A Man on a Mission: Former General Turns His Attention to Pakistan’s Educational System
By Amna Nawaz | September 30, 2009 | Pakistan
IRP Fellow Amna Nawaz interviews Gen. Sabeeh Qamar-uz-Zaman in Islamabad.
In determining their country’s future, I’ve heard Pakistanis joke that the “Three A’s “ rule: the Army, America, and Allah. The future of the country’s badly bruised education system may depend to some degree on all three, but so far it is an Army man who is making impressive strides.
In the office of Quality Schools Foundation, an education-focused, non-profit based in Islamabad, I am greeted by this very man.
At 72-years old, retired Lt. General Sabeeh Qamar-uz-Zaman hardly looks his age. A tall, impeccably dressed man, Gen. Sabeeh crosses his office with long, purposeful strides to shake my hand. He wastes no time in ushering me to a table and opening a manila folder, full of information he has compiled for our meeting.
This much is clear about Gen. Sabeeh – he is a man who gets things done.
A 40-year career in the Pakistan Army led him through stints teaching engineering at the country’s military college, and later, running it. His own weapons electrical engineering work earned him the nation’s highest military award. And when called to take over the state-owned steel mill corporation in the early 1990’s, he wrested power from the corrupt trade unions and turned one of the country’s biggest business embarrassments into a profit-making machine.
His attention is now fixed on Pakistan’s education system, his latest, and perhaps biggest challenge.
The country’s illiteracy rate still hovers around 50%. Nearly half of all students drop out before they reach sixth grade, and that’s of the students who are actually attending; roughly ten million children of primary-school going age aren’t even enrolled.
Though private foundations and charities have stepped in to fill the void, public, government schools still outnumber the private institutions two-to-one. Teacher absenteeism is high. Performance is low. By the Government’s own numbers, 50% of their primary schools have no electricity, 35% have no toilet, and 30% have no drinking water. A recent survey discovered over 12,000 “ghost schools,” meaning they’d been built with Government funds, but weren’t actually functioning.
Gen. Sabeeh is now a man on a mission. He’s helped to start and run two educational non-profits – The Citizens Foundation (TCF) and Quality Schools Foundation. Both run hundreds of schools across the country and enroll tens of thousands of students. But even he admits that’s just a drop in the bucket of what remains to be done.
Flipping furiously through papers, Gen. Sabeeh furrows his brow as he whips through facts and figures on education spending. He jabs his pen at the air to punctuate his points. This is a man not easily derailed. And despite the dismal national figures and bleak outlook, this is a man with hope.
Click here to hear Gen. Sabeeh talk about the current state of Pakistan’s educational system.
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