| 27 January 2004 | Tuesday | 04 Zilhaj 1424 |
Pakistan's image - where lies the remedy?
Jirga on custodial death
This is a rejoinder to Dr. Kamal Munir's article titled "Is export the only way to development" published in this space on December 12, 2003. Interestingly some of the arguments I intend to make are derived from Dr. Munir's previous article which dealt with the dangers of excessive reliance on the law of the comparative advantage which I agree with, largely.
It is self-evident that export does not necessarily mean the export of primary commodities which are vulnerable to price fluctuations and all the consequential hazards as Dr. Munir has so eloquently spelt out. In his previous article he gave the pertinent example of the Dutch flower industry. Despite its obvious shortcomings (high labour cost, high price of land, etc) Holland is the largest flower exporter in the world.
This, however, is a consummation assisted by a number of equally strong compensating factors - proximity to the markets, a literate responsible workforce, highly developed infra-structure and infusion of the latest technologies.
These factors are necessary for a successful value-added export strategy but export also reinforces and adds to these strengths which further enhance exports so there is a synergy at work here. It is not conceivable, as Dr. Munir contends, that the consumers in Korea overnight become sophisticated and discerning. This was a 30 years' process which started in 1960s and was catalyzed by growing affluence and international exposure gained through international trade.
Let's take the example of the domestic footwear industry which is neither low-tech nor high-tech (but firmly in the middle), and which in the past has been highly protected. At the same time, until recently, the government has not really been actively promoting the export of footwear.
Yet our domestic footwear consumer is hardly sophisticated or discriminating as Dr Munir would predict. On the contrary such a policy has encouraged inefficiency in the industry and today we are faced with a situation where China has flooded our markets with reasonable quality cheap footwear and our domestic industry is in a crisis.
To understand where we went wrong, let us go back to the early 1980s when the footwear manufacturers in Taiwan and Korea were experiencing the effects of rising wages and looking to relocate their plants. Our policies at that time were not conducive to foreign investment and the beneficiary was China which today exports more footwear than Pakistan's total exports.
During this process there have been major improvements in the skills and abilities of the Chinese workforce and their affluence level. At the same time there has been exponential growth in the ancillary industries, the transport and utilities infrastructure and Chinese domination in this field is complete. With the best will in the world we can never hope to catch up now.
The fault as always is in course and not in our stars. Even after 55 years we do not have a single footwear training institute of quality and repute. Some have formally been closed, some are alive in the name only, and perhaps only one is offering any value at all. The bulk of our footwear production is made in the cottage sector using out-dated manual methods and obsolete materials.
Skilled workers are at a premium because the lack of machinery and technology creates excessive dependence on skills learnt from their forefathers. Dependence on outdated production and materials has also retarded the growth of an ancillary accessories industries and we still import most of our accessories and shoes materials.
The strategy for a successful value-added export policy is no rocket science. It involves creating conditions which would encourage domestic producers to look at export and tempt foreign buyers to Pakistan instead of our competitors. The main steps needed would involve:
a) Zero rating of customs duty on all primary and secondary raw materials which are not produced in the country. This suggestion has been floated over the years on numerous forums but the stock reply from the bureaucracy is that raw materials/accessories can be imported duty-free for re-export anyway so why is this blanket reduction required. There are two reasons for this.
Firstly no export industry develops in isolation of the domestic sector. The potential exporter needs the captive domestic market to hone his skills and fine tune the designs and also as a channel for export surpluses. Secondly, the notifications and schemes allowing such duty free imports are so complex and tedious that they are not availed by the majority of exporters. I know of one case where an application for import of raw materials on a concessionary rate has been pending for seven years!
b) The summary of the UK government trade advisory on Pakistan reads as follows: "There is a serious threat from terrorism throughout Pakistan. British nationals of western origin are particularly likely to be targeted by terrorists including for kidnap. Everyone is at risk from indiscriminate attacks. There is also a serious threat from criminal violence.
"We advise against holiday travel unless you have family contacts there. If you are travelling to Pakistan for professional or holiday reasons, you should be very careful about, and confident of, your personal security arrangements throughout your visit."
