A ten-year old girl dies when she falls in an open manhole while another school kid barely survives. We are all angry at our chors but they seem to have other priorities at hand. It seems that road expansion and water and sanitation projects have turned our roads into death traps. Hundreds of folks lose their lives due to accidents on our highways but our government doesn’t care. Every monsoon, thousands of our folks are displaced from their homes due to floods and landslides and many lose their families.

It’s been more than two years since we were hit by the Big One and only a few hundred of the families have received subsidised loans so far. It seems that our government is not in a hurry to help the people but it is always eager to waste our taxpayers money on new vehicles, foreign junkets and more perks for our netas and civil servants.

It’s the same story every year but public outcry doesn’t seem to affect our chor netas and sarkari hakims. Our concerned government agencies are in no hurry to repair our roads or even cover up the holes they have dug around the Valley.  How did our government officials become such cruel and cold-hearted monsters?

Well, the sarkari hakims get free government vehicles and their kids don’t have to walk to school but why do millions of us who do walk to work, school and to tend to other matters suffer due to the mismanagement and lack of urgency showed by our concerned government agencies in resolving such problems?

Our clowns only care about their political cadres and themselves. You can be a mundrey gunda and die during a protest programme and your family will get a million Rupees from the state and you will even be declared a martyr. But if you are just another ordinary citizen then you get a few thousand Rupees as compensation and our government agencies are neither ashamed nor do they promise us that such accidents won’t happen again in the future.

Our Prime Monster, King Deuba had directed government agencies to take care of our roads and that’s what our politicians do. They are too scared to go out there and meet the victim’s family. They just stay inside Singha Durbar and dole out instructions to our sarkari hakim sahebs.  And our civil servants will nod their heads and then go back to their office and do nothing. 

We have thousands of security personnel in the Valley. Maybe, we should ask all the folks who did help out to clean the Bagmati River to join hands with our security folks to plug the holes in the Capital. We should all gherao the Department of Roads and tell the folks there that it is their responsibility to coordinate with other government agencies to resolve the crisis.

We have new Mayors in the Valley and it seems that they are only interested in buying mobile phones for all the ward chairpersons and increasing parking fees all around the Capital and making us pay more taxes while they stay mum about the problems faced by their municipalities.

We must all take our stand and refuse to pay the new taxes until our Mayors and concerned government agencies work together to make this city livable again. But who will listen to us? The government doesn’t care. The civil servants will look the other way while the contractors who are making millions from the contracts will not get punished for putting our lives at risk because they have already paid off our politicians and hakim sahebs!

Gyanu Uncle thinks it is okay to go to Norvic for his health checkup but our netas need to go to Bangkok because they do not trust our medical establishment. Maybe, we should just ask the Thai Embassy to hire a dozen of Thai doctors and our netas can visit the Embassy for their medical check-ups instead of wasting our taxpayer’s money on foreign visits for their medical treatment.

Deuba has done us all proud by allowing the Election Commission (EC) to spend Rs 140 million to buy five luxury vehicles for the commissioners. It doesn’t matter if the media, the people and the rest of the world are not happy with how our government wastes our taxpayer’s money. Earlier, the government secretary who refused to go ahead and ask the government for funds to buy the new vehicles was transferred from the EC. That’s how our system works. If you do your work by the book, then you get transferred somewhere else but if you cook the book and make your hakims and netas happy then you get promoted.

Our netas and civil servants don’t care and will continue to loot the state treasury for their own benefit. I think we should just go ahead and buy our President a nice helicopter. At least, we won’t have any traffic jams in the Valley! And we don’t want the security vehicles escorting our President suddenly disappear in the middle of the street, do we?

Guffadi is a grumpy old man who blogs at guffadi.blogspot.com. You may contact him at [email protected]