| June 14, 2003 | Saturday | Rabi-us-Sani 13, 1424 |
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Why victimize NGOs?
Gregory Peck
THE unemployment situation in the country is getting from bad to worse. The latest labour survey conducted by the Federal Bureau of Statistics has put the unemployment rate in the country at a massive 7.82 per cent this year — up from 5.89 per cent in 1998. In absolute terms, more than 3.34 million people are estimated to be unemployed at present compared to 3.27 million last year. The total labour force in the country is estimated at 42.75 million. Out of this 29.69 million or 69.45 per cent is in rural areas and the rest 13.06 million or 30.55 per cent in urban areas. Interestingly, more people (39.41 million) are employed today than in 2002 (38.57 million), showing an increase in the employment rate from 2.1 per cent last year to 2.2 per cent in the current year. This means that the population is growing at a faster rate than the current rate of increase in employment generation. Pakistan has, thus, to step up its efforts for population control on the one hand and accelerate the creation of job opportunities on the other.
Population planning has never been a matter of serious concern in our scheme of things. What with misplaced religious and social inhibitions, policy planners have tinkered with the problem rather than coming to grips with it all these years. That explains why, despite having experienced growth rates of between five to six per cent over extended periods in the 1960s and 1980s, we have continued to remain stuck with abysmally low social and physical indicators. In times of both high and low economic growths we have done very little in practical terms to keep the population growth in check. It is time to move out of this self-induced myopia and put as much emphasis on population control as on economic growth. In the last three years, when the economic growth rate remained very depressed, unemployment was bound to increase, as it did. In fact, according to one estimate, if underemployment is also taken into consideration, the rate of joblessness goes up to about 10 per cent which for any society is a signal for disaster. On the advice of the multilateral donors the government has been keeping a tight lid on public sector spending which in most developing economies serves as an engine of growth. It is only in developed economies that the private sector leads the way and that too because over the years it has learnt to take risks under well-known and tested fiscal and monetary conditions.
In developing economies, especially those which have been tied to central planning for decades and where the private sector had trudged on the crutches of protection, concessions and incentives for long, the nostrum of market economy cannot suddenly come into play and turn the private sector into a mighty engine of growth. This, just because the donor countries and agencies have so decreed. It would take time for the private sector first to unlearn what it had learnt in a protective environment over so many decades and acquire the dynamism, enterprise, efficiency and risk-taking traits to be able to hold its own in a highly competitive global market. And while Pakistan’s private sector goes through this exercise, the economy cannot be kept at a standstill. It has to grow, and grow it will if the public sector spending is maintained at an appropriate level in order to achieve a certain growth rate and also to reduce the twin problem of poverty and unemployment.
THE relationship of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal government in the NWFP with non-governmental organizations working in the province has been ridden with tension and misunderstanding right from the start. The announcement by the well-respected Aurat Foundation, that the NGO will no longer be working in collaboration with the NWFP government because of the latter’s hostile attitude towards it, is an ominous development. Dozens of projects funded by donor agencies for the province’s socio-economic uplift now risk being scrapped because of the MMA government’s hostility to NGOs. In this particular case, matters came to a head when the NWFP social welfare department asked the Aurat Foundation to vacate the premises given to it by the government to set up Mera Ghar, a centre for destitute women. Launched earlier this year with funding from Germany, the centre’s operation will obviously be temporarily hampered till the NGO finds a new location. Two other such groups who have opened similar shelters in the NWFP have also reported that the MMA government has been extremely unhelpful and obstructive to their working.
If one goes back to last year, many MMA candidates, now sitting in the NWFP government, made it a point to target NGOs, calling them instruments of the West, un-Islamic and part of the new imperial order that the religious alliance was bent on opposing. However, the reality is quite to the contrary. Many NGOs, especially those like the Aurat Foundation or Sungi, have done some very useful and constructive work, especially in the NWFP. The foundation’s legislative watch programme, conducted in all four provinces, educates women parliamentarians and councillors on the political process and imparts valuable training for later use in legislative business or policymaking. Such work, or providing shelter and financial assistance to needy women, cannot be called un-Islamic by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, such NGOs are doing commendable work in terms of making the NWFP’s female population more aware of their rights and responsibilities. The notice to the Aurat Foundation also shows that there is a wide gulf between what the MMA government says and does because in the current controversy over the passage of the Shariat Bill it has all along said that it is taking practical measures to improve the lives of ordinary people in the NWFP. Action against this particular NGO, which is providing shelter to destitute women, will hardly help the MMA government achieve its stated objectives.
MOVIE fans throughout the world must have been saddened by the death of Gregory Peck, one of Hollywood’s greatest heroes. A versatile actor who was rightly regarded as one of the filmdom’s icons, Peck was the heart-throb and idol of millions of fans throughout the world. His popularity cut across cultural and geographical barriers. A remarkably handsome man, Peck specialized in playing the role of a man in distress. The Oscar that he won was for one such role in the 1962 classic To Kill a Mocking Bird. Others of his memorable roles included that of a journalist in Roman Holiday, a sailor obsessed with a white whale in Moby Dick, and a commando in The Guns of Navarone. The characters he played ranged from a sheriff in Mackenna’s Gold, to a romantic lover in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Among the historical characters he played were MacArthur in MacArthur and Abraham Lincoln in a TV mini-series quite late in his life. The heroines he teamed up with were legends in their own right — Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Liz Taylor, Sophia Loren, and many others. A gentleman to the core, Gregory Peck had a career that was free from scandals. He felt strongly about racial equality and, thus, put his very soul into the role of Atticus Finch, the widowed southern lawyer who defended a black man accused of raping a white woman in Mocking Bird. His death removes from the scene one of Hollywood’s all-time greats.