Public money and public policy

Public money is a trust which people bestow on governments. Public policy is an appliance by which governments spend that money back onto the people to address their issues. The redressal of people’s grievances culminates into national development with international ramifications. This is an ideal state of affairs; but we have a complete opposite model in place. Power has a crepuscular side as much as it has a glistering one. The anarchic exercise of power has illegitimate offshoots and “absolutely corrupts”. Pakistan’s public policy is a befitting witness to this hypothesis. Our public policies are well coined out, sophisticatedly verbose, correct, and ornamentally decorated with only one exception, that they are not “being public”. Thus, these policies have zero potency at improving peoples’ lives and rather serve the meagre interests of the few in this erratic public policy process.

Despite huge spending under the tutelage of public sector development, we have a sorry performance on all socio-economic trajectories which is far from meeting the national and international targets. Be it improving educational standards, alleviating poverty, controlling population growth or reducing the neonatal mortality rate, we are not yielding the projected results. This is indicative of the chronic malady resting at the base of our governance structure which is how public policies are engineered.

It is entirely up to the bureaucracy to decide and identify public issues. How they identify these issues is driven by the thumb rule rather than any set formula. Once identified, the means to attend to the issue are hatched, which are driven by public money and the bureaucracy can only be at ease after executing said development projects — that also with severe shortcomings. This is entirely a halfway measure as the post-implementation phase is left at large with none to measure the socio-economic impact of the policy actions.

The politicians have their axes to grind in this process. They have a louder say in including problems of their own constituencies in the mainframe of public sector development. Petty political interests grapple with larger national or regional development objectives. The politicians always have a say and the projects which otherwise would be worth discarding, are liberally supported through public money. There are evident examples of such projects being called in question by the honourable courts of law such as that of Balochistan.

Public policy and public money have a crucially intimate relationship which needs to be well comprehended. Public money could be defined as the sum total of public taxes and as there is no discrimination in charging this tax, there needs to be no discrimination in investing it back in the public. This sacred trust of the people should be structured so as not to leave it to the whims of persons holding public office.

Strong, effective and a democratically formed local government structure is the only way we can level our apprehensions in using public money judiciously and markedly with wise and responsible public policy. There are useful takeaways in the world’s two most successful local government examples, i.e., the US and the UK. This will not only ensure that the public issues are well identified but will also develop the concept of accountability at the local level. NAB is only good enough in accountability disaster management rather than a system that eliminates the psychology which tempts one to go corrupt. The loopholes within the fiscal governance structure encourage people to aspire to committing corrupt deeds. Furthermore, a strong local government will sow the seeds of a natural democracy, but the irony remains that none of the pseudo-democracies allowed the local governments to flourish, which in itself is a stigma in our democratic history.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 28^th, 2019.

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