Small wonder, buyers are reluctant to come here. And those who do have their apprehensions confirmed when they see the high number of armed police and Rangers whose ubiquitous presence we have become oblivious to. Add to this the lack of any nightlife or entertainment in our cities for the first time visitor.
We should make visiting our country a fun, safe and memorable experience and in this regard should take a leaf out of Dubai's book. The restaurants and hotels there are allowed to serve liquor and they have developed a tourist industry in the middle of the desert without anything to offer except shopping and wadi bashing. We could do so much more?
Exporting creates certain exigencies and one of them is standardization. Standardization in the footwear industry requires good quality lasts and to date there is not a single quality last maker in the country whereas in India a German company has set up a state of the art facility.
Most of our footwear exporters import lasts as they have no choice, whereas India is today exporting lasts tool. The growth of a value-added export industry has numerous spin-off benefits some of which are tangible and many are intangible.
One of the intangible ones is that there seems to be a correlation between fast growing exports and tourism growth. Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam are prime examples. This may be a synergistic result of increasing overseas awareness and the improved infrastructure facilities which are necessary for growth in exports. Tourism, of course, is also an export (albeit invisible) but potentially the single largest export revenue earner for Pakistan given the necessary impetus.
Pakistan's image - where lies the remedy?
Pakistan's image has remained central to various serious concerns of President Gen Pervez Musharraf since he took over the reins of this country in October 1999. Generally he has blamed the media, both national and international, for the not-so-happy an image that we have acquired for ourselves over the last so many years.
The high ranking of Pakistan on Transparency International's list of corrupt countries had already won this country a bad name even before Gen Musharraf had staged his military coup inviting even stricter international sanctions on Pakistan, an already highly sanctioned country.
The day the military took over this country, the Commonwealth suspended our membership, the Europeans began dragging their feet on a number of trade issues, and laws in the US and UK automatically barred their governments from giving us any economic and military aid and even stopped them from voting in favour of Pakistan's aid application in the multilateral aid agencies.
These laws are still there. And if the governments in these and other developed countries have come to Pakistan's rescue, it is because they have introduced special over-riding laws with a short life to take care of the aftermath of the 9/11.
But even these rescue operations launched by Washington, London, Paris, Ottawa, Berlin and Tokyo, etc, have not been able to help improve the image of the country. Rather the media in these very countries continues to be hostile towards Pakistan.
We continue to be accused of helping the Taliban against the Karzai government, the militants in Kashmir (these accusations have become few and far between since the signing of the Jan 6 Musharraf-Vajpayee joint statement), having indulged in nuclear proliferation, and giving a free hand to extremists within the country.
This is happening despite the fact that Pakistan is the only country which has successfully rounded up as many as 600 Al Qaeda terrorists and handed them over to the US. One recalls that Gen Musharraf had on a number of occasions publicly debunked the very existence of Al Qaeda when the US first named this organization as the mastermind behind the 9/11 tragedy.
The international media is not giving him the benefit of the doubt even today when, after insisting all along openly and publicly that Pakistan's nuclear programme and its nuclear assets are in very safe hands, he is openly admitting the possibility of some rogue scientists having sold nuclear secrets to Iran and Libya for personal gain.
And even the very close shaves that he had in December 2003 have not convinced the international media (which in most cases takes dictation from its respective foreign offices) of Gen Musharraf's sincerity and commitment to meet the four issues outlined above head on.
As a matter of fact, the president in his characteristically open style had brought up these four issues even during his address to the joint session of parliament, seeking cooperation of the elected representatives in combating them. This should make his commitment in this respect sound even firmer, but there seems to be no let-up in the ongoing international media trial of Pakistan.
This is happening to Pakistan when the record of at least two other countries, India and Israel, on similar scores is even worse. The state terrorism practised by these two countries (in India's case it is being perpetrated in about 18 states besides occupied Kashmir is much more bloody than what Pakistan is being accused of doing in Afghanistan and held Kashmir). Extremist groups in both India and Israel continue to pose a serious threat to the life and property of minorities and neighbours in their respective countries.
Israel has been known to have provided nuclear technology to South Africa (which has since given up the programme) and India too appears to be involved somewhere in Iran's nuclear programme. But then the two have continuously got away with what could only be termed as blue murder when Pakistan stands in the dock.
