Musharraf’s outbursts

PRESIDENT Musharraf is now so totally divorced from reality that he finds it difficult to accept the fact that his popularity ratings are slumping. He therefore feels he is within his right to warn the people of Pakistan against consequences yet to be defined if things don’t go the way he thinks they should post Feb 18. For starters, Mr Musharraf doesn’t like the opinion polls, which make it all too clear that all and sundry simply dislike him and possibly even his progeny with a passion that escapes calculation. He thinks, immersed in the positive reinforcement supplied by a fast diminishing group of yes-men (even flunkeys have a modicum of sense and an eye cocked to the future), that these opinion polls are biased, influenced by NGOs of devious bent and similar anti-social elements capable of independent and rational thought. What exactly is he threatening, you and me being the audience, when he says that putting him in a “bind” would be inadvisable? How, precisely, will he lash out? Remember that Mr Musharraf’s worst has already been seen. Consider also that he no longer commands the army, an institution that now follows the dictates of a man seemingly of far more sober an outlook. So what does putting Musharraf in a “bind” really entail? Please explain that, Mr President. Are we to expect state-sponsored violence if things don’t go your way?

Pakistan is not alone in suffering dictators and insecure midget-men who seem convinced that they are the chosen saviours. Yet we do get more than our fair share of these tinpots. Why is that? One, you can’t escape the fact that the people of Pakistan (quite incredibly) still haven’t lost all faith in the inherent goodness of the Pakistan Army. That’s a given, like it or not. So it is that people as patently mediocre as Pervez Musharraf can rise to great heights and shout from the pulpits at any given time and in a manner which would get you and me arrested in the Islamic republic. Two, we have suffered fools for way too long without doing anything about it. Three, because our mindset as a people and a nation is not revolutionary, at least no longer, we deserve ‘leaders’ even as controversial as Asif Zardari. Think about that before you vote.

Fear and loathing, to quote Hunter Thompson, is how the pre-election sentiment can best be described. Hyderabad started shutting down on Thursday and Karachi will follow on Saturday. The Frontier, Balochistan and Punjab will no doubt follow the dictates of their own peculiar exigencies. Already food is in short supply across the country.

Feb 18 is being viewed with trepidation, not hope. What an irony.

Cricket, anyone?

BESIDES the television commentary that went with it, the recent one-day series against Zimbabwe threw up few shockers. Not that it was expected to in any case given the quality of the opposition. What’s more, so middling now is the stature of even the Pakistan cricket team that feverish anticipation is missing these days from most matches involving the national side. Keeping in mind the combined calibre of the two contestants, a ‘clash’ with Zimbabwe was always going to fall miles short of the titanic and so it proved to be. Speculation in the build-up to the series was limited more or less to the margin of victory, with Pakistan’s captain promising a 5-0 whitewash while insisting, in the same breath, that Zimbabwe should not be underestimated. And a clean sweep it was in the end, sparing fingernails across the country and shielding fans from the health risks associated with unbridled passion. But where the cricket failed to rouse, Zaheer Abbas, Mushtaq Ahmed, Waqar Younis and the rest of that inane commentary crew succeeded in driving viewers to levels of fury not seen since Taslim Arif’s stint behind the mike.

Little should be read into the final scoreline because Pakistan were anything but impressive. True, the side remained unsettled throughout as a host of fringe players were given an opportunity, and rightly so, to represent their country in a series that was a test only for the visitors. Even so, the top-order batting was alarmingly fragile in the second and third ODIs and the pace bowling, save a spell or two, much too innocuous to trouble anyone but the minnows of cricket. While some of the new players — notably Nasir Jamshed, Khurram Manzoor and wicket-keeper Sarfraz Ahmed — did their fledgling careers no disservice, judgement on the true worth of at least the batsmen must be reserved until they face stronger opposition. The series against Australia would have been a better test but that tour is now almost certainly off. Pakistan’s real troubles, however, lie elsewhere. The central contracts controversy continues to simmer. Worse, disturbing rumours are filtering in of a clique forming round an insecure captain said to be supported by a coach who, as a foreigner, was expected to keep a distance from player politics. This grouping is, among other manoeuvrings, allegedly working to ensure the retention of Kamran Akmal at the expense of Sarfraz Ahmed and, incredibly, the easing out of Shahid Afridi from the one-day side. If true, these reports of growing divisions do not bode well for the future of Pakistan cricket.

