By D.M. Thapa It seems everyone wants to be the prime minister of this politically tottering country. According to media reports, youth leader of the Nepali Congress Gagan Thapa wants to be the prime minister, present prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba’s wife Arju Deuba Rana wants to be the prime minister, opposition leader KP Oli wants to be the prime minister, Madhav Nepal wants to be the prime minister and now it has been publicly announced that Maoist chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ has also expressed his wish to be the prime minister. Naturally, other leaders in other parties too surely must dream that one day they will be the prime minister of this country. Even small-time politicians in remote villages and also major townships must be having similar wishes. But like said in an English proverb “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride". What the country needs now is not only a prime minister, we need a prime minister who is not greedy, who does not want only his or her family to earn riches and who promotes only supporters by bypassing many other more deserving candidates in important posts. Meanwhile, the country is reeling due to its weak economy and there are reports that about a dozen political leaders at the local level, including two mayors, have been suspended from office because of their involvement in corruption. But first, come to the incident of Finance Minister Janardan Sharma, who was criticized ruthlessly with allegations that he was involved in corruption while drafting the current fiscal year’s budget estimates, now has been reinstated in office, this is something which is ethically questionable. But the political parties don’t seem to care. It was almost laughable to read that a Parliamentary probe commission formed to investigate the matter, did not find enough evidence to prosecute Sharma. As one vernacular daily said, this was a carefully “planned” move of the present coalition partners in trying to ‘pull the wool over the eyes of the impoverished common people. This columnist agrees with this conclusion. If I am not mistaken, I think Sharma was a minister even before, just because of the fact that he was a close aide of CPN Maoist Center chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal or comrade ‘Prachanda’. But the now more aware public has not been fooled and they have lost more faith in prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, comrade Prachanda and minister Sharma as well. About the probe commission, the less said the better, but we could clearly see the orchestration of the five parties who now lead the country. Now to come to the point of many wanting to be prime minister, I think the late Girija Prasad Koirala holds the record of being prime minister for the most time. Current prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba is also on his fifth stint as prime minister of this country. Comrade Prachanda has become prime minister two times already, once during his time when the country had to suffer eighteen hours of load shedding daily. Even leaders in the then partyless system became prime ministers, also in the changed multi-party system. Take for example late Surya Bahadur Thapa and also Lokendra Bahadur Chand. And when there was a feud within the Nepali Congress and Deuba had formed his own party, there was a powerful minister, late Khum Bahadur Khadka, who could make or break any government, headed either by late Girija Prasad Koirala or by Deuba. Once, late Khadka was given the portfolio of three very important ministries at once and thus he allowed the then government to function. There are many innumerable individuals who have become ministers multiple times. This happened even in the partyless time and now it has become common to see the same faces time and again as ministers. The situation has not been fruitful for the country, specially when we have had to endure coalition governments, like the present one for instance. There have been incidents of how parties have bought MPs and kept them in hidden places, there have also been incidents when leaders have changed sides just because of the money paid to them, and top-level leaders have spent millions and given facilities to MPs by draining government coffers. This is simply not good for this tiny nation, struggling politically and economically. Just changing the Constitution is not good enough. The two constitutions we have seen after the establishment of multi-party democracy, both of which have been described as “the best” constitutions in the entire world have been changed, burned and amended many times over. If the present and the other constitution were the best, why have we not seen any political stability or economic progress in the country? It does not matter how good a constitution is, as long as the top-level leaders and also bureaucrats are not sincere and honest while implementing the words and spirit of this legal paper of the entire nation. Here in spite of the wrongdoings of America in other parts of the world, one cannot still admire how they have not changed their more than two-hundred-year-old constitution. Yes, they have amended it, but the fundamentals of the constitution have remained the same. Here, we have seen the change of the Constitution, again and again, but we are still in turmoil and trouble. Also in the constitutional arrangement for an individual to be president of that powerful country, there is a fixed policy that a person can have only two terms in office, no matter how good a job he does. In the recent past, there were some good presidents, but no matter what, once they left office, they were never called back, like we see prime ministers making a comeback on many occasions here. The only kind of fault others see in the constitutional arrangements for a person to become president of that country is that no matter how many popular votes a person may have gotten in the election, he or she could be declared president only after winning the votes of an Electoral College. For example, in recent times, George W Bush won and became president, just because he got more votes from the Electoral College. His rival Al Gore had won half a million votes more than him in popular voting. To win in the Electoral College, a candidate has to compulsorily win two hundred and seventy votes from the selected representatives in that powerful “club”. More recently it was the same thing when Hillary Clinton was denied being the first ever woman president, though she won almost three million more votes than Donald Trump. This is ironic for that nation which always talks and preaches to others about women’s rights among other things. To come back to Nepal, it was most disheartening to read that corruption was rampant at the grassroots level, and such acts were carried out by elected representatives of the people. Yes, we all had thought that if elected people from the local level came to power through people’s votes, they would understand more about the problem in local governance and they would be able to address such problems more effectively. But this has sadly been proved untrue, with even a former bureaucrat admitting that corruption was rampant in local level bodies. It is impossible to imagine the country getting out of this current mess unless there is a drastic change in the behaviour of the political leaders and senior bureaucrats, but for that to happen it may take much more time. A time when Nepal could easily be turned into another Sri Lanka or even Ukraine. We can only pray that better sense will prevail in the current lot of political leaders so that the Nepalese would not suffer in the same manner as the Lankans or the Ukrainians. For now, due to the short-sightedness of the political leaders and the greed of many bureaucrats, the nation is being pushed to a dangerous precipice, to avoid which, the people have to act fast.