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Striking Out
The Opposition put on a very public display why they have failed to unite by themselves for over two years; it took the Government of Mian Nawaz Sharif a combination of a series of blunders and mis-governance to bring the Opposition’s act together. Having staged a successful strike on Saturday 4 Sept and a moderately successful one next Saturday on 11 Sept they had nothing to show for it except for a rush of adrenaline in playing hide-and-seek with the police near the Quaid’s Mazar in Karachi. On the shaky foundations of the protest against the GST by traders they decided that they had achieved omnipotence and grandly announced that the succeeding Sunday and Monday would see a continuation of their political protest by strikes. Except for Hyderabad the result was embarrassing, bad enough for us to keep hoping that in the face of a lack of credible alternates with any sense at all if not common sense, Mian Nawaz Sharif will at the very least feel sorry for the country he rules over as a virtual monarch and decide to govern it properly as per his promise and the mandate given to him, all 16% out of a voting populace of 50 million, 6% if one takes the whole population of 130 million.
Incurable optimists like me see silver linings even in the darkest of moments. The fact that MQM had to depend upon PPP and other allied Opposition parties to embark upon a strike call in Karachi is very significant. That it completely failed on subsequent days except in District Central should be of concern to the MQM. This is the same city which lived on the word of one man and his whims. The reality that Karachi as a whole belonged to the MQM has now become the subject of myth. One has no doubt about the MQM stamp on District Central but Malir District and District South are definitely out of the MQM camp, Districts East and West being marginal at best. While Altaf Hussain’s once dominant party continues to command the greatest majority in the city, its days of total control over the city are over. With sought-after (by the law enforcement agencies) MQM stalwarts surfacing in UK at frequent intervals, one expects that the coming Altaf initiative will be meant to be detrimental to the interests of Pakistan, however one believes we should welcome this now as we are far better equipped to deal with separatism rather than the early 90s, moreover Altaf Hussain is now increasingly out of sync with the mood of the vast mass of Mohajirs who remain patriotic mainstream Pakistanis. Leadership by remote control seldom succeeds particularly when the leader lives in luxury in contrast to those whom he professes to lead. Karachi is in for interesting times if any attempt is made to turn this city hostage to the anarchy we witnessed for a decade or so at the hands of MQM militants.
Significant Events
As much as one admired Ms Benazir Bhutto for many leadership qualities that escape lesser beings, in the matter of corruption she has been a major disappointment. As much as one thought that the BJP ultra-nationalism militated against Pakistan, one had to concede that they at least had coalesced a political mandate to effect meaningful changes in India’s policies. For the moment both are derailed, albeit probably temporarily, but the manner of their leaving may leave behind festering wounds that may never heal.
Ms Benazir Bhutto has led the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) for over 20 years. She has effectively carried the baggage of the legacy of her father, late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had his own extreme moments, contributing significantly to the break-up of Pakistan in 1971 but then almost single-handedly consolidating the western wing as an independent entity. Giving the country a workable constitution in 1973, he emasculated it simultaneously by a number of amendments. His tinkering with the growth-oriented economy by nationalising everything in sight put us back two or three decades at a crucial time with respect to our place in the world economy. In short, he beggared us, put us in a hole that every successive government since then has put us deeper into. Maybe because of her youth, maybe because of her courage, certainly because she was educated and articulate and certainly because she had charisma, a number of us forgave her the sins of her father and looked at her as a national leader having international standing and instant name recognition. The crowning moment of her glory came when she came to Lahore in 1986. The accolades of the mass population were well deserved. Even when she went and married Asif Zardari, one gave her the benefit of the doubt. To almost anyone but Karachiites who knew him far better, Asif Zardari was a good match. The fact of the matter was that his family was in hock to the banks. A scion from a landed family fallen on hard times, one could forgive AZ his ham-handed attempts to play the rich dilettante, a playboy. Playboys have money, by the time he met up with Benazir, AZ (and his father) needed a golden goose badly to stay financially afloat. AZ wanted money alright, and tons of it, but to Benazir’s (and PPP’s) detriment he hankered after power more. After a few ham-handed attempts at petty extortion during Benazir’s first term, AZ came into his own post-1993 i.e. during her second term. As much as people say that he ran a government within a government, he actually ran the government and everyone and sundry paid homage and obeisance to him. These included politicians, industrialists, businessmen, bankers, generals and senior bureaucrats, etc, some of whom became “specialist advisors” in guiding him in milking the Pakistani cow. This was not an open secret, it was good public knowledge and anybody who denies this is a liar. Throughout this period, we gave Benazir the benefit of doubt. We were ready to believe anything but the obvious, we wanted to believe that she knew nothing of what was going on and even if she knew, she was not a willing party but was being emotionally blackmailed by her husband.
