PRIME MINISTER Zafarullah Jamali has obtained a vote of confidence from the National Assembly. His ‘stage mangers’ even improved their own performance by securing the support of 16 additional political converts to their cause. Ministries, bribery, intimidation, blackmail, etc. — the armoury used to achieve the objective is inexhaustible.

Their performance has not been disappointing in Sindh either. They have successfully sidelined the majority party and cobbled a coalition of divergent forces who have very little in common except the desire to keep the majority party out of power.

Within hours of Mr Jamali’s confidence vote, Gen Musharraf restored the anti-defection clause of Article 63(A) of the Constitution. The need to withhold this erstwhile salutary provision is no longer compelling. There was a time when governments secretly indulged in horse-trading. Not so any more. Even a pretence of fair play is being dispensed with. Now it is blatant and without any remorse. Gen Musharraf seems elated at the performance of his functionaries. Even General Zia would have been envious of this masterful strategy. When he ousted Nawaz Sharif, Gen Musharraf had coined the terminology of sham democracy. Now he is giving content to the idea.

Mr Jamali has vehemently defended the action. He disagrees that this amounts to horse-trading. To him, the votes polled were according to conscience. It is indeed surprising that only members of the opposition responded to their conscience while no one from PML(Q) had any problem with his or her conscience. If Mr Jamali is right, then why have the anti-defection clause which suppresses the conscience of our members? Mr Jamali’s response, though preposterous, is not surprising for two reasons. First it is self-serving. Second, he has himself been very ‘pragmatic’ about political commitments all his life.

Members who voted contrary to the directives of their parties argue that they have done so to save the democratic process. They invoke the bull in a China shop syndrome. But if the bull in the shop is indeed bent on destroying the shop rather than quitting it, the natural course should be to put it in chains or drive it away.

Though the manner in which Mr Jamali’s elevation to the office of the prime minister was obtained would continue to cast shadows on his legitimacy, it is still possible for him to earn the trust and respect of the people by following in the footsteps of one of his predecessors — the late Mohammad Khan Junejo. Mr Junejo in his lifetime was highly underestimated. In retrospect, he has gained a stature which befits the high public office he held.

Mr Junejo did not earn the respect of the people by picking unnecessary fights with Gen Zia. That would have been imprudent. He only tried to live up to the promise of restoration of democracy and attempted to subordinate the military to the civilian leadership of the country. Instead of rubber-stamping Gen Zia’s dictates, he assumed the role of the custodian of parliament and geared his efforts towards restoring its sovereignty.

In the process he ultimately lost to Zia. That would have happened in any case. But in trying to assert the authority of a civilian government, he set a shining example of the supremacy of representative rule. An even more illustrious predecessor of Mr Jamali, the late Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, even lost his life doing so. The struggle for civilian supremacy continues and shall continue unless sovereignty is finally restored to the people through their leadership. This country is not the gift of a military dictator but the fruit of sacrifices of millions of people who were led to the goal of independence by one of the greatest constitutionalists of his time.

Despite the skewed process of his election as prime minister, Mr Jamali should not consider himself eternally beholden to the military. After all, he is now the leader of Pakistan. As against him, Gen Musharraf’s sole claim to presidency is a sham referendum.

The first test for Mr Jamali would be the issue of the legitimacy of the Legal Framework Order (LFO). Under the new dispensation put together through the constitutional amendments made by Gen Musharraf, there is a substantive shift of power from the prime minister to the president. There are further curbs on the powers of the parliament through the National Security Council introduced under Article 152-A. Under this provision, the NSC is to serve as a forum for consultation on strategic matters pertaining to sovereignty, integrity, the security of the state, and matters relating to democracy and inter-provincial harmony. Could there be a better place than parliament to exhaustively discuss and decide these fundamental issues?

The presidential power to dissolve the National Assembly under Article 58(2)(b) is also being restored. Why should one individual be allowed to sit in judgment over the elected assembly? The arbitrary exercise of this power on the last four occasions is a sufficient repudiation of any justification of this provision. If the assembly acts in violation of the Constitution, let the ultimate sovereigns — the people — decide its fate, through a fresh poll.

