Good Governance Pakistani Style!

Daily Times, July 12, 2006
VIEW: Good governance Pakistani-style —IM Mohsin

Ruled as we are by the barrel of the gun, those wielding power ignore all kinds of accountability. The net result might as well be that the Q-League membership exceeds the population of the province. The fudging of economic data is blatant. For this a senior bureaucrat has recently been made a scapegoat

A lot of public money is being spent by the current regime on propagating its ideas of enlightened governance couched in the popular idiom of democracy. Obviously self-serving, the whole operation has proved an exercise in futility. Besides the media, the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) has been its major beneficiary. Guile rules the roost and too often one finds the photos of the General President and the Punjab Chief Minister announcing some ‘success story’ or the other on front pages of major newspapers at the expense of safe water supply to the harassed people.

The National Accountability Bureau (NAB), it appears, has redefined corruption so that nobody can hold accountable those who cheated people of billions of rupees through manipulation of sugar or petrol prices. While the current speaker of the National Assembly is permitted to recruit people in his discretion a former speaker remains in jail for the same offence. Islamabad is abuzz with rumours about a civilian bureaucrat very close to the corridors of power reminding the NAB chairman of his limitations when it comes to dealing with special interests.

The free for all allows the Punjab Chief Minister to announce in a press conference that the allocation of development funds has been linked to the Q-League membership drive. And nobody seems surprised at an exercise that could have brought down a genuinely elected government. Ruled as we are by the barrel of the gun, those wielding power ignore all kinds of accountability. The net result might as well be that the Q-League membership exceeds the population of the province. The fudging of economic data is blatant. For this a senior bureaucrat has recently been made a scapegoat.

On a brief visit to Dubai recently, I found the police celebrating its silver jubilee. The people appeared to be generally satisfied with the administration of justice. The city is well organised, unlike Karachi, where people are known to have died on account of traffic jams.

The Dubai police, under a commander-in-chief, appear to have a neat structure. Well-paid and considerably upright, it enjoys the reputation for being law-abiding. Its approval by the citizens has been vastly helped by the recent modernisation. Respect for law is writ large over UAE. In Pakistan, by comparison, lawlessness seems to be the norm. No wonder a recent report pointed out that government departments and organisations were the biggest defaulters of utilities bills.

Governance under the current regime is confused and generally corrupt. At the federal level, the officials have to give separate briefings to the General and his PM which is exasperating besides being wasteful. Under such circumstances, concern for public welfare becomes secondary while special interests prevail. Accordingly, the judiciary and the police rarely act as free agents of the rule of law. That some officers in these departments remain honest is indeed surprising. The high incidence of rape and other crimes against women and other marginalized section of the society, particularly in Punjab and Sindh, betrays our depravity as a people. Abroad it earns us universal scorn. I, for one, fail to relate such practices with our claims of being an ‘Islamic’ society.

The regime’s lack of legitimacy has reduced the notion of supremacy of law to a practical joke. Almost symbolically an airline passenger was beaten up for objecting to the law minister’s son’s jumping the queue. Inspired possibly by the example, a parliamentary secretary was reported to have used his hoodlums to manhandle a joint secretary at the Finance Ministry. Such instances abound and no heavens fall. This explains the demoralisation in the bureaucracy. However, some officers, including some very courageous women, have shown great resilience. The secretary to the Sindh government for the Services and General Administration Department (S&GAD), for example, resisted on legal grounds an extension to a brigadier’s posting in the Karachi Development Authority (KDA). For this she was made an officer-on-special-duty (OSD) in the Establishment Division. Saira Karim, a senior joint secretary in the Law Ministry, has famously challenged her minister despite the odds.

The lopsided development, which has benefited the hangers-on of the regime, means that we are heading towards a new level of political disintegration, lawlessness and rich-poor divide. The problem is compounded by the civil-military divide. In spite of the regime’s bravado the insurgency in Balochistan and the situation in FATA are fraught with all kinds of dangers.

The nation must wake up. The General should learn to live by the constitution and appoint a COAS who can disabuse the army of political entanglement. Simultaneously, he should set up a national government of major parties so that a national reconciliation can be effected. To avoid becoming a failed-state we must hold free and fair elections to turn a new leaf.

The writer is a former interior secretary