KARACHI: Two contradictory statements on two consecutive days from the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Finance, Dr Salman Shah, on National Finance Commission (NFC) related issues have created confusion.

On Tuesday, he was quoted as saying that Sindh had given up its demand of giving due weightage to tax collection in the resource distribution formula of the NFC. According to Dr Shah, Sindh now wanted personal income tax and retail sales collection as the new basis for the distribution of resources among the provinces instead of total collection. This proposal, he said, “now seemed to be acceptable to the provinces” and he went on to declare that the differences among the provinces on horizontal distribution of resources and between the provinces and the federation on vertical distribution appeared to be narrowing down.

On Wednesday, he appeared to negate this impression when he said that if there was no consensus among the provinces, the federation would continue with the old formula of giving 43 per cent of the tax pool to the provinces. This statement was seen here as a veiled threat.

Sindh Finance Minister Syed Sardar Ahmad — who had stayed away from the Bhurban meeting where Dr Salman Shah had said that Sindh had given up its claim of making revenue collection as one of the criteria for resource distribution — declared on the floor of the provincial assembly this week that his government’s stand on the NFC remained unchanged.

Earlier, two leaders of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Sirajul Haq (NWFP finance minister), issued statements in which they asked Sindh to show flexibility in its NFC stand.

“All these statements are being issued, one after the other, to force Sindh to follow Islamabad’s dictates on the NFC issue,” a member of the Sindh coalition government remarked.

It is also pointed out that under the Constitution, the NFC is an autonomous body that take decisions after consultation on all related issues of public finance. It is not the business of any federal government functionary to arbitrarily fix provincial shares. President Gen Pervez Musharraf has himself announced 50 per cent of the tax pool for the provinces, but his ministers appear to be confused.

Sources in the Sindh government say that it had stayed away from the informal NFC meeting in Bhurban because of two objections. First, that Dr Salman Shah was an adviser to the prime minister and, second, that Dr Shah was an official consultant to the Punjab government on the NFC before moving to Islamabad. Dr Shah was said to have been kept outside NFC deliberations on a number of occasions during 2004 and 2003.

As for the demand of the MMA leaders on Sindh to show flexibility on NFC issue, sources here say that now is the time for the federal and Punjab governments to show a spirit of accommodation. Since 1974, when the first NFC award was announced, the federal government has been retaining the bulk of the tax pool and Punjab is getting the benefit of population. Before 1971, when East Pakistan was with us, the federal government refused to accept the 56 per cent majority of the Bengalis and adopted parity as the principle in distribution of resources and allocation of jobs. Once East Pakistan ceased to be part of Pakistan, it took only three years to make population as the only basis. After 1974, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who chaired the 1979 and 1984 NFCs, held only a few meetings and produced no award. The only NFC award that benefited the smaller provinces was in 1991. But the federal government did not implement it in its true spirit.

It is also argued that Sindh shares the population burden of both the NWFP and Punjab. More than five million people of Punjab and NWFP are settled in Sindh who own more than 200,000 acres of agricultural land and are well represented in provincial government jobs, particularly the police, and in the public transport business. Their provinces get a share in the federal tax pool by including these immigrants in Sindh but Karachi pays for the infrastructure facilities and in terms of transfer of resources.

CAIRO: The bespectacled lawmaker marched into his plush office and settled before the television cameras. He grimaced shyly, almost whispering as he tested the microphones. And then, without a pause, Ayman Nour ripped into Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling party.

The night before, one of Nour’s supporters had been killed and dozens more wounded when an armed mob ambushed their buses in the Nile Delta countryside. According to Nour, ruling party officials paid thugs $10 each to block his party from opening a new outpost in the countryside.

“The one responsible for what happened on Wednesday is the head of the executive authority, and we name him: Mohamed Hosni Mubarak,” Nour said. “It’s not true that we have a ruler who’s willing to give up his throne. We have a ruler who’s willing to spill blood to keep it.” For decades, Egyptians have gone dutifully to the polls to vote “yes” or “no” in presidential referendums in which Mubarak was the only choice.

Now the 40-year-old Nour has emerged as the most visible alternative to Mubarak. It was Mubarak’s security forces that boosted Nour’s popularity — and introduced him to the world beyond Egypt — when they recently jailed him on charges of faking signatures to form his party.

