. But government was too thick-skinned to be affected by any of it. Amid the pandemic, chaos within government for power sharing stole the whole limelight. It felt like we, people, were paying for the wrong show. I would be so wrong if I don’t mention that we Nepalese ourselves are very careless indeed. We do pretend like we are invincible and ignore the basic safety protocols until the threat is imminent. This is entirely on us how we choose to fight this battle against COVID-19 pandemic.