Where Are Our Young Leaders? A Nation Rich in Talent, Poor in Opportunity

Blocked corridors, inherited privilege, and the silent exodus of hope: a generation’s story of courage, principle, and denial

We are living in a time when our nation appears young in age but prematurely tired in spirit. Our streets are filled with restless energy, our universities overflow with degrees, our towns produce engineers, writers, coders, dreamers — and yet a strange silence surrounds the question that refuses to go away: where are our young leaders?
We do not suffer from lack of talent. We suffer from lack of passage.
Across drawing rooms and tea stalls, in classrooms and coaching centers, in modest homes where electricity flickers and ambition does not, a generation prepares itself with quiet discipline. They master languages, technology, law, medicine, public policy. They debate world affairs on cracked mobile screens. They compete globally through fiber-optic cables while locally navigating broken pavements. Poor in inherited wealth, yes — but rich in hunger, rich in ability, rich in that dangerous ingredient every stagnant system fears: independent thought.
And yet, when the ladders of national decision-making are counted, their rungs are strangely few. The corridors appear narrow. The gates are guarded not by merit alone, but by lineage, patronage, and proximity to power. We hesitate to use heavy words — but when access to leadership circulates within a small, self-protecting circle, democracy begins to resemble oligarchy — a narrow circle of inherited privilege, where doors are opened by names, not by effort; where corridors of leadership remain barricaded to those who dare to rise on merit alone. Elections may rotate faces, but pathways remain reserved.
The tragedy is not noise. It is suffocation.
Our most brilliant minds quietly depart for distant shores. Those who remain often adjust, compromise, or retreat into private survival. A country that once dreamed loudly now negotiates cautiously with reality. We export talent and import slogans. We celebrate youth in speeches, yet rarely entrust them with structural responsibility.
This is not the complaint of one individual. It is the unease of a generation.
There was a time when we believed that rules meant something. When a line printed in a civics textbook was not merely ink on paper, but instruction for life. In a modest classroom, on a wooden bench polished not by varnish but by generations of restless students, a boy once read that a government servant could not participate in practical politics. The sentence was simple. The consequence was not.
Some children read to pass examinations. Some read and move on. But sometimes a sentence enters the bloodstream. Sometimes it becomes covenant.
We often speak of destiny as if it descends from the sky. Rarely do we admit that it is shaped quietly in childhood, in rooms without microphones.
It is good, as Allama Iqbal reminded us, that the heart be guarded by reason — but sometimes it must be left alone to decide. That day, reason and heart reached the same conclusion: participation in public life required freedom. Security without voice was too heavy a price. The decision was not heroic. It was innocent. And innocence, in politics, can be expensive.
When the boy of the classroom bench grew into a young teacher in the 1970s, the world around him had shifted, but the lessons of childhood had not faded. Schools were nationalizing; policies changed with the pen of rulers far away. His headmaster, a man of kind temperament, reminded him gently:
“Do not resign now. After December 31st, your position will automatically become a government appointment. Bhutto has changed the law, and this school will soon be under government management.”
The young man looked at the ceiling beams, at the worn chalk-stained walls, at the same wooden benches where he once decided that freedom mattered more than security. Then he smiled quietly and said:
“That is exactly why I am resigning.”
The decision was simple in words but heavy in consequence. The system promised comfort, salary, permanence — all the rewards that would have seduced any ordinary person. Yet he refused. He refused because the covenant formed on that old wooden bench demanded freedom of conscience. The path to leadership, he knew, was not a salary-bound obedience, but a voice untethered by institutional chains.
Here, the Qur’an whispers softly in the soul:
“Indeed, Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves.” (Ar-Ra’d 13:11)
The young teacher’s resignation was more than an act. It was a declaration: we will not allow principles to be rented or mortgaged. The Hadith rings in harmony:
“Each of you is a shepherd, and each of you is responsible for his flock.”
He was his own shepherd, his flock the conscience he carried since childhood. He knew well that the system around him, like a slow-moving river, would resist, would test, would block. But moral courage does not demand applause; it demands patience and persistence.
Even when conscience and courage had been proven in resignation, the world outside remained unkind to those without a name, without inherited privilege. Years later, a glimmer of hope appeared: signatures were secured at the MPA hostel in Lahore, an MPA willing to endorse a nomination for the Senate. The path seemed open, if only briefly.
Yet, as if fate itself had joined the bureaucracy in silent collusion, the nomination never reached fruition. He was not a scion. He was not of the family whose name commanded loyalty, whose wealth opened doors, whose shadow guaranteed passage. The system, patient and cold, permitted merit only at the margins. And thus, the boy who had once sat on a wooden bench, the young teacher who had resigned rather than compromise, found the corridors closed once more.
The boy on the wooden bench, the young teacher who resigned rather than compromise, the one whose nomination was blocked — he was none other than Syed Tazeem-ur-Rehman.
Here, we may name the condition plainly: oligarchy. Power concentrated in a few, corridors reserved for the few, while the many, brilliant and untamed, remain outside, knocking quietly at the gates. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — who will guard the guards themselves?
The tragedy is no longer personal. It is generational. A nation flush with youthful energy, with minds sharp as swords, finds itself throttled by inherited privilege. Our talent wanders abroad. Our streets watch the dreams of youth depart with every flight, every visa, every laptop connected to distant clients. The scent of possibility drifts away with them, leaving behind slogans and empty chairs.
Yet hope flickers faintly in the actions of others. In Kathmandu, Balen Shah walked through Indra Chowk and alleys teeming with life, listening, debating, understanding. From rapper to engineer to mayor — not because he was handed the crown, but because the public space allowed him to rise. In Brooklyn, Zohran Mamdani wandered broken neighbourhoods, Jackson Heights evenings alive with debate and disagreement, his voice forged in the raw pulse of streets, not in boardrooms or drawing rooms.
We look at them not with envy but with insight: corridors matter. Freedom matters. Opportunity matters. The systems that allow talent to breathe produce leadership; the systems that constrict it produce stagnation.
Brain drain is not merely a statistic; it is the silent exodus of hope. Doctors, engineers, thinkers, and civil servants leave the nation that refuses to trust them. The country exports its stars and imports slogans. Talent remains, but voice disappears.
And now, as the warning rises like a tide: if the corridors remain locked, if the gates remain guarded by lineage and wealth, the consequences are clear. Independent minds will turn silent. Creative energy will seek foreign soil. Mediocrity will inherit authority. And the nation — young, ambitious, rich in unseen potential — will suffocate quietly, invisible to its own rulers.
Yet the lesson is not despair. The Qur’an reminds us:
“Indeed, Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves.” (Ar-Ra’d 13:11)
And the Hadith rings its clarion:
“Each of you is a shepherd, and each of you is responsible for his flock.”
We — the witnesses, the dreamers, the still-present youth — call upon those who hold power: open the corridors. Break the monopoly of inheritance. Protect independent voices. Encourage debate in streets, alleys, and classrooms. Let merit be recognised, not obscured.
Do not fear independent youth. Fear the day when they stop knocking.
For it is in the quiet refusal to open doors that a nation loses its soul. And it is in granting opportunity, in breathing life into corridors of hope, that a country finds its future — not in slogans, not in scions, but in the unbought, untamed, brilliant energy of its people.
The boy on the wooden bench may have vanished.
The teacher who resigned may remain hidden behind the curtains of history.
Yet the lesson persists, shocking and vivid, colored with the grief and hope of a generation denied — and the memory of streets and public spaces where courage is nurtured and leadership is born.