The failing charade

The hallmark of Pakistan’s democratic governments has been their desire to rule (not govern) Pakistan in an imperial style, which eventually leads to their exit. Ever since PML-N has assumed power, while the economic mess left behind by the PPP government has only worsened, the PML-N remains focused on getting rid of bureaucrats that it considers ‘unfriendly’, not corrupt or incompetent.

The PML-N government sacked the Chairmen of PCB, PEMRA, NADRA and the Accountant General Pakistan Revenue, and in each case the sacking was declared unlawful by the higher judiciary. Given the fact that over fifty state offices and state-owned enterprises remain headless, this track record of questionable sackings deepens the doubts about the intentions of the government.

The impression gaining ground is that the government wants its cronies to head every state office because the government feels threatened – it knows it can’t deliver on the rosy promises it made during its election campaign eg plugging the power supply gap in six months. Appointing men of integrity to top slots in these institutions could up their delivery capacity. But that’s not a priority.

Worse still, there are no signs that it realises that following this flawed route is making it increasingly unpopular because institutions aren’t delivering the services people need. Against this backdrop, sacking even those who showed signs of delivering were removed because, by acting fairly (a rarity in bureaucratic conduct), they were exposing the flaws in the government’s practices.

As if the judicial reversal of the questionable sackings wasn’t enough, last week the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) expressed its anger over the destruction of the records of many state offices. One PAC member went as far as saying that setting ablaze the record was a ‘culture’.

Besides, isn’t it baffling that, in 2014, the PAC is reviewing Audit Reports relating to 1998-99? Is it that the governments in power since 1998-99 didn’t review the audit reports, nor sought the implementation of corrective steps in the context of waste/misuse/squandering of state funds, and those responsible for these failures haven’t been be punished to-date for their misconduct?

Is this the record of governance based whereon the PML-N government expects a near-bankrupt Pakistan to be trusted to make prudent use of resources provided by foreign governments and International Financial Institutions (IFIs)? At a time when Pakistan badly needs foreign assistance to rebuild its battered economy, PML-N regime’s conduct is wholly perplexing.

To establish its credibility as responsible and dependable, the PML-N government’s first priority should have been a complete revamp of the system of paying IPPs for power supply to ensure that consumers weren’t made to pay the cost of alleged frauds in the system, and the resultant skyrocketing of the circular debt. While nothing of the sort was done, power tariffs were jacked up.

The second priority should have been prosecuting those responsible for massive corruption in the last government so that a process of retrieving the stolen state wealth commenced on highly credible bases – a vitally important effort that too remains on the backburner. To make things worse, appointing a new NAB chief too remained a low priority for months at a stretch.

The third priority – expanding the tax net – is yet to appear a concern. Meanwhile, what surfaced yet again is the sad reality that hundreds of parliamentarians are tax evaders. Sadly, the initial parliamentary response to this disclosure was questioning the FBR about how these facts came to the knowledge of the media. Three cheers for the democrats’ sense of responsibility!

Is this what democracy delivers? That’s the question bothering every Pakistani. Given the almost irreversible economic and social mess that the country has been plunged into by its democratic governments, is it the time to prosecute a dictator under whose rule the state of the economy was far better than it is today? In the current setting, it appears more like vengeance, nothing else.

As a matter of fact, the current setting is convincing the masses that a responsibility-conscious dictator is better than “dictator-dacoits in democrats’ clothing”, as recently opined by Humayun Gauhar. The harsh reality is that, in Pakistan, the real enemies of democracy are the country’s make-believe democrats who use democracy as the cover to impose self-serving dictatorships.

The monetary policy announced on January 17 clearly states that, to sustain the economy even its current state, Pakistan needs foreign inflows – direct investment, bilateral and multilateral lending, and loans from the IFIs – to commence the rehabilitation of the economy (especially the energy sector) and putting it on track for reduced reliance on foreign assistance in the coming years.

While the pro-democracy West may opt to keep quite over the disclosures referred to above, no European parliament will agree to extend financial assistance to Pakistan. The worrying aspect of this setting is that each passing day of neglect of corrective action worsens Pakistan’s image and risk perception, whose cost will be borne by the country for years to come.

We keep pointing to flaws in the various sectors of the country’s economy and polity but the fact is that the key flaw is a combination of lack of vision, integrity and competence in the leadership in all sectors, be they public or private – a failure that manifests the erosion of values – because, over time, we got used to ‘living in today’, with no concern for future consequences of our actions.

Successive governments neglected exploration of oil and gas resources (estimated to be enough to meet demand for 80 years), building extensive and well supervised basic health, and education and skill development set-ups to realise the huge potential in agriculture, fruit, animal farming and fishery sectors, and set up research outfits to guide all these sectors in increasing their output.

Above all, the governments ignored the importance of raising a truly committed and well-equipped police force that expanded in line with the rise in Pakistan’s population although it was imperative given the large-scale spread of lethal weapons among the masses, courtesy the blind support General Zia extended to America’s proxies in its war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

The PML-N seems to have no clue of the challenges it confronts or, perhaps, it knows that they are beyond its capacity to confront and so, in the [likely] limited time at its disposal, all it wants is to benefit its cronies. But doing so, it is forgetting that when things get as bad as they are now, people (not courts), hold their leaders accountable. That history repeats itself is a reality.