The SGS-Cotecna case has removed that doubt. However, the trial may have been conducted, whatever the antecedents of the judges and their credibility thereof, the evidence on record is damning. The fact remains Boomer Finance, an off-shore company, was owned directly/indirectly by AZ and Benazir was a recipient of funds from SGS through this conduit. No doubt she says the truth when she says the government of the day is victimizing her to remove her from politics. What is also true is that while she may fight on technical grounds, she is as guilty as her husband is, whether in all his “enterprises” one does not know but certainly SGS is a “smoking gun” she cannot escape. As PM Ms Benazir advises all those targeted by her regime to seek justice from a court of law, surely she will appeal but if the verdict goes against her in the Supreme Court (SC), will she abide by it?
A Juma Janjh Naal!
To the credit of Former President Sardar Farooq Leghari, instead of waiting at the sidelines till the present government succumbs to the consequences of attempting Hari-Kari every fortnight or so, he has adopted the legitimate route of political activism to try and come to power. On 14 August 1998 he launched his much propagated Millat Party, long on rhetoric but seemingly short of new ideas and/or a cohesive framework for political action from a still to be unveiled manifesto. Except for a handful of persons who one can label as electable or technocrats, a majority of those who attended the Convention do not inspire much confidence for the future. However that is the start of any Party, PPP began on Edwards Road Lahore in the late 60s with very few human assets. One agrees that the idea is right, fresh faces must be encouraged to come and clean up the political scene in the country. This will be an uphill task. In the sub-continent Moghul Emperor Akbar the Great set the trend of bucking the system when he tried to set up a parallel religion to amalgamate all those existing then. His “Din-e-Elahi” ultimately became the butt of jokes through history, Farooq Leghari will have to work really hard politically to avoid the “Zillat Party” tag that people have already started to label his new found political grouping with.
Heeding Lessons Learnt
During the years Mian Nawaz Sharif was out of office, one got the distinct impression that he was willingly embarked on a “learning curve”, that in keeping with the fundamental principles of leadership he was taking into account his own mis-steps and failures in order to benefit and not make the same mistakes again. Out in the cold from government he was an interested observer to the full range and complement of Benazir’s misdoings from which to draw lessons from for a possible future tenure of government. For any student of politics, which one should always be before becoming a full-time practitioner, the last decade provided a virtual plethora of instances of bad governance, none so potent as the misrule of the last 3 years. Has Mian Nawaz Sharif really learnt from the mistakes made or is he caught up in the strait-jacket that usually cocoons our leaders in an aura of self-delusion and despite their obvious leadership qualities, drags them into failure at governance, unfortunately at the cost of the country? Field Marshal Slim of Burma’s “Defeat into Victory” is an epic saga of the lessons he drew from his mistakes that led to his drubbing by the Japanese, the analysis of which took his 14th Army to eventual total victory. However, it is his “Unofficial History” that is recommended for every subaltern in the Army to read as an example of learning from one’s own mistakes and the reinforcing of success rather than failure, maybe it should be also made mandatory for our top political leaders before they don the mantle of high office.
Analysing Defeat, Absorbing Victory
Field Marshal William Slim commanded the 1st Burma Corps during the retreat up the Irrawady River following the Japanese invasion of Burma in World War II. Later he went on to command the British 14th Army which inflicted a series of defeats on the Japanese, forcing them down the Irrawady River to Rangoon. Turning “Defeat into Victory” (incidentally the name of his autobiography), Slim was a very lonely man. Sitting outside his tent contemplating his next move during the drive back into Burma, he overheard two of his sentries talking. When one of them wondered aloud where the next battle would take place, the other very confidently named a location. On being asked as to how he knew, the second sentry told the first, “the old man is definitely going to choose to fight in all the places on the way in that he got badly beaten on the way out”, or words to that effect. So much for strategy!
Elections or Accountability?
The great debate about whether elections should be held first or accountability should precede elections is on. Having swiftly enacted the Ehtesab (Accountability) Ordinance, the Caretaker Government have also appointed as Chief Ehtesab Commissioner, a respected non-controversial retired Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court, Mr. Ghulam Mujaddid Mirza. Both the President and the Caretaker PM Malik Meraj Khalid have repeated the intention of the Caretaker government to have the February 3 elections as scheduled. Given the enormous task of holding a whole slate of people accountable since January 1, 1986, it would seem logistically impossible to complete the accountability process in the next 70 days. How then do we reconcile this great divide?
