A familiar story

Pakistan spends billions on good ideas every year only to see them fall by the wayside due to a lack of political will

Pakistan is not short of good ideas. It spends billions on good ideas every year only to see them fall by the wayside due to a lack of political will, incompetent management or plain old corruption. One such very good idea is the Safe City Project in Islamabad. It was inaugurated with much fanfare two years ago with promises of being the start of a new crime-free era in the capital, Islamabad. There were 1,800 cameras, a command and control centre in Sector H-11 and the police had eyes everywhere. Unfortunately, two years on the optics are not so good. Around 300 cameras are not working, most of these in places where civil works are in progress, the command and control centre is so understaffed that it is barely functional and the entire system is little better than a rolling record of passing traffic. Every camera beyond Faizabad on the Expressway is not working.

The project has yet to be integrated into the policing structure as routine repair and maintenance have been neglected or simply absent and even when the police tried to use the system to resolve some high- profile cases all they got were screens full of static. To be scrupulously fair to all concerned it has to be said that the police insist that hundreds of cases have been resolved using the Safe City cameras, 608 in the last year alone. There is a pledge to restore sight to the system as well as expand it.

This is all very well but the point is that having a dysfunctional system is almost worse than having no system at all. The blind spots will be known to those that wish to break the law and exploited, and the promise to restore vision does not come with a timeline. The tale is almost as old as Pakistan, a deficit of completer-finisher skills across macro governance and civil management bedevils the good that is done time and again. Eyes are repeatedly taken from vital balls, money disappears down the drain and Islamabad is no safer. Fixable? Yes. Likely to be fixed? Probably not. 

Published in The Express Tribune, March 9^th, 2018.

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