Another fire tragedy

FIRES in Karachi seem to be spiralling out of control, both in terms of their intensity and frequency of occurrence. Tragedy struck once again last Wednesday when a fire in Gadap Town engulfed 11 shanty dwellings, killing three young sisters and severely injuring their mother who tried to rescue them. On the same day, a fire broke out in Manzoor Colony, destroying more than 100 homes and injuring five people. So far the cause of the fires is not known, although in the first case, police have pointed out that the girls’ mother had lit wood to boil water. Unfortunately, although many homes in slum dwellings may not be as prone to short circuits as buildings and shopping plazas many are constructed of combustible material including cardboard cartons, wood and thatch. This means that fire in one dwelling can easily spread to other homes, especially in congested surroundings. An inadequate water supply in such areas means that there is no quick way of putting out the fire which then engulfs everything in its path.

Given the dearth of proper and adequate housing, it is no surprise that shanty towns are a regular city feature. But it is a pity that there is no one to inform or direct the people when it comes to safety precautions. For instance, smoking inside huts constructed of inflammable material or lighting open fires in the vicinity of the latter should be highlighted as being a dangerous activity by town authorities. Fire blankets and extinguishers may be expensive propositions in poverty-stricken shanty towns but they are a necessity, as is the accessibility to emergency numbers for the fire brigade. Local schools and madressahs, too, should educate children on fire risks and carry out regular drills. Meanwhile research is needed on inexpensive fire-resistance building material that can at least minimise the possibility of a blaze in such dwellings.

Challenge of climate change

PAKISTAN produces more than 30 million metric tons of carbon emissions. This is about 0.4 per cent of global emissions. But, this has increased almost four-fold from nine million in 1980.

A heavy emphasis on industrialisation in Pakistan means that the rate of increase in emissions is going up. The energy sector contributes the most to emissions: 53 per cent.

At the same time, Pakistan’s decreasing forest cover is suffering from among the world’s worst deforestation rates, primarily from the large logging industry. Forest cover declined to 2.5 per cent in 2005 from 3.3 per cent in the late 1990s.

Some of the 11 climatic zones in the country are under threat of extinction, while the coastline of 990km is considered vulnerable to the rise in ocean levels. The agricultural sector is the most vulnerable to climate change, and changes in cropping and productivity are already affecting livelihoods.

Agriculture is the single largest sector in Pakistan’s economy, contributing 21 per cent to the GDP and employing 43 per cent of the workforce. Thus, the rural poor are the most vulnerable to any decline in the sector. The poor in general are especially vulnerable to any shifts in production and price patterns; conservative estimates count about 38 million people out of a population of 160 million as below the national poverty line. They, of course, are the first to suffer. However, there is no comprehensive mapping of comparative or absolute vulnerabilities to climate change in Pakistan.

The response to this alarming situation in Pakistan is mixed. On the one hand, the government of Pakistan has made international commitments to climate change mitigation by ratifying the Framework Convention, the Kyoto Protocol, the Montreal Protocol and the Desertification Convention. It has also made numerous bilateral commitments to donor countries. A climate change cell has been formed in the federal ministry of environment, and a national committee is chaired by the prime minister. The government has also formulated a clean development mechanism strategy.

Pakistan’s emissions continue to grow at an increasing rate, deforestation continues to reduce carbon sinks, national capacities remain abysmally low at all levels to mitigate climate change, and there is not even a sound vulnerability analysis to work around.

The country has the capacity to address the issue, and international cooperation and civil society’s response (including one from the private sector) are all available — but all in isolation. There are no platforms to bring together multiple stakeholders to combat climate change. Enough financial aid is flowing to a system that is not responsible, transparent or responsive to the citizenry.

Pakistan needs an ‘approach to development’ to mitigate climate change. Single steps will be useless. In other words, the problem does not lie so much in the decisions being made but the way in which they are being made.

The more traditional take on development involves the devising and implementation of technocratic solutions. Such solutions have failed to improve social/environmental indicators. Instead, they have resulted in deepening inequality and deprivations.

Inequality continues to increase despite the massive influx of development assistance now being received by the government — the average Pakistani receives twice as much aid on paper as any other South Asian citizen. Just one donor, DFID, increased its aid seven-fold from £15m annually in 2000 to £106m in 2007. Just between 2000 and 2005, Pakistan received over £4.5bn in aid overall.

The problem is not of procuring more money. It lies more in the way in which decisions are made rather than the decisions themselves. The grounds needed for any successful action do not exist. What is lacking are democratic norms in the decision-making system. The state does not involve the relevant stakeholders while taking decisions. At the same time, the formal democratic system is in a shambles, with no effective representation whatsoever.

Likewise, although democratic systems exist at the local level, these are entirely inactive on issues such as climate change mitigation or capacity-building. So, any macro solution imposed at any level just falls through the cracks of client-patronage, nepotism, resource-grabbing and profiteering.

