THE Public Accounts Committee of the National Assembly, which has been increasingly critical of the swelling administrative expenditure and the vast waste, has called for an effective shrinkage of the government. A subcommittee of the PAC has suggested that certain federal ministries, including the ministry of food, agriculture and livestock, should be abolished and their subjects be transferred to the provincial governments.

The subcommittee said that dissolution of the federal ministries dealing with provincial subjects will not only improve the performance of the provincial departments but will also save about Rs100 billion annually which could be utilised for poverty reduction. Mr Riaz Fatiani, chairman of the subcommittee made these observations while dealing with the audit objections in respect of the ministry of food and agriculture for 1995-96.

That means the committee is behind in its task by eight to nine years and hence its scrutiny of the accounts or audit objections are now more academic rather than a hands-on job. The transfer of provincial subjects to the provinces would also mean a lot of saving of time by the federal and provincial officials who fly around attending inter-provincial conferences convened by the centre to evolve uniform policies and procedures. The time spent on such frequent travels by senior officials would more usefully be spent on important matters in the provincial setup. And the red tape which chokes the system can also be reduced and governance made more effective.

It is not easy for the centre to hand over too much of its vast power to the provinces as the federal officials are accustomed to ruling the roost when it comes to the exercise of power. Some crucial decisions of fundamental importance will have to be taken by the central government to hand over to the provinces the power that rightly belongs to them and which they can exercise more productively in the interest of their population.

The reasons for large governments at the centre can be quite many, to begin with federations and large cabinets to represent all the states or provinces. In this respect the US is an exception. Though it has 50 states the number of ministers may vary from 14 to 18 and there is no minister for state or deputy minister. By that standard Pakistan has only four provinces. And it is a unique federation in the sense that only one province has a population of 58 per cent of the total. It means Punjab should be the champion of provincial rights, but it prefers to rule through the centre with its politicians exercising political power and a vast majority of its officials exercising administrative power. Hence, provincial autonomy in Pakistan is stunted despite the outcry of the small provinces against it.

Federations have often large cabinets depending on their political maturity, the more mature and tolerant they are the fewer parties they have in a coalition. The US is again an example of a large federation always having a single party government.

The larger the coalition the more the political compromises to please the small parties and greater the scope for corruption as we have seen in Pakistan though it is a small federation. The major reason for the provinces having too little power and the federal system having too much is the long concurrent list. The list shows where the centre and provinces can operate. If the list is too long the centre will have far more powers and the provinces far less.

In the case of Pakistan the concurrent list has as many as 47 subjects which cover almost all areas where the centre and the provinces can operate, with the centre having primacy over the provinces.

When the political leaders are out of office and are calling for real provincial autonomy, they call for abolition or shrinkage of the concurrent list. But when they come into office at the centre they want the centre to retain the existing setup and the provincial governments depending on them for too many things. Benazir Bhutto was for abolition of the concurrent list while in the opposition earlier. But when she came into office she did not initiate any positive moves to whittle down the list as it gave her authority over Nawaz Sharif who was chief minister of Punjab at that time.

Even otherwise in a country subjected to frequent military rule for long with the help of martial law regulations or other draconian measures, the provincial autonomy becomes more of an academic issue and since military rule’s legacies persist after the return of civilian rule there is little pressure for provincial autonomy. But now Balochistan is in the lead demanding provincial autonomy to end its infinite backwardness.

With authoritarian trends dominant in our public life elected prime ministers undermine provincial autonomy in several ways. The most common among them is the practice of the prime minister or the president nominating the head of the parliamentary party who becomes the chief minister. The chief ministers are also changed at the will of the prime minister or the president as happens in Sindh too often. So what is constitutionally provided for is undone through the political process and the central supremacy ensured at the cost of the provinces.

All this is happening in a country in which the provinces agree to join the federation instead of the centre creating the provinces. But now a parliamentary committee has been set up by the centre with Wasim Sajjad, a former chairman of the senate, as its head to recommend measures to increase and ensure the autonomy of the provinces and reduce the concurrent list. The committee is said to begin its work soon.

Yet another reason for the diminution of provincial autonomy is the foreign aid negotiated by the centre and routed through it to the provinces. But now the provinces can negotiate with the donors directly and the centre stands as the guarantor and that gives the right to the centre to put its finger in the entire pie and make the provinces agree to whatever the centre wants.