Gen Musharraf’s election as president is highly questionable. Aside from what the self-serving provision of Article 41(7)(b), stipulates, the general has no mandate to serve the nation as president for a term of five years. He also continues to hold the office of the chief of army staff. Is it conceivable that any civilized country claiming to be a democracy would have a president who is also the army chief?

Can it legitimately be argued that this is what the Supreme Court had done in the case of Zafar Ali Shah vs Pervez Musharraf, PLD 2000 SC 869? The court only condoned the temporary deviation for a limited period. Can the judgment be interpreted to mean that a deviation becomes the norm? Musharraf had no authority from the court to amend the Constitution in basic terms. He was only allowed to amend the Constitution to a limited extent and for a limited duration. The duration having expired in October, 2002, his amendments cannot endure beyond that period without their ratification by parliament in accordance with the procedure prescribed under Articles 238 and 239 of the Constitution. Indeed the Supreme Court itself had no authority to confer any such power on any military ruler.

The Legal Framework Order has introduced a number of provisions and not all of them are questionable. Indeed, some provisions such as the one relating to local governments is quite desirable. The point is whether a military government had the power to permanently amend our basic law. The answer is no. Let the parliament examine these amendments and decide their fate.

Civilian ascendancy is not in sight yet but ultimately it will have to come if this country is to survive as a democracy. It is better for Mr Jamali to fall while fighting for a larger cause, as his predecessors did, rather than fall without a cause.

DECEMBER 12, 2002, was a crucial day for many in India and also for India-watchers. All eyes were on the elections in the Indian state of Gujarat. No other state election had evoked so much interest, other than the one in Indian occupied Kashmir, as did Gujarat.

To Indians it had all the characteristics of an Indian movie — the good against the bad, the villain working to become the hero, the battle so boldly laid-out, while to the international community, it was a study of India’s thinking in the 21st century.

For very good reasons, the BJP should have miserably lost the elections as it did in other states. Whenever an election is held, the party in power is usually at a disadvantage as it is normally not able to fulfil the promises that it made in its manifesto or in its election speeches.

In the case of Gujarat, the performance of the BJP government was miserable as can be seen from the following indicators. GDP declined from eight per cent to one per cent; investment fell; most of the factories had to close down because of mismanagement and financial and governance problems; massive unemployment, raising poverty to new dimensions; power and water shortages directly affecting farmers; lawlessness; and, as if the other factors were not enough, there was rampant corruption at all levels, particularly at the cabinet level.

However, March 27, 2002, changed it all. The Godhra train incident was used by Hindu extremists to ignite anti-Muslim sentiment among the Hindu populace of Gujarat, which in any case has always been more “communal” than other parts of India.

The BJP based its election campaign on Godhra, using the Hindutva slogan to motivate the Hindus to vote for the BJP. Not once did it express regrets over the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Muslims that had followed the Gohdra incident. The ruling party was “rewarded” for the butchery of more than 2,000 innocent citizens of India by an unprecedented electoral victory, winning 127 seats out of a total of 182.

Many in India and outside commented on the BJP victory. Some were stunned while others were shocked. Some felt upset, others felt hurt and yet others, humiliated. Some thought this victory had brought even greater “shame” on India than the destruction of the Babri Mosque.

Apart from its own hate platform, other factors contributed to the BJP victory. The international community did not pressure the Indian government in relation to its Hindu fundamentalist views, actions and its Gujarat campaign. Second, the Congress ran a half-hearted, apologetic and badly-organized campaign.

Instead of basing its election drive on non-violence and secularism, it decided to fight the BJP on local issues. It harped on the “failure” of the BJP government to deliver. It did not confront the BJP’s Hindutva slogan head-on. Not wanting to lose the Hindu vote, Congress appointed an old BJP and RSS man as its leader in Gujarat. People thought that the hard Hindutva of the BJP should be preferred to the soft Hindutva of the Congress.

Third, the Muslims of Gujarat adopted a poor strategy. Either they should have openly campaigned for the Congress and then en bloc voted for it or they should have raised the pitch of their own campaign against communalism by interacting with the other parties of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance.

Fourth, the Dalits unfortunately sided with the BJP in spite of poverty, unemployment, persecution of the caste system and the attitude of the upper castes.

