ELECTIONS / THOUSAND OAKS COUNCIL : Quidwai Defends Free Speech by Using It--a Lot

Cradling a miniature black cardboard coffin decorated with American flags, council candidate Ekbal (Nick) Quidwai rose from his seat at this week’s Thousand Oaks City Council meeting.

A small, neatly dressed man with ramrod-straight bearing, Quidwai made his way down the steps of the Forum Theater and approached the microphone.

As he began his regular weekly scolding of the council, members of the audience shifted in their seats impatiently.

They watched the electronic timer tick away as Quidwai touched on pet peeves ranging from the failings of the city budget to the fact that the council opened the meeting without a prayer.

But he lingered on one topic: his belief that council members are trying to smother First Amendment rights by limiting how many times residents can address the council during meetings.

The coffin, he explained, represented the death of the First Amendment in Thousand Oaks. He announced to the blank-faced people in the audience that he planned to hold a burial ceremony later this month for the people’s right to free speech.

It was a classic Quidwai moment, illustrating simultaneously his passion for democracy and the trouble he has communicating it to a public that frequently appears to find him tiresome.

Quidwai is smart, informed and dedicated, but even he admits he has little chance of winning a council seat in the June 6 special election. He wears a button supporting one of his five opponents, Trudi Loh, on his lapel, right below his own campaign button.

“This election is basically between two people,” Quidwai said, referring to Loh, an attorney, and Mike Markey, a Compton homicide detective. “I wish I was a key player. Money is the mother’s milk of politicians, and I don’t have enough of it.”

The 43-year-old office equipment salesman ran for council last year as well. He finished 15th in a field of 16 candidates, despite strong name recognition among residents who watch the council regularly on local cable television and see Quidwai pop on their screens throughout the meetings.

Quidwai seems to have trouble being taken seriously, a problem he acknowledges hampers his candidacy. Almost like the infamous boy who cried wolf, Quidwai speaks on so many issues at meetings that his message becomes diluted and he ends up being ignored by the public.

“He has substantive comments to make on crucial issues,” Councilwoman Elois Zeanah said. “If he would restrict his comments to only those issues I think people would take him more seriously.”

Politically, Quidwai is an unabashed supporter of Zeanah and Mayor Jaime Zukowski. He believes in adhering closely to the city’s General Plan and favors slow growth. But even the two Zs, as he refers to Zeanah and Zukowski, are not free from occasional criticism. He is annoyed with Zukowski now because she sponsored the plan to change the public comment period at council meetings, and he has given her several public tongue-lashings since the policy was passed.

Like the two councilwomen, Quidwai was an active opponent of building the $64-million Civic Arts Plaza. He remains so, even now that the building is complete. He keeps close tabs on construction costs, watching zealously for overruns and waiting anxiously for the city to restore funds it borrowed from its own Redevelopment Agency to pay for the City Hall and performing arts center.

He has gone over the city’s budget line by line and has found what he says are numerous examples of wasteful spending. Although he doesn’t consider himself to have a particular aptitude for numbers, he said his business background has helped shape his view of city spending.

“I’m not a finance person per se,” Quidwai said. “But I sell equipment for a living, and all along we have expense budgets that we have to stick to.”

He said that city staff members act “like it’s funny money or something.”

Although she is not making any endorsements in the race, Zeanah said Quidwai’s knowledge of the issues is impressive, because he takes the time to dig in and really get the facts. The city needs his voice, she said.

“It is just that he has frustrated people,” she added. “He has lost some credibility when he could have had much greater impact on city issues if he had disciplined himself.”

Quidwai is well aware of critics who say he speaks too often and on too many issues at council meetings. He said he has tried to limit himself on which issues to address. But after he spends several hours at the library combing through items on the council agenda every week, he finds too many intriguing things. He can’t resist.

“I might pick seven and whittle it down to two or three,” Quidwai said. “But it’s like eating peanuts. You get done with one bag, and you go get another.”

Growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, he admired the freedoms given to Americans. Now that those freedoms are his, he said, he can’t pass up the opportunity to participate--in part because he can do so if he wants.

He said he has friends who were thrown in jail in Pakistan for pursuing freedom, and even some who died because of political or religious stands they took. So if he gets booed at or hissed at for speaking too often at council meetings, it doesn’t bother him.

“That is just a side issue for me,” Quidwai said. “The main issue is that we should have a right and redress to speak before the government and criticize it.”

Always close at hand, in his briefcase or pocket, is a copy of the U.S. Constitution to remind him of his rights.

“I want to give something back to this wonderful country,” he added. “If I said some of these things in the old country I would have been locked up.”

The intensity of his involvement in Thousand Oaks city politics has not had a positive effect on his career. A former employer noticed how much time he was spending at council meetings--all they had to do was turn on the television to find out--and quizzed him on it.

“I would get into work at 8 a.m. and they would say, ‘Did you stay there until 2 a.m.?’ ” Quidwai said. “ ‘You must be tired,’ they would tell me. They made the point that I was too concerned about the city.”

He works for a different company now, All Makes, in Los Angeles, which sells office equipment, including copiers, fax machines and recording machines.

When he began studying at Karachi University he had no plans to go into sales--in fact he wanted to be a doctor. But a limited number of premed students make it to medical school in Pakistan, and Quidwai was not one of them. He left his home in 1971 on a student visa and joined several older friends studying at Cal State Fullerton.

“I had five people waiting to greet me at the airport,” he said. Quidwai graduated from Cal State Fullerton in 1976 with a degree in business management.

He said he has occasionally experienced discrimination as an immigrant.

During the fall campaign, he said, two teen-age boys taunted him as he put up signs near Westlake Boulevard, shouting at him that he should “be working at the 7-Eleven.” They drove by several times, spitting at him before finally leaving.

Still, Quidwai said, coming to the United States has been an overwhelmingly positive experience, particularly because of the freedom to practice his Muslim faith.

“Without a doubt, this is the best place to live in the world,” he said. “We can practice our faith in Islam better here than we can in our own countries.”

His accent remains strong, even though he has lived in the United States for nearly 25 years. But he is fluent in English. Growing up in Pakistan, once a British possession, he began learning English at 6.

“They started teaching us ‘A is for apples, and P is for porridge,’ ” Quidwai remembered. “I did not have these foods, so it was challenging.”

His wife, Rabia, joined him in the United States in 1974. He had first seen her sitting on the steps of one of the university buildings in Karachi--”I guess it was love at first sight,” he says now--but didn’t dare ask her out. Instead they became friends, and eventually their families arranged the marriage, a tradition in conservative Pakistani families.

Rabia is a chemist with Baxter Health Care in Newbury Park. The couple have three sons, Humi, 17, Shani, 12, and Imran, 8. They live in Newbury Park.

The rest of his family still lives in Pakistan. He has not been able to get back to see them in five years, he said, and the absence has taken a toll on him and his wife.

“We are both a little lonely here,” he said.