Consequently, there is a huge policy disconnect, especially on issues that seem peripheral to the state, such as climate change. Not only are present policy instruments flawed, they are low on the priority agenda and thus remain unimplemented in letter and spirit. Likewise, there is no coordination amongst various policies, each championed by separate interests that are constantly in conflict.From an environmental governance perspective, climate change mitigation should be an outcome or focus within a larger framework of socio-environmental uplift. But in actuality, climate change policy instruments (such as ratified conventions) remain in silos, with no linkage to social policies like education, public health, water and sanitation and fisheries, or to macro-economic policies such as infrastructure development, agriculture and industrialisation. In this scenario, capacity-building efforts remain limited.

The state also does not have either the credibility or the wherewithal to pull together the relevant stakeholders on climate change. There is, thus, no evidence-based decision-making that engages the private sector — especially large corporations — along with grassroots representatives and academic input. There is a desperate need for issue-oriented, non-partisan platforms to collate and coordinate actions on and around climate change.

Pakistan’s participation in global climate change negotiations is a case in point. Although these may be fundamentally flawed, the Pakistani interaction renders them completely futile for the citizenry. There is absolutely no participation or even effort towards sharing information and positions. Our western friends talk about the difficulty in convincing their legislators and negotiators of positions to take. But we envy them for we cannot even reach ours, and even if we do and even if they agree, it makes not the slightest difference to citizens on the ground.

The dilemma is very clear. On the one hand, urgent multi-dimensional action is needed, such as analysis, capacity-building, implementing warning and response systems, controlling emissions, etc. On the other hand, any steps taken are pre-destined to fail because of the ground situation of governance. Options for civil society actors are limited. While development assistance has increased over seven-fold in seven years, less and less of this is going to independent, non-partisan organisations that can link grassroots voices to policymaking. Rather, the bulk of aid goes to the state, which simply cannot utilise it in the larger public interest.

The dilemma in Pakistan, therefore, is how to proceed on both fronts — individual measures and creating an enabling environment to make those steps work towards impacting on climate change. The underlying problem, of course, is one of social justice. This has remained a historically challenging issue.

The writer heads LEAD (Leadership for Environment and Development) Pakistan.

atsheikh@lead.org.pk

OTHER VOICES - Bangladesh Press

ADB weighs in with energy prescription

Niya Diganta

INTERNATIONAL agencies are mounting pressure on the government to raise the price of gas, oil and power to cut bloated energy subsidies in Bangladesh. Hua Du, the resident mission chief of the Asian Development Bank, is the latest to recommend the price hike.

Media reports say the ADB tries to push its way further into energy projects. The Manila-based agency that has long worked as a partner of Bangladesh in developing the energy sector is optimistic about continued efforts to implement a package scheme, she said, after leading a three-member expert committee in a meeting with finance adviser A.M. Mirza Azizul Islam on Tuesday.

The global market founders under pressure of rising oil prices. It creates a huge impact on the local market too. In these circumstances, if the prices of oil and gas rise, people’s sufferings will mount. Bangladesh faces an intriguing trend: prices once on the rise never decline even after the situation returns to normal. A rise in energy prices will spark a ripple effect across the economy. Freight charges will increase and so will food prices. Things will certainly spin out of control.

ADB’s recommendation for a price rise did not surprise the people. It is just that the agency does not take into account the probable fallout from its prescription. We hope that the government will not wilt under pressure from multilateral lenders. — (Feb 14)

Debate on food security

Samokal

DEBATE rages over whether wide media coverage is to blame for a hike in food prices. Some believe it is. They say the prices of commodities — especially rice — increased after the media spotlighted the problem. No sensible person thinks so. The bottom line is that food prices are beyond easy reach, farther beyond the purchasing power of people on the margins.

The government must make and implement long-term policies to keep the prices under control, an issue that threatens the credibility of the Fakhruddin administration. Bangladesh now depends on heavy imports from neighbouring countries — rice from India, a case in point, which left the country’s balance of payments in deficit. On the local market, rice prices climbed amid heady confusion over deadlocked imports from India, which imposed restrictions on the low-priced shipments of non-Basmati varieties.

The Indian ban is not specific to Bangladesh. It is a measure to ensure food security for its own people. Despite all, India agreed to export five lakh tonnes of rice to Bangladesh through the government channel... India tightened curbs on rice shipments through private channels, but approved the L/Cs opened by Bangladesh businessmen before the Feb 7 ban.

Bangladesh must cut dependence…on imports and pay more attention to boosting local output in the days to come. According to media reports, the government’s efforts to ride out the crisis are far from adequate. — (Feb 14)

— Selected and translated by Arun Devnath