Now what next? Will the BJP be able to use Gujarat as the model for other states — will clones of Modi be set up in other states? Will the BJP at the centre be now more hawkish, more extremist, more Hindutva-oriented? Will it continue to say all Muslims in India are agents of Pakistan, that they are terrorists, that they are against India and its nationalistic approach?

But if the BJP is prepared to take a dispassionate look at what happened, it will see Gujarat as a setback to its image. If the trend is not checked, the party will fall entirely into the hands of fascists. It should also understand that other states where elections have to follow are not controlled by it as Gujarat was and anti-Muslim prejudices are not so high in those states, nor are the social conditions there the same. It is not possible to engineer large-scale violence in other states to enable another Godhra to be staged.

What has happened in Gujarat has happened. It has brought out the worst in Indian politics. It should not be repeated. One such incident is enough to tarnish India’s claim as a secular, peace-loving democracy.

The writer is a retired maj-general and president of the Institute of Regional Studies, Islamabad.

LAST Sunday, as I was driving merrily along Clifton Road, past the spot which is most offensive to the olfactory nerves, a four-wheel drive with tinted glasses and no licence plates, overtook me from the wrong side and drove me off the road. That’s when I knew that democracy had finally arrived in Pakistan. It was a case of pure serendipity.

While missionaries and railways are the intrusive symbols of the West, the four-wheeler is still the identifiable symbol of the elected democrat in Pakistan. It signifies power and authority and the driver, trapped by routine and ritual, who ferries the owner and a couple of guards around, always appears to be blown by a gale of furious purpose.

But this is only a symbol of an indigenous culture based on ostentation, pomp and ceremony which has its own hierarchy and rules of engagement. While it adds immeasurably to life’s rich pageant, it also testifies to the eternal and laughable fallibility that real progress in an underdeveloped country can be made through a democratic system.

One of the unfortunate by-products of this system is the projection and propagation of what is commonly referred to as VVIP culture, which has invariably succeeded in eventually turning an irate populace against those who practise it. The common people are not concerned with foreign policy or budgets, or what the United States thinks of the North Korean leader.

They are concerned with little things that touch their lives, such as whether or not the cost of goods is going up, whether they can obtain the same profit from their investments that they did last year and why they are being stopped from crossing the road because some fellow in a big black limousine has to pass. Holding up traffic for hours to ensure smooth passage to a VVIP’s motorcade sets in motion a chain reaction of anger and frustration on the part of those affected and disenchants many more.

There are the motorists who arrive late for work or miss appointments. There are children who have to wait long hours at school, because nobody has turned up to collect them. That is, of course, when they are not asked to line up on either side of Sharea Faisal, waving paper flags in the blistering heat to greet some foreign head of state.

And then there are the poor policemen who line the main thoroughfare to the airport. They have to suffer for hours in the broiling summer sun, for those brief moments when, rigid with dehydration and exhaustion, they salute the cavalcade of cars that shoot past. Hegel once wrote that people learn from experience that they do not always learn from experience. This appears to have a special significance in Pakistan..

In the larger scheme of things people have learnt to cope with these minor irritants. But one wonders, how the public will react when it finds out what it costs the exchequer to run a democracy in Pakistan. To start with, there is a large increase in the size of the parliament. The number of members of the National Assembly has swollen from 227 to 342 — a rise of 66 per cent — as a result of the influx of 188 women members nominated by the party leaders. There has also been a substantial increase in the strength of the provincial assemblies, which now has a total of 728 members. To top it all, the federal cabinet decided that each MNA would be given annually 10 million rupees, each MPA five million rupees, and each senator 10 million rupees as part of development expenditure. This is going to cost the Pakistani taxpayer an additional staggering eight billion rupees.

The matter apparently does not end there. Huge assemblies, where governments have been formed through manipulation and horse-trading and the wooing of turncoats who have to be accommodated, mean large cabinets. And large cabinets mean a larger class of secretariats with their office and security personnel and their hangers-on, their fleets of cars and their foreign tours. And what about salaries? A short while ago the emoluments of the president were almost doubled, as were those of the prime minister. There now appears to be some truth in the saying of a British diplomat that India is a rich country with poor people, while Pakistan is a poor country with rich people.

All this seems to be a far cry from the efforts of a former prime minister, the late Mohammed Khan Junejo, who during his tenure passed a bill ensuring freedom of the press, and who is still regarded by a section of the public as the finest premier to have ruled in Pakistan, even though his position was secured through a presidential appointment and not an election.