The centre has now 62 ministers and ministers of state, a battery of advisors to the prime minister and quite many of them with ministerial status. Most of them deal with provincial subjects too, so the Public Accounts Committee has called for winding up the federal ministry of food, agriculture, livestock and fisheries and handing over its functions to the provinces.

Quite often too many federal ministers are in Karachi along with several ministers from other provinces and the government is unable to provide escorts and security cover to all of them. Complaints and protests follow while the Sindh government voices its helplessness.

The Sindh government has possibly the largest number of advisors to the chief minister who act mostly on the advice of the president or prime minister. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the Punjab cabinet can have only five advisors as the law provides for only that many. Advisors in excess of that number had to resign which they did promptly. Sindh has no such checks. Instead it is a case of more the merrier as one party wants to accommodate as many of its leaders and workers as possible. So, last week five more advisors and a minister were sworn in.

A minister is now far more costly than before. Their salaries and allowances are a small part of that expenditure. The office space is now large and costly to maintain. Their large personal staff beginning with their secretaries is quite many and costs a great deal. Their domestic and foreign travel costs a large packet of money. And the cost of ensuring their security in their office and home and as they move around is a great deal. The advisors are equally burdensome financially to the country. Hence the number of the ministers at the centre and in the provinces has to be cut to the required minimum and their perquisites and privileges rationalised.

The savings brought about by such rationalisation along with the increase in the authority of the provinces can be more than Rs 100 billion if the reforms are comprehensive which is the need of the hour. The savings could be diverted to the Poverty Reduction Fund or to build the infrastructure.

Education, public help and environmental safety can be looked after by the provinces and so also women’s rights, sports, arts and culture.

But the provincial assemblies will have to be awake and active and cut the vast waste in public expenditure. They have to hold their provincial governments accountable day after day. The provincial high courts have to become zealous champions of human rights to ensure good governance. Now with a long concurrent list of 47 the centre blames the provinces for its administrative failures and follies and the provinces blame the centre for its sins of commission and omission. All this should come to an end. Such overlapping of functions and responsibilities has to stop and the authority of the centre and the provinces have to be more clearly specified.

And surely the large official funds lost through inter-provincial wrangling or the tug of war between the centre and the provinces must be saved and used for far better purposes. Let there be a federation based on consent and mutual cooperation between the centre and the provinces. The provinces should be able to breathe more freely than they are now. Salim Saifullah as minister for inter-provincial affairs has a major role to play along with Wasim Sajjad and they should not fail.

A FEW months ago, the Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Centre published a report entitled Human Development in South Asia 2005 with the sub-title, Human Security in South Asia. So, how secure is the life of a human being — this ‘naked ape’ sans claws; sans fangs; sans scales on the body; sans the speed of an antelope or the strength of a lion or the bulk of an elephant?

It can be killed quite easily or starved of food, and is vulnerable to germs. It has always been insecure and has sacrificed animals (and human beings) since time immemorial to forces it could not understand. It has developed weapons and made itself more insecure as a species because, while it can fight against stronger animals than itself, it can also kill its own species. In fact, it can eliminate its own race in times of war. Moreover, it threatens to wipe out the earth itself. But still we look at security through the prism of hostile armies and not the behaviour pattern of our species.

As human beings accumulated knowledge, they also began to kill each other more efficiently and thus became more insecure. The 20th century was very violent but the 21st one may be bloodier if the last few years are any indication of new trends. Let us see what the newspapers tell us. The headlines of October read: ‘October deadliest month in Iraq’; ‘North Korea tests nuclear bomb’; ‘Maximum casualties in Afghanistan; ‘Earthquake affectees still not settled’; ‘Lebanon littered with Israeli bombs’; and ‘Dengue fever claims another life’. In addition, there are the usual cases of men killing women for honour and so on.

This was merely the score for October. During the summer, a war raged between the Hezbollah and Israel in Lebanon, a terrorist plot to blow up passenger jets over the Atlantic was discovered, Mumbai commuter trains were bombed, etc. Such events lead to despair vis-a-vis human security.

A more useful response would be to pay attention to the phenomenon of insecurity, its perception among the people and its causes — in short, the kind of information that the above-mentioned report offers us.

