| April 11, 2002 | Thursday | Muharram 27, 1423 |
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Lowering voting age
Transport and referendum
THE finance and planning ministers of the SAARC member countries have set themselves some highly utopian targets in the action plan they adopted on Tuesday at Islamabad for reducing poverty in their region. There is indeed a chance that their respective countries could succeed, say in a couple of life-times, if they try hard enough and with sincerity of purpose in removing corruption, promoting good governance, ensuring a transparent use of funds, improving procurement processes and bringing improvements in the police and judicial systems. But it would be naive to expect the rich world to help them out by stopping the flight of illegal capital from developing to developed countries, cooperating with them in bringing to justice those who fled the region with ill-gotten wealth, agreeing to increase their assistance to 0.7 per cent of their GNPs and providing debt relief and debt swap without strings. Those who finalized and approved the action plan should know that their hope for getting the multilateral donor agencies to help them find a solution to their debt problems can only be fulfilled if the boards of these agencies were not controlled by the rich countries.
Assistance from the rich countries and the multilateral donor agencies has always come to the third world with a lot of conditionalities. Help without strings came only when the recipient was found to have assumed some kind of strategic role in furthering the rich countries’ economic and geopolitical interests. For instance, under pressure from the multilateral donors, Ghana recently privatized even the public water system. This pushed up the water rates by 95 per cent. This has been done to render the Ghanaian water system profitable for foreign bidders. Seventy per cent of Ghanaians earn less than a dollar a day. With the privatization of water, they will be forced to make daily trade-offs between water, food, schooling and health care. Worse still, their children will fall sick and die from the many illnesses caused by drinking unsafe water. Thus, that part of the SAARC action plan that pins its hope on help from the rich countries and the multilateral donors appears to have been drawn up without taking into consideration the reality on the ground.
The solution to the SAARC region’s gargantuan economic problems lies in a collective, and determined, approach by the member states to tackle these problems on their own. In this connection, one would welcome wholeheartedly the SAARC ministers’ decision to bring about fiscal discipline in all matters and pursue prudent macroeconomic policies with a view to removing poverty from the region. This war on poverty, however, is linked to good governance, which, in turn, is directly related to a number of basic issues — the level of literacy, the strength or otherwise of democratic institutions, the independence of the judiciary, and the quality of the officialdom. Unfortunately, the SAARC nations will take decades to reach even that level which one finds in some Far-Eastern countries. Nevertheless, the SAARC countries can indeed make a dent in their problems if they show some determination to work together. Ignoring the European Union, nearer home the Association for South East Asian Nations has shown how regional cooperation can improve the member states’ economic lot. The SAARC governments would do well to spend their energies more on cooperation than on self-destructive national rivalries.
THE government’s decision to reduce the age limit from 21 to 18 for voting in the planned referendum must be welcomed. This way Pakistan joins much of the rest of the developed world at least in this particular electoral practice. One hopes the decision is not confined to the referendum but will also apply to voters in all future general elections. Lowering the voting age to 18 makes sense because it falls in line with the legal definition of an adult under Pakistani law. If, for all intents and purposes, an individual is deemed to have reached adulthood at the age of 18 then there seems to be no reason why he or she should not be allowed the right to vote for the candidate of his or her choice or say “yes” or “no” on April 30. The potential number of voters will now swell by several million young people. However, increasing the voter base could bring with it an increase in the number of people with no formal education casting their votes. For example, there are bound to be thousands of cases where the newly enfranchized voters might not be able to even read the question asked of them. The issue is linked to the national literacy rate. A politically-conscious citizenry aware of its powers and responsibilities is not possible without universal literacy.
Reducing the age limit should, however, give a sense of much-needed responsibility and self-worth to the new category of voters. One would now suspect that the government will embark on some kind of youth-friendly campaign to get these young voters to come out and vote on April 30 on the assumption, of course, that a majority of them would say “yes”. The timing of the reduction in the age limit would suggest that the president’s advisers are relying on this assumption to come true on the day of polling. It would have been infinitely better had the cause for the age limit reduction been different from what it at present is — a strongman’s instinct for self-preservation.
THE travelling public in Punjab had to bear the brunt of President Pervez Musharraf’s decision to launch his referendum campaign from Lahore on Monday. Commuters in Lahore and other parts of the province were severely inconvenienced by the administration’s decision to impound public transport vehicles in order to transport people to the Minar-i-Pakistan rally. Thousands of people were stranded for hours at various places, as both local and inter-city buses virtually disappeared from the roads. In the circumstances, most commuters had no option but to hire rickshaws or tongas or simply to walk to their destinations, causing great inconvenience, particularly to students and workers, and disrupting their schedules. Rickshaw and taxi drivers, meanwhile, minted money by doubling their normal fares. The ill-advised move was aimed at helping union council Nazims to transport people to the venue of the president’s public meeting.
Unfortunately, the unsavoury practice of impounding passenger vehicles to further official objectives has become a regular feature of life over the past many years. Buses and wagons are routinely hauled up to ferry people from various places as if there was nothing abnormal or unethical about it. However, adding to the people’s transportation miseries is not the best way to gain their support. In fact, the government could have earned a great deal of goodwill had it broken with past tradition and demonstrated that it was different from previous rulers. That it chose to adopt the same old tactics is a depressing commentary on the contempt the authorities have for the convenience of ordinary citizens.