We have seen that many countries have laws which bar them from helping countries even under indirect military rule. Turkey's application for entry into the EU was not entertained until it withdrew the constitutional predominance it had accorded to its armed forces.
In the case of India and Israel, it has been observed that they could get away even with grave violations of international law and universally accepted norms only because they are democracies. The Indian prime minister has never been known to have made any lasting impression on the international media. But he is still held in awe because he is an elected prime minister of the "largest" democracy in the world.
President Musharraf has never been accused of being a bad leader or a corrupt one. He is perhaps one of the few media-savvy and media-friendly heads of state in the world. The extent of freedom that is enjoyed by the domestic media in his regime is perhaps the envy of journalists of many other countries.
He seems to have given up the senseless concepts of 'strategic defiance' and 'strategic depth', etc., so lovingly nurtured by his predecessors and neither has he ever refused to be persuaded by his US friends to look at things through their prism. And he gets a pat on the back from the highest in the US every time he agrees to see things the way Washington sees them.
He has even given up all his old notions about the Taliban, the 'moderate' Taliban, the Northern Alliance, the definition of terrorism, and Kashmir being the core problem. He has accepted and diligently introduced each and every reform prescribed by the multilateral agencies.
He has settled the LFO controversy and got a vote of confidence for his presidency from elected legislators. And he is as good a friend of President Bush as the Israeli prime minister is and perhaps has a better equation with Mr Bush than Mr Vajpayee has. And US officials have acknowledged on a number of occasions that at least during his tenure, no proliferation has occurred.
Still, we continue to suffer from an image problem. Why? Why are we being singled out? Could it be that Gen Musharraf's uniform is the problem rather than the panacea for all of Pakistan's ills? Could it be that the international media looks at his proposed National Security Council arrangement with total cynicism?
And would it perhaps help, if at this point in our history, Pakistan's armed forces- after having given the country an elected parliament, grassroots governments, a stable and relatively corruption-free economy and having initiated on their own a move to normalise ties with India- went back to the barracks and let the elected government govern. And govern without being made subservient to the armed forces? May be the answers to these questions have in them the answer to our image problem.
Jirga on custodial death
Kawish takes note of the holding of a jirga in Arain Goth last week to settle the dispute of the death of Imam Bukhsh Solangi in police custody allegedly due to police torture. The jirga imposed a fine of Rs500,000 on the accused police officials.
The daily comments that there is no place for a jirga in the law of the land, but police officers, including the TPO of Rohri and the SHOs of Rohri and Kandhra, played a vital role in convening one to save the accused. It wonders how common citizens can hope to get justice if police officers are allowed to patronize a parallel judicial system.
Kawish says that such incidents lead the people to lose trust in the established legal system and asks the judiciary to take notice of the illegal Arain Goth jirga. It also urges the Sindh Assembly to enact a law against the mediaeval institution.
Awami Awaz writes that the Sindh chief minister's deadline to the police for the recovery of the kidnapped people of Larkana district has passed, but the hostages have not been recovered. As a result, the people's protest against lawlessness has been continuing.
In this situation, the daily says, Sindh police chief Syed Kamal Shah has admitted that his force cannot launch an effective crackdown against bandits in Shah Belo since the riverside forest is spread over 30 kilometres. He said that the police would be equipped with rocket launchers and provided with helicopters.
In addition, 325 check-posts will be established in upper Sindh. However, the daily doubts that given police performance so far, these check-posts will help in curbing crime and says that instead they may add to the miseries of people.
Hilal-i-Pakistan writes that in the wake of the transporters' strike threat, the Sindh government has increased the public transport fares. Those making decisions in air-conditioned offices are not aware of the impact of this on commuters, already facing hardships caused by a rise in the cost of living.
Ibrat says that the smaller provinces have again demanded that the National Finance Commission award should be prepared in such a way that they receive a fair share of resources. The provinces' representatives insist that apart from population, revenue generation, poverty and backwardness of should also be made the basis of the financial award.
The NFC has decided that the provinces' share will be increased so that they can meet their expenses on their own and do not ask for special grants from the centre. Under the new award, Sindh will have to bear the expenses being incurred on the presence of the Rangers and other paramilitary forces in the province. Ibrat argues that both the decisions will increase the burden on Sindh's exchequer and broaden the gap between resources and needs of the people.