THEIR blue uniforms are worn out, their guns rusted; their faces reflect apathy. Meet some 20 school security guards who are at the police headquarters in Lahore to get a one-day crash course in thwarting terrorists in case the school they protect is attacked.

“Hold the gun straight and steady,” a police trainer tells one of the participants, who has difficulty pointing his weapon in the right direction when he is practising. After the weapons training, the guards are asked to perform a military crawl. They try their best but many of them are unable to do so. There is loud laughter among their colleagues; the exercise appears almost comical, given their inability to move in that particular manner. Then comes the technique of aiming while kneeling, during which too many of them struggle to balance themselves on one knee as the trainer instructs them. Similarly, when they are asked to roll while trying to keep their guns in the direction of an imaginary attacker in front of them, they are unable to maintain position.

The trainers appear alarmed at the level of guards’ ‘expertise’, and privately complain about it.

“They are mostly retired personnel [of the armed forces], who are too old to work anywhere else. And then they are the ones who are hired as security guards,” the lead instructor says. He also expresses concern about the weapons that the guards carry. “Many of the guns they bring [provided to them by their respective organisations] jam when they are trying to reload. Sometimes the bullets get stuck in the chamber, which is very dangerous,” he adds.

But these guards’ low skills set and the quality of their weapons is only one side of this ‘security measure’ that has become a requirement. The guards have their own grievances, and many of them confess that they are only doing this because they could not find a better job.

“My salary is usually delayed for two months. And even then, what I make is not enough. What motivation do you think I will have for this job?” says a guard getting weapons training for the first time.

Asked why he joined the security profession, he does not hide his unsuitability. “I used to be a driver before this. But I got into a car accident as I had weak eyesight. So they fired me and then I got this job,” the bespectacled security guard responds.

On average, the guards earn between Rs12,000 and Rs15,000 a month. This is a meagre salary, especially given the risk they must take and their family burdens.

“I get Rs15,000 a month and I have five children. I work every day for 12 hours. Will I be worrying about saving other people’s children when the attackers come or worrying about my own? No one is going to look after them if I am gone,” says another guard.

Even if this one-day training makes these guards more effective somehow, those reporting on it claim that the government is not really serious about the exercise.

“In Rawalpindi they said they would train more than 4,000 school guards but after the first day or two of training a handful of the guards, when the media moved on to another story, as far as I know the training for school guards stopped. It was all a public relations’ exercise,” says a journalist who works at an English-language daily and reported on the initial story when the government announced this initiative.

Industry insiders confide that the majority of the security businesses are owned by former military officials, for whom it is easier to get licences to run such an enterprise. And with a high demand and low supply of human resource, quality naturally takes a backseat. “There is just too much demand given the current security environment in Pakistan. So it is more about quantity over quality,” says Norbert Almeida, a safety and security adviser based in Karachi.

For Mr Almeida, one-day sessions and crash courses are insufficient and as ineffective as not having provided that training in the first place. “Ideally they should be providing training to their own staff. But given the low salaries they offer, they know that a security guard will jump to the next better opportunity even if it is only Rs500 more than their last salary. The private security business is booming and they are making a lot of money, but little is being invested in training or raising the guards’ standards,” he adds.

The writeris a TV and print journalist.

Twitter: @TahaSSiddiqui

Published in Dawn, February 26th, 2016