Institutions — the holy grail of governance

Governance and institutions are two important components of a state. According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) 1997 report, governance is “the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority, to manage a country’s affairs at all levels.” Institutions on the other hand provide the environment that constitutes a system of rules within which policymaking, administration, innovation, and cooperation occur. For many years, we have been hearing that Pakistan is losing on account of not having strong institutions, resulting in a governance pattern, which instead of creating harmony breeds confrontation. Our persistent outreach to the Monitory Funds (IMF) programme is a prime example of institutional decay. Plenty of issues concerning mistrust, arbitrary decision-making, and dysfunctions in institutions have further been exposed since the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) intervention.

Let us begin by understanding what having strong institutions means and how it impacts governance.

At the start of the present century, the United Nations and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank started thinking about the ways and means to reduce poverty in the world through the process of growth and development. Each country was expected to initiate policies that would raise the standard of living of its people. An expanded middle class became the benchmark of a country’s progress, reflected in a high gross domestic product percentage. These milestones were not easy to reach because countries with a high poverty rate were the ones having poorly functioning public sector institutions and weak governance. Therefore, institutional reform was considered the first step on the ladder to development with subsequent policies to sustain their performance.

In Pakistan, institutional reform has become a cliché. Though every political party, their leaders, intellectuals, and activists are unanimous that Pakistan’s trajectory to economic development has been atrophied due to the politicisation of institutions, no effort has been made to improve the situation. Various diagnostic studies, particularly those that emerge from the Wilson Center’s frequent conferences on Pakistan’s development challenges, suggest that “every single crisis faced by the country — including low tax mobilisation, energy shortages, lack of law and order, losses of public sector enterprises, poor delivery of education and health services, and stagnating trade — can be traced back to governance deficits and institutional weaknesses.”

At present, the political environment is ripe with discussions on the credibility of NAB; a few days ago it was the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in the crosshair; and before that, we were raising fingers at the Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Service Corporation Limited under the nose of which wheat worth billions of rupees was stolen. Similarly, we have written and talked endlessly about the inefficiency of the police department. An associated issue has been of confrontation between regulatory bodies and their relevant ministries on the issues of corruption and maladjustment within their sectors. Each one of them had tried to shift the burden of their follies on the other. It is a pattern. Whenever a calamity strikes, instead of owning it and finding a solution, evasion is adopted as the best option to mar the process of accountability. It so happens because usually hiring in governmental departments is not done based on merit and most of the public sector organisations have been used as recruiting agencies to hire people on political affiliation. In this scenario, institutions work at cross-purposes, a glimpse of which we saw in the aftermath of the Karachi plane crash report.

While the Ministry of Aviation was thrashing out unlicensed pilots from the PIA cadre, its regulatory body, the CAA, was handing them an umbrella. What an embarrassment it was seeing CAA denying having any pilot with a fake licence. This volley of disagreement left a bad taste in the mouth of the international market for Pakistan.

The political environment has become so hostile that issues among politicians are either settled through street agitation or with the intervention of the judiciary. Why is the judiciary overactive in Pakistan? Not because it is laden with excessive cases, which is a normal part of its functionality. The real reason lies in the number of political cases placed at the doors of the judiciary. Our political parties, their leaders, and the politicians cannot communicate on issues with the ability to reach a consensus on common grounds. It is this vacuum that has been taken advantage of by the third force leading to either coups, conspiracies, or unending controversies undermining the legitimacy of both the government and the opposition.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) had also been the victim of intra-departmental and intra-provincial rivalries because of which Pakistan had difficulty achieving terms and conditions that would have benefited Pakistan. In corollary, the full benefits of the project that lied in small and medium-size business plans and the creation of economic zones are still to be derived. To prevent any further damages the command of the CPEC Authority has been given to an organisation, purportedly, more organised, and hierarchical.

The challenges that Pakistan faces — such as, population growth, urbanisation, federal decentralisation, climate change, and water scarcity, among other issues — demand fundamental reform of the institutions. The first step to a meaningful institutional reform would be the elimination of the culture of patronage and co-option. People should strive for success relying not on state bestowed privileges but on their ability to use opportunities to their advantage through hard work.

The Charter of Democracy could provide the required impetus for the trajectory from the politics of expediency to national interest. It has all the ingredients to unite politicians with a common thread of nation building.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 30^th, 2020.

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