Junejo made strenuous efforts to introduce austerity and to downsize the government in a bid to cut expenses. Government secretaries, used to travelling in big air-conditioned cars, were quite incensed when he made them travel in small 1,000 c.c. automobiles , as they do in India. The civil servants, who had never had it so good, were cut down to size. Wasteful expenditure was curbed.

Many of the civil servants were removed and placed in a surplus pool. Junejo was, of course, trying to make a point. He once confided to an aide that if he, the prime minister, could move around in one of those tiny utility cars, with what face could the generals, admirals and air marshals cruise around in their luxurious limousines? Unfortunately, President Ziaul Haq, heeding to the complaints of the men in khaki and the mandarins of the bureaucracy about Junejo’s cost-cutting drive, turfed him out when the latter was at the height of his popularity.

The current mood is vastly different from what existed in Junejo’s time. The federal cabinet which was sworn in, in November, has 21 ministers, seven ministers of state and four advisers. But this is just the beginning. There are already 32 divisions where each division will have a minister, a minister of state, a parliamentary secretary and a number of advisers.

This is probably one way of handling the problem of unemployment. But it is a very expensive way. No wonder Gen Tanvir Naqvi resigned his position as National Accountability Bureau chief. He had seen three years of hard work, dedicated to the task of downsizing and ensuring that governance remained within manageable limits, go down the laundry chute.

The Sindh government is also going to have 24 ministers and five advisers, fifty per cent of whom have already been administered their oath. One wishes them well, for this is the most difficult province to govern. While they grapple with the problems of law and order and the management of water, they should take a good hard look at Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital and the heart beat of the nation which houses and feeds 12 million people.

After 55 years this metropolis has become one of the dirtiest and most neglected in Asia. Nothing seems to work any more. The transmission of electricity is irregular water supply unreliable and transport deficient and erratic. The city’s face is disfigured by broken roads, chipped pavements, open drains, ugly unpainted highrises, the washing on balconies reflecting the evening sun. There are shanty towns where children play in dusty streets often inundated by flowing sewage, narrow thoroughfares clogged by cars, buses, rickshaws, motor-cycles and animal-drawn carts.

Even Clifton, where some of the city’s more affluent people reside, and foreign consulates are located, there are open garbage dumps at street corners. But what is really astonishing is that nobody seems to want to do anything about that strip of dirty, brackish water in the lagoon located opposite a medical centre, now overgrown with moss, weeds and litter around which people work, shop and reside. The bog emits a stink that is sucked up by the respiratory systems of people by passing by and has become something of a landmark of the area. Perhaps the local government, once it is in place, might be able to goad the cantonment into doing something. Three years of military rule have unfortunately not helped rectify the problem.

WAR in February now looks very likely. The die is almost cast. It will be a bitter, hard fought war, baring little comparison to the easy run of ten years ago.

With his back to the wall Saddam Hussein will fight in the toughest, cruellest way imaginable, luring the American and British invaders into the Iraqi cities where they will be butchered one by one and they in turn will wreak vengeance, intended or not, on the innocent, the trapped city dwellers.

“And there is this earth, this mud where the flesh rots, where eyes decompose. These arms, these legs that crunch in the jaws of the boars. The souls ulcerated and foul from killing, the bodies so starved for tenderness they haunt stables in search of pleasure. There is this gangrene that eats at the heart....”

President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, two men who in their own personal life have avoided war, should read Duong Thu Huong’s searing novel set in Vietnam where she as a young woman fought on the side of the Vietcong.

Not only is it the most beautifully written novel I have read this year it tells you about war word by word, until you feel your own eyes have been gouged out, your own corpse hung from a branch, and the dizzying sense of carrion and gunpowder.

Bush and Blair talk of how a liberated Iraq will be, with a new democracy, human rights for all and the end of the horrific torture of Saddam’s opponents and their children (which was first brought to the world’s attention by Amnesty International fourteen years ago and ignored by the British and the US governments which then sold Saddam arms). But the worst of human wrongs is to kill 10,000 people (one Pentagon estimate).

No human wrong of that proportion can justify some wildly optimistic scenario for improving human rights.