The report begins with Mahbub ul Haq’s concept of human security i.e. the security of income, employment, food, health, education and environment. It includes insecurity arising from war, internal conflicts, domestic violence and official maltreatment. In South Asia, the people are not secure. In India, out of 1001 respondents, over 94 per cent ranked war as the first threat to their security; in Pakistan robbery; in Bangladesh terrorist attacks and in Sri Lanka, understandably, civil war. In all these countries, fear of the police was a major concern.

The atmosphere of perpetual conflict in South Asia is responsible for many of our problems. We have large armies and nuclear weapons, which, instead of guaranteeing security, increase insecurity. This is because this security apparatus is so costly that it leaves little money to be spent on the citizens. Indeed, contrary to propaganda, nuclear weapons have not reduced the size of the armed forces nor have they guaranteed security from low-level conflict which leads to further insecurity.

One effect of creating garrison states is to increase poverty. This is further enhanced because of globalisation. This means that state subsidies decrease and the disparity of income between the poorest 10 per cent and the richest 10 per cent increases. Thus, the number of the malnourished and the undernourished at present exceeds 300 million in South Asia. This directly translates into bad health. Unhealthy people succumb easily to all diseases including HIV/Aids, malaria, TB and dengue fever. Indeed, according to the report, there is an epidemic of HIV/Aids. This, in turn, is linked to the lack of information about health as well as the patriarchal structure of society.

Our education system, such as it is, does not tell our children much about the environment, the prevention of disease, good nutrition and how destructive discrimination can be for the security of vulnerable groups: women, religious minorities, working classes and marginalised people as a whole. It does not even talk about the exploitation of children nor equip them to deal with those who may abuse them sexually. Nor does it tell us how to deal with Aids.

Indeed, the concept of education, which is pointed out in other reports elsewhere but not in this one, is what educator Paulo Freire called the banking concept of education. You put in concepts in the short-term memory to be exchanged for marks or grades. If the concepts can be used in real life to understand the security of livelihoods, environment and human life then it would be a revolutionary change. However, so far this kind of education is not even remotely possible in South Asia.

The most vulnerable groups in society are the working classes, the marginalised and weak minorities, women and children. Poverty is a major condition for exploitation. The poor from the same groups are exploited far more than the rich. The report points out, for instance, that children are exploited because they are poor. With 23 million of them engaged in child labour, there is no way this reality can change unless poverty itself is reduced and more schools set up for children.

In short, the factors causing insecurity are interlinked. We inherited a colonial elite which did not invest much money on the poor anyway. Still, there were government schools; government hospitals and government buses running on the roads. True, the government schools were Urdu-medium institutions whereas English was the key to the best jobs and social prestige. True, the hospitals were crowded and the poor had to wait in endless queues while the well-heeled barged into doctors’ offices out of turn. True, the buses were creaky and ran late, as did the trains, but they did run.

But then the elite got richer both as individuals and as corporate bodies. In Pakistan, of course, the armed forces entered the corporate sector, eying real estate and agricultural land. They even entered the lucrative education sector (English-medium schools and universities). The government system is becoming more and more ghettoised.

In India, as Thomas Friedmann’s book The Earth is Flat tells us, the corporate sector entered the IT revolution. It seemed as if India was shining but it was only urban India which was doing so. Rural India remained mired in poverty and squalor and the footpaths of Kolkata were as populated as ever. The man-pulled rickshaws remained in place. India was more unequal than ever. It was shining only in patches while the rest remained dark, festering with sores.

South Asian elites are mostly indifferent to the plight of the masses. By security they understand the security of borders by huge professional armies. The security of cities boils down to the security of the VIPs and some upscale localities. The term in general means keeping the citizens away from the bureaucrats.

The United States, with the European countries in tow, have reduced security to creating laws allowing for the maintenance of secret prisons, arresting people without proper legal procedures or appeal to courts of law, humiliating people at airports and getting away with offensive statements against Muslims which, in turn, invite even more offensive statements from some Muslims against the West. In short, the concept of security has always had a pro-state, pro-powerful, pro-rich bias.

What the late Mahbub ul Haq (and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen) did was to democratise the concept of security. This report is essential reading for those who are caught up in the colonial, pro-establishment concept of security or, even worse, the modern neo-conservative version of it. Security is to make us all free from want and fear. If this is understood, the need for a new interpretation of security becomes obvious, even if very few people are ready to do anything about it.