Nour’s arrest outraged Egyptians, and their cries of protest reached Washington. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cancelled a visit to Egypt to protest Nour’s imprisonment. “So far he’s been outspoken, he was given a lot of space in the Western media, he was turned into ‘the main opposition leader in Egypt,’ ‘the only alternative to the ruling party,’ and so on,” said Mohamed Kamal, a member of the policy secretariat of the ruling National Democratic Party. “He’s entitled to say that about himself. The Western media is entitled to describe him in any way they want. But the real test is going to be the election, the votes.” In the weeks before he was detained, Nour had been calling for a constitutional overhaul to curtail Mubarak’s powers or to oust the president altogether.

The government accused Nour of faking signatures when he established his party, but the arrest raised immediate suspicions. “They thought they could give one strong blow on one day and finish Ayman Nour forever,” Nour said in a recent interview. “The end result was that the whole case became a public scandal for the government.” The regime eventually set Nour free to await trial. Since his release, Nour has been smeared in government-linked newspapers and called a “rat” in banners draped throughout his electoral district. “I don’t think there are specific orders for people to go after him or harass him,” Kamal said. “But this is an election environment, and you expect a lot of things like that happening.”

Nour doesn’t seem like much of a challenge to a president who has maintained an unshaken grip on Egypt since taking power 24 years ago. Nour has a fervent but small power base in one of Cairo’s grittier districts. His detractors dismiss him as a political nobody, “at bottom a TV phenomenon,” as the government-run Al Ahram newspaper wrote. Nour is due to stand trial for forgery next month. Thanks to a summertime court recess, election day could find him either tied up in court or languishing behind bars.

“I think the government will try very hard, will push to prevent Ayman Nour from becoming a candidate,” said Ahmed Seif al Islam, director of Cairo’s Hisham Mubarak Law Centre. “If the government succeeds in using legal techniques to block Ayman Nour, people will lose interest in the election.”

When Nour’s followers give directions to his weekly rallies in the Cairo neighbourhood of Bab al-Shaeriya, they usually quip that you’re getting close when you see the signs insulting Nour. The banners are slung over a dilapidated cluster of butcher shops, juice stands and coffee houses: “Bab al-Shaeriya renounces every outlaw, every deviant, every traitor to the country, every agent of colonialism,” says one. “We are united behind President Mubarak,” says another.

“Those who lie and say Egypt doesn’t have democracy should come to Bab al-Shaeriya.” Asked about the signs, the shop owners roll their eyes and shrug. “It’s the ruling party who put all of these up,” says Khaled Abdel Alim, who sells toilets and sinks. “All of a sudden they made a fuss about Ayman Nour.”

Nour represents the neighbourhood in parliament, and has spent years here building popularity the old fashioned way: dropping money and doling out favours to the needy. The son of a lawyer and a French teacher in the Nile Delta town of Mansoura, Nour studied law in Egypt, then worked for a few years as a muckraking journalist. He was elected to parliament 10 years ago, a 30-year-old member of the liberal Wafd party. He quickly earned a reputation as a young, loud-mouthed liberal, a man who didn’t shy away from flamboyant flourishes to make his point. He published pictures that had been smuggled out of Egypt’s torture chambers. He showed up in parliament one day with a dirty, misshapen lump of bread to show ministers what many Egyptians were eating.

“He was always having trouble with the regime,” says Gamila Ismael, a journalist who is Nour’s wife and unofficial press secretary. “Life was such a painful adventure.” Nour left the Wafd party to help found the Tomorrow party. Its members describe Tomorrow as a liberal, democratic opposition party that stood for reform and modernization.

From his headquarters in Bab al-Shaeriya, Nour has begun to open party offices around the country, walk the streets in a door-to-door campaign and erect billboards telling Egyptians they can buy their freedom for the price of his party’s newspaper. Every Wednesday night, in a rundown cultural centre, he presides over political meetings packed with hundreds of rowdy supporters.

Nour supporters who crowd the meetings have dirt under their fingernails and clothes that look as if they’ve been carefully mended over the years. Old men nod into their newspaper and lean on crutches, veiled women shuffle back and forth on an ashy graveyard of cigarette butts. They pack the hall in spite of their skepticism over the coming elections. They are looking for a change, and they see a glimmer in Nour. –Dawn/LAT-WP News Service