And this is to put it mildly if in the end the US decides to use nuclear weapons, a proposition now seriously considered in the Pentagon and one that is, according to a new poll, apparently supported by 60 per cent of the US electorate.

I will mention a new book for the fireside, “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning”, by Chris Hedges, a star war correspondent of the New York Times. Hedges made his reputation by covering wars in Central America, Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is a reporter who admits the closer he was to the action and the slaughter a greater high he got. Apparently fearless he lived for the next fight. “At certain moments” he wrote, “I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life.” He imbibed the narcotic of war as happily as any soldier seduced by the unlimited power to destroy.

War, he admits “gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.... In every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, that war alone is able to deliver”. But as time went on he realized he had made a great spiritual mistake, although Hedges is not a religious man. As the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote, “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates”.

He has watched war leaders and their fighting machines and the journalists who hang out with them become corrupted by war. Even President Ronald Reagan, an upright man in many ways, called Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader in Angola, the Abraham Lincoln of Africa, although he littered the country with mines, once bombed a Red Cross factory making artificial limbs and pummelled a rival’s wife and children to death.

Hedges, who seems to have spent his precious spare moments as a war reporter reading the great works of western civilization, recalls of how, unable to sleep during the war in El Salvador, he picked up Shakespeare’s Macbeth. “It was not a calculated decision. I had come that day from a village where about a dozen people had been murdered by the death squads, their thumbs tied behind their backs with wire and their throats slit”.

He opened the play at the speech of Macduff’s wife made when the murderers sent by Macbeth arrive to kill her and her small children. “Whither should I fly?” she asks. “I have done no harm. But I remember now/I am in this earthly world- where to do harm/is often laudable, to do good sometime/Accounted dangerous folly.”

Those words “seized me like furies” Hedges wrote. It drove him to write this unusual and searing book, deeply researched but its most precious insights culled from personal experience and his rich knowledge of our great literature in which he excels. If for a moment I thought Bush and Blair would give it time I would happily send them a copy to read in front of the fire.—Copyright Jonathan Power

“SET up factories and give us jobs. Build small delay action dams and help market our main agricultural products, grapes and onions.”

This is what the poor of Sawan Khan village in Mastung, about 29 kms south-west of Quetta, said in answer to a question on how to eradicate poverty when Mr. Shoaib Sultan Khan, chairman of the NGO, National Rural Support Programme, accompanied by the chief economist of the government of Pakistan, selected that area to ascertain the views of community leaders for incorporating them in the Interim-Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (I-PRSP), which in turn would constitute the basis for World Bank funding.

Mastung is part of the area of operation of the Balochistan Rural Support Programme (BRSP). Community development programmes involving an expenditure of Rs 20 million have been started there by the BRSP in collaboration with the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) of the World Bank. NGOs working in Pakistan provide an easy medium for experimentation of the not-so-new approach.

The main objective of the exercise leading up to Mastung was to identify key actions for poverty reduction including policy changes, institutional reforms, programmes and projects for medium and long-term sustainable development, robust, and effective and empowered individual/community participation in poverty reduction activities.

I-PRSP, announced late in 1999 by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, is the latest but certainly not the last anti-poverty framework. The focus is on “identifying in a participatory manner the poverty reduction outcomes a country wishes to achieve and the key public actions, policy changes, institutional reforms, programmes, and projects, which are needed to achieve the desired outcomes”.

It is a ‘new’ approach, where civil society is being offered a part in shaping and implementing national anti-poverty strategies. The ‘I’ in I-PRSP will be dropped after the participatory bit has been achieved to the satisfaction of international financial institutions (IFIs). In order to trigger debt relief, countries are being asked to produce a poverty reduction strategy paper drawing on inputs from all sections of society.

The IFIs, including the IMF and the World Bank, have shown a marked preference for stability, a euphemism for military or authoritarian governments. They have promised continued interest in our stabilization programme provided Pakistan ensures participation of the poor in evolving an appropriate response to the problem of poverty.

It is the very poor and the most vulnerable sections of society having no say in the matter who have paid the ultimate price of the IFIs’ mandated programme. Except for continual increase in the power tariff, gas and petrol prices and similar other such measures impacting on the common citizen, no other conditions mandated by the IFIs have been met. These include increase in revenue, levy of an agricultural income tax, privatization of KESC and WAPDA, etc. They now insist that the present civilian extension of the military government must continue these ‘reforms.’

