By Aflatoon
The government’s statement was issued in Urdu, through the government’s spokesman, and the phrase it used was fi kas. Per head.
Five million rupees per head, to the families of the newborn children who died at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences on Wednesday morning. Fourteen heads. Seventy million rupees. The money goes into the bank accounts of the mothers.
I want to set down, in order, everything the state has offered since. Not to sneer at it. Some of it is real. But I think the list is worth reading as a list.
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A secretary was suspended. Aslam Ghori, federal health secretary, removed the day of the fire, with the housing secretary given additional charge.
A committee was formed, four members, under a retired federal secretary, and given forty-eight hours to produce an interim report. That report was due to the prime minister today. As I write this it has not landed.
Audits were ordered. Punjab gave its administration twenty-four hours to audit every public health facility in the province, with compliance reports by tomorrow. Sindh gave its departments fifteen days. In Islamabad itself, where the fire actually happened, the Capital Development Authority went into two other hospitals on the 27th — Capital Hospital and the Federal Government Polyclinic — and found no smoke-control system, expired extinguishers, no sprinklers, blocked exit routes, thirty-four separate deficiencies at the Polyclinic, and no means of evacuating anyone from an intensive care unit.
That is the offer. Money, a suspension, an audit, a committee.
Now here is what is not in it.
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Nobody has said what caused the fire.
I do not mean nobody has said it definitively. I mean that four different accounts of the cause are in circulation, and that the one official who went and looked has said nobody knows.
Rescue sources said an air-conditioner compressor exploded. The PIMS administration’s own initial report said a nebuliser measuring the quantity of oxygen exploded beside an incubator, and that the oxygen then caught, and the smoke went through the pipes into the children’s breathing systems. The PIMS spokeswoman told AFP it was an electrical fault, that the fire sparked from the AC. The Minister for Parliamentary Affairs said it was a short circuit.
And Mahesh Kumar Malani, who chairs the National Assembly’s health committee, went to the hospital on Thursday, cross-questioned the staff and put the CCTV to the executive director, and told reporters this: so no one saw where the spark came from. We have concluded that no one knows the source of the fire.
He was not being evasive. He was being honest, which is rarer. He also said the ward dated from 1990, and that there should not have been a nursery in it.
Hold those two sentences next to each other. On Thursday the chairman of the parliamentary committee said the source of the fire is unknown. This morning, the day after, the minister announcing the compensation stood at PIMS and said the fourteen infants had fallen victim to someone’s criminal negligence.
The state has named the crime. It has not named the cause, and as of this afternoon no mainstream outlet reports a criminal case registered against anyone.
Those two positions cannot both be finished thoughts. One of them is doing work the other cannot do.
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There is a further claim, and I am going to be careful with it, because I have been careless before.
Geo News reported on Thursday, citing sources, that PIMS held no fire-safety NOC; that the Islamabad Healthcare Regulatory Authority renews hospital licences without verifying fire arrangements, accepting photographs of rescue drills held in November and December; and that the Capital Development Authority twice wrote to the authority asking it not to certify hospitals without those arrangements, and was never answered.
Every word of that is sourced to one outlet and to people who are not named. Geo’s own headline puts lacked in quotation marks. No independent paper has confirmed it. I am not going to write it as established, and I notice that nobody in government has denied it either.
What I can say is narrower and worse. The two hospitals the CDA did inspect this week, with its name on the report, would not have passed the standard the sources describe as unenforced.
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I said yesterday that eleven million rupees a year for repairs, inside a budget of one thousand and sixty-nine million, was not a maintenance figure. I will not relitigate it. I will only note that the compensation now offered is about six times that year’s repair line for the building the babies died in, and that this is the correct order of events in this country: we find the money afterwards.
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In the same week, in the same city, the Islamabad High Court reserved judgment on three men in Adiala jail who want to be treated somewhere other than a government hospital.
I want to be exact about the connection, because it is thematic and not causal. Nothing in the fire caused their petition; they filed before it. But the Advocate General of Punjab told the court that some of the country’s highest office-holders are themselves treated at PIMS, and the judge — according to the ARY News and Dunya News accounts of the hearing — observed that fourteen children had died in a single day, and told both law officers to go and look at the place.
The state’s argument to those prisoners is that its own hospital is sufficient. That is a serious argument and I have written in its favour. It rests on an assumption that was never tested until Wednesday.
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Seventy million rupees is not nothing. It will pay for things. Fourteen families will receive it and they should.
But it is an answer to a different question than the one they asked. They asked what happened. What is being offered is a number, arrived at quickly, by people who have said in the same breath that they do not yet know what happened.
The report was due today. I will read it when it comes.
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Aflatoon is a satirist and observer of the Pakistani condition. His column, Intellectual Voices, appears in The Pakistan Daily.