OVER the coming days and weeks — throughout the appeals process, up to and including the day of the execution itself — you are going to hear a lot about what went wrong with the trial of Saddam Hussein. You will be told, as an Amnesty International director put it , that the trial “has been a shabby affair, marred by serious flaws... Every accused has a right to a fair trial, whatever the magnitude of the charge against him.”

You will hear many denunciations of the verdict itself: The British Guardian newspaper called on Iraq to maintain a “principled opposition to the death penalty, to which there can be no exceptions. No European country now executes its criminals.” You will also be told that the judges were incompetent, that the Iraqi government interfered constantly and that the international legal community loathed the trial from the start. All of this is true — and all mostly irrelevant.

In fact, all post hoc political trials are in some sense “victor’s justice.” That’s just the nature of putting on trial people who were not doing anything “illegal,” according to the laws of their totalitarian society, at the time they committed their crimes.

The International Military Tribunal that sentenced the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg not only wrote special rules to duck the question of its own dubious legality but even accused the Nazis, at one point, of murdering some 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere, a crime that the Soviet judges — among them an infamous participant in show trials — knew for a fact that the Soviet Union itself had committed.

The much-vaunted, approved-by-international-community trial of Slobodan Milosevic evolved into an occasion for the Serbian ex-dictator to carry on an extended rant. In part, the decision to hold Hussein’s trial in Iraq was made in order to avoid that kind of UN-sanctioned failure. In part it was made because back in 2003 the UN Security Council — led by France, Russia and China — told the Iraqis organising the trial that it wanted nothing to do with the trial anyway.

In truth, though, the shambolic and incoherent nature of this trial was not so much evidence of too few foreign human rights lawyers as it was yet another byproduct of the shambolic and incoherent nature of the US occupation of Iraq. Clearly the violence outside the courtroom affected what happened inside: Defence lawyers were murdered, judges travelled under armed guard and members of the prosecution said privately that they still felt afraid when Hussein came in the room. At times, their fear showed, adding to the appearance of incompetence. Even now, the chief investigative judge visits mass-grave sites in strict secrecy; his family is in hiding, as are the families of other judges.

The violence outside the courtroom also affected how the trial was perceived outside its walls. Televised testimony, which Iraqis initially found riveting, grew less relevant as the violence increased. The trial became nothing more than the background noise of the sectarian struggle: On Sunday, Shias cheered the verdict while Sunnis denounced it. Imagine how different Hussein’s death sentence would sound today if a stable, peaceful Iraq with a reformed judicial system were uniting to declare it, unanimously. Even the British media might then accept that, in such extraordinary cases, the Iraqis are allowed to choose penalties of which Europeans disapprove.

And yet, in the end there is only one standard by which the trial of Hussein and other Baathist leaders should be judged: Did it or did it not compile a true record of Hussein’s crimes — a record that in some distant, future, peaceful Iraq, will be available to help Iraqis understand what took place during Saddam Hussein’s reign? Though it is unfashionable to write anything positive about Iraq right now, the answer is that it did. The crime for which Hussein was condemned — the torture and execution of 148 people in the small town of Dujail more than two decades ago — was well documented. Witnesses and archives were produced. Cross-examinations were held.

In August the Iraqi court started hearings in a second trial, this one designed to examine the Anfal campaign of 1987-89, during which Hussein murdered up to 180,000 Kurds. Already, some dozen witnesses have testified about what they saw when Hussein, at the height of the campaign, unleashed chemical weapons on whole Kurdish villages. Large parts of Shia and Sunni Iraq are hearing these stories for the first time. Listening to them may someday, in that distant, future, peaceful Iraq, help them to understand what Kurds experienced under Saddam Hussein’s reign and help them to achieve some kind of reconciliation.

It is true that the execution of Hussein, if and when it occurs, could well have a positive effect on Iraqi politics. If nothing else, it will eliminate once and for all the Baathist dream of a Hussein-led revanche — a dream that even Hussein himself appears to have cherished; witnesses say he was genuinely surprised by the verdict and was shaking afterward. But his death will also probably put an end to this truth-telling project, one that has been unique and unprecedented in the Arab world. For the first time, an Arab dictator was held accountable for crimes against his people. Thanks to American incompetence in Iraq, it may be the last time for a long time, too. —Dawn/Washington Post Service