With people denied effective representation at all levels for 55 years and only formal representation for half of them, it is ironic that IFIs have suddenly discovered the great merit of participation. All their previous programmes, including the Social Action Programme, were admittedly a monumental failure. Now a new packaging is needed. The percentage of the poor population, which was 46.5 in 1969-70, came down to 17.3 per cent in 1987-88 mostly as a result of a free flow of dollars as our reward for participating in the Afghan war on behalf of the United States, but climbed back to 38 per cent in 2000-01.

To get a real measure of poverty, one is invited to read the Annual Review 2001 by the Social Policy and Development Centre (SPDC). It has recorded interviews with poor women who have descended into poverty in the last few years. They no longer have enough resources for their family’s survival. Children feel a sense of deprivation at being denied adequate food which they see others eating. Some excerpts from the report are worth reproducing:

— “I sometimes cry when I see my children’s pale faces and weak bodies. We just don’t have the resources to feed them properly. I can’t do anything about this except cry.”

— “I unstitch used pants from Lunda Bazar. I do about 50 to 60 pants every day and manage to earn between Rs. 10 to 15.”

— “I wash dead bodies which is naturally not every day.”

— “When I cannot take the stress any more, I just take a tablet and go off to sleep.”

— “What can I do? Sometimes, I just beat my children and cry.”

The government has made great strides by adopting in 1998-99 a new definition of the official poverty line based on 2,350 calories per adult equivalent per day and estimated at Rs.673.54 per capita per month or Rs. 22 per capita per diem. Therefore, a dollar in three days should keep poverty at bay. But in its effort to reduce the budget deficit, the government, with lending agencies breathing down its neck, has adopted the soft approach of development — reducing expenditure without regard to its impact on the poor and the vulnerable.

In 1992-93, development expenditure, which was 36.4 per cent, or a little more than one-third of the current expenditure, declined to 18 per cent in 2000-01. Falling development expenditure has synchronized with recessionary trends in the economy and has aggravated the problem of poverty. Rising poverty is therefore not an accident.

The Musharraf government has not succeeded in collecting revenues beyond Rs. 400 billion. The Central Board of Revenue has been restructured, meaning thereby that expensive personnel have been hired, and yet the performance continues to be dismal. From 1987-88 to 2000-01, direct taxes have grown at 20.4 per cent and indirect taxes at 11.9 per cent on average. Direct taxes include the 67 per cent withholding tax, an indirect tax. All those survey forms distributed through uniformed people have produced nothing, although Rs. 100 billion were targeted to be recovered through this device. Similarly the effort of realizing Rs. 200 billion from defaulted loans came to naught. The set of policies, according to the SPDC, has remained the same, except that there has been a greater show of vigour in its implementation and more so in its publicity. Total revenue, which was 19.3 per cent of the GDP in the decade from 1988-89 to 1998-99, fell to 17.3 per cent in 2000-01.

Under-collection of revenue and over-spending on current expenditure has been the hallmark of the much-touted stabilization, and yet the budget deficit has persisted. The average budget deficit from 1987-88 to 2000-01 has been 60.3 per cent. The development budget suffered most during the entire period, and under expenditure was recorded in seven out of 14 years.

If all past strategies have failed to reduce poverty, what then is to be done? All the verbiage churned out by the World Bank will not reduce poverty unless the basic issues are addressed. These are, in order of importance, good governance, education for all, health for all and infrastructure development. Good governance is the starting point. Without it nothing will get done. The concept involves getting the priorities right including giving the highest importance to human development. It also means good law and order, which provides the basis for domestic and foreign investment. Money for human development cannot keep coming from foreign agencies. We have to find indigenous resources, which can come only by cutting down our defence expenditure.

We failed to qualify for the Fast Track Initiative when the donors concerned invited 18 developing countries that had completed full poverty reduction strategy papers and had on-going education sector programmes. The security environment created by the dominance of the military over national affairs has to change. Funding of both education and health has to be on an adequate basis. Infrastructure including roads, railways, communication, etc., has to be improved. The price of electricity must be reduced to make industry viable. The industry is sick and on the point of collapse. The answer may lie in going back to the basics.