The arguments for accountability are very cogent. This nation has been looted in the name of democracy under the flimsy cover of the Constitution. Given the enormous wealth in the hand of the looters they could conceivably buy their way back into power and thus frustrate the accountability process. We have seen how Ms Benazir, without a mandate from the people, was manipulated into power by a combination of power and intrigue in 1993. Conceivably money and intrigue could play a part in foisting the likes of Zardari on us again. Even in first world countries like the US, an election campaign war chest is important to winning elections, in Third World countries where voters are mostly illiterate or ignorant on a relative basis, an enormous election fund is more than likely to ensure victory. To add insult to injury, the looters will use a classic “Judo play”, using money looted from the national treasury to influence the voters so that once in power they can proceed to loot the nation even more, inflicting more torture on the populace. By itself, this makes for good enough reason to delay the elections until the accountability process is complete.
Pre-Budget Expectations – The Proverbial Magic Hat
Balancing the nation’s books is more akin to Houdini trying to get out of a closed sack underwater with both hands and feet tied and chained. Pakistan’s Houdini, Mr Sartaj Aziz will spell out the economic destiny of the populace for the coming year in the National Assembly (NA) on Friday June 13 (lucky or unlucky, take your pick). Not only are we deeply in both external and internal debt, we are in dire danger of defaulting on our instalments of both Principal and Interest thereof. With revenues decreasing instead of registering an increase, with the weather hostile to obtaining a semblance of food autarky, with a corrupt revenue-collection machinery dragging its feet, with traditional aid-givers adopting a wait-and-see attitude, etc, it is a brave, selfless man indeed who would happily function as Pakistan’s Finance Minister, a thankless job in the company of thankless colleagues and a demanding people. People (Dr Mahbubul Haq in the front row) are now waiting to see whether the man chosen to be the sacrificial lamb by the Nawaz Sharif regime will fall flat on his face or pull the proverbial rabbit out of the magic hat.
Fed up with fudged statistics by the Bhutto regime, neither the World Bank (WB) or the IMF were happily disposed towards Pakistan or ready to accept Pakistani numbers with any credibility. For the record WB’s President Mr Wolfenson has recently denied Ms Benazir’s accusation that the WB was an accomplice (along with Farooq Leghari and a host of others blamed by Ms Benazir for good measure not excluding the voters who voted against her) in the sacking of her corrupt regime. IMF’s Mr Camdessus reluctantly did concede that he had been taken in by her considerable “charm” and what Mr Sartaj Aziz stated during his visit to the US was “music to their years” (a direct quote) in the sense of long-term structural reforms of the economy. The deliberate mechanism needed to correct the imbalances in the financial sector involves downsizing the administrative structure, drastically reducing the size of the public sector, bringing in private sector entrepreneurial and cost-cutting measures into effective employment in the administration, etc. As a preamble to his budget proposals, the Finance Minister does not simply signify rhetoric, he means it. Because both the WB and the IMF seem to believe this, there is every likelihood that we will have access to almost US$ 1 billion in comparatively conditionality-free External Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) at 0.5% interest rather than the expensive conditionality-ridden Stand-By-Arrangement (SBA) at 6% plus what we got in 1993 due to Moeen Qureshi’s generosity to the people of Pakistan. Sartaj Aziz was close to an ESAF agreement in April 1993 when Ghulam Ishaq Khan sent Mian Nawaz Sharif packing the first time around. Instead of working ourselves into a frenzy about IMF conditionalities, we should accept that some of it is plain common-sense stuff, it is only in the matter of prices of foodstuffs and other essentials that we must stiffen our backs.
Virtuality
Despite PM Ms Benazir Bhutto’s wide-eyed poker-faced disclaimer about corruption (what corruption?) to the David Frost question in his Breakfast Show, “Virtual Reality” is that the corruption perception index for 1996 produced by Transparency International (TI), a multi-national organization dedicated to curb corruption in international business, places Pakistan second in corrupt countries behind Nigeria, adjudged to be the most corrupt (not by far) among the 54 countries surveyed. Among the least corrupt countries, New Zealand was first i.e. at No 54. In order of rascality among the Muslim nations (other than Nigeria that preceded us) Pakistan was followed in order of demerit by Bangladesh (at No. 4), Indonesia (at 10), Uganda (at 12), Egypt (at 14), Turkey (at 22), Jordan (at 25) and Malaysia (at 29). It is scant consolation that India is not far behind us (at No. 9 position) in the corruption stakes. Should we be happy that we are more corrupt than our perennial arch-rival or hang our heads in shame that even they are less corrupt than we are? To some of us it is a matter of embarrassment, to those who have worked overtime to put us on this shameful pedestal, does it really matter?
