Analysis: Time to walk the talk

What the PML-N needs to focus on.

The Sharif brothers deserve kudos for standing behind Dr. Malik Baloch as Balochistan’s new chief minister, as it reflects the desire to make a new start.

While the task of investigating the accumulation of ill-gotten wealth by many who have now joined the PML-N in Balochistan, and preventing further plunder of institutions now rests with the new provincial government, this also makes a case for deep introspection by the Sharifs and their close cohorts.

The PML-N would do well to leaf through the book Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, which vividly illustrates the challenges that Pakistan faces today.

“Nations fail today because their extractive economic institutions do not create the incentives needed for people to save, invest and innovate. Extractive political institutions support these economic institutions by cementing the power of those who benefit from the extraction,” argue the authors.

They use this analogy to underscore the spiralling crisis of institutional corruption (exploiting state entities for personal and extended circle benefits) and politically-motivated governance as it obtains today in most African and Asian countries. Though they don’t mention Pakistan, yet their description of circumstances in countries being run by plutocrats, or governed in plutocratic style, equally applies to Pakistan, where a certain class of political and economic
kleptocrats embodies state power and uses it for self-preservation and personal benefit.



Their definition of “Extractive Institutions” also befits state institutions and corporations such as PIA, Pakistan Steel, Railways, Pakistan TV, PBC, PICIC, NIT, Police, Power Generation and Distribution companies; they are all symptomatic of inefficiency, patronage and financial attrition.

Successive ruling parties have stuffed them with cronies and activists with total disregard for merit and performance.

The consequences are over 500 billion rupees worth of attrition annually. The staggering amounts that poorly-run state organizations gobble up every year are in addition to the inherent corruption that also amounts to tens of billions a year.

Reforming these bleeding public sector institutions, purging them of cronies, and subjecting them to merit instead of political expediency represents the real challenge to a government that is publicly vowing merit, rule of law and good governance.

One could list down five areas that Sharif and his team need to focus on:

• Energising the country to provide some relief to the teeming millions affected by endless power outages

• Economic revival to increase productivity and lessen the massive unemployment.

• Education as a top priority to be dealt with on a war footing

• Empowering the common man by reviving the local government system.

This would be the greatest proof of the PML-N’s and other parties’ deference to the will of the people.

• Eliminating the nepotism that flows from within the party structures thanks to those who treat power as a privilege rather than a sacred trust vested in them by the people.

Unless the ruling parties turn these five “Es” into urgent priorities and align them into their “better governance and rule of law matrix”, they will find it extremely difficult to impress the already frustrated masses with mere slogans of change. They must embrace the Five Es to walk the talk.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 7^th, 2013.