According to the article in Financial Times (Monday June 3, 1996), TI, with Headquarters in Berlin, defines corruption as “the misuse of public power for private benefits”. It tries to assess the degree to which public officials and politicians in various countries are involved in such practices as siphoning bribes, taking illicit payments in public procurement and the embezzling of public funds. TI’s summary of findings is based on 10 international business surveys, most conducted among foreign businessmen doing business with the survey-target countries. In the past three years we have deteriorated rapidly in the corruption stakes, sliding from a low of 2.25 points out of 10 in 1995 to even low 1.00 point in 1996, being bracketed by Nigeria’s 0.69/10 and Kenya’s 2.21/10 (at No.3 position). At the reverse end of the corruption scale, New Zealand retained its LEAST CORRUPT status but fell slightly from its high of 9.55 out of 10 (1995) to 9.43/10 (1996). Even the so-called “Banana Republics” that people in (and out of) uniform are usually scornful about are considerably less corrupt than Pakistan, the closest being Colombia at 15th position with 2.73 points out of 10.
Privatise, but Carefully!
Pakistan’s golden economic years were the 60s. While there were aberrations, e.g the disproportionate distribution of wealth among only a handful, they were nowhere as serious as those confronting the nation today. A mixed economy with benevolent central direction was a model for the other emerging economies of Asia. Today we will be lucky if we can regain any semblance of the momentum lost to us over the past three decades. By the early 70s, despite the fact that it had become quite apparent that the concept of socialist economy was a dismal failure and many of those countries that had followed the romantic notion of socialism under the leadership of charismatic leaders were already re-thinking their economic strategy, we started to head pell-mell in that direction. The first major breakaway from the pure socialist model was the Peoples’ Republic of China, which under Deng Tsao Peng started to gradually brake and reverse the socialist Soviet model and by the early 1980s was well on the road to a mixed economy. In retrospect it seems they followed Chinese cousin Lee Kwan Yew’s Singapore model of the late 60s/early 70s on a far bigger scale. The far smaller Island-State provided the blueprint for opening the economy to free enterprise with public utilities under State control, at places in partnership with the private sector. The leaders of both Singapore and China were careful to keep the opening up of the economy ahead of the loosening of controls over freedom lest the public’s aspirations overcome achievement. In the early 80s Thatcherism was born when Margaret Thatcher established her policies on the dual Chinese experience (Singapore and China), to quote “when you copy from one person it is called plagiarism, when you copy from many it is called “research”.
The father’s penchant for sweeping nationalism has only been transcended by the daughter’s for complete privatisation, an orgy of extremes and excess, both at the wrong time. Late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at least had his own vision, neither Ms Benazir’s vision or her objectives seem to be her own. Bhutto went about dismantling Ayub’s economic legacy with wholesale vengeance but this paled in comparison to the bureaucratic excess during Zia’s Martial Law that followed. Given a veritable treasure package to handle, bereft of political control and with the military men-in-charge having no sense of economics, bureaucracy went berserk in personifying the worst of Soviet-model control in industry, ushering in inefficiency, pilferage, corruption, etc in so rabid a manner that despite free-wheeling movement towards free enterprise over the past 5-6 years we cannot stop our economic slide downwards. One saving grace of the Soviet model was that those corrupt or profligate with the public money or property faced firing squads, has any of our corrupt managers in the 1977-1985 period faced any punishment?
Alarm Bells!
The Annual Report of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) for the year 1994-95 seems to have created a stir in financial circles, certainly much more than one can recall in the recent past. However the full impact of the financial implications on the economy as enunciated in the Report has not yet become general public consumption, the common man remains unaware of the catastrophe likely to befall him. The Government reaction has been subdued enough to be called as non-reaction. Maybe they are all “Infantry-men” in the Finance Ministry and know that when under fire to keep their heads down. While the detailed reaction from professional economists and other experts of the country is still awaited, the layman should expect the worst, our financial sins have finally caught up with us. Some aspects of the Report beyond the cold statistical data and figures must be brought out for the benefit of the general public.