Envisioning Pakistan

BEGIN with the end. This is the principle on which every successful endeavour in life is based, be it personal, organisational, national or international. The philosophy behind this principle is that first determine what your destination is and then carve out a path to reach that end.

A 100-day plan or a 30-day deadline is thus the most misleading and meaningless target. It follows the classical short-term, quick-fix strategy. It does little more than serve as a catchy comeback slogan with little to offer in terms of providing long-term solutions to an economy riddled with a chronic deficit of all basic facilities.

As is evident by the chaos over the restoration of the judges, such slogans continue to be counterproductive. The whole focus of the government is to have a piecemeal, daily planning or ‘dehari thinking’ attitude with no concerns of where all this knee-jerk reactive approach can lead to. We must ask and answer soul-searching questions to discover what as a nation and as individuals we want to be, if we want to overcome the identity crisis we are suffering from. What is our purpose and identity, as a nation and as individuals? What is our reason to be? What do we stand for? What do we represent in terms of purpose, vision, values and identity?

Countries like companies need to be practising strategic planning where a total reinvention and rejuvenation plan should be made to help discover the true essence and spirit of who we are and what we want to be. The following process needs to be followed: first, a vision should be established. Countries without a vision are ships without direction which go round and round before sinking. Thus it is necessary to determine what we want our country to be.

It was the Quaid and Iqbal’s vision of having a free motherland for the Muslims which transformed the nation, making it take action. A formal documentation of this vision took place at Minto Park in the form of the Qarardad-i-Pakistan which presented the vision of Pakistan known as Tasawar-i-Pakistan. Similarly, the government needs to document a formal vision statement which describes the end state like: ‘A developed, literate, peaceful and prosperous society’.

This vision in turn needs to be given shape by forming a mission statement which emphasises what all needs to be done to reach this destination. A mission is a statement of purpose outlining the major areas which need to be focused on in order to reach this destination. A suggested mission statement of Pakistan could be: ‘To make Pakistan a leading Asian economy where it is comparable to the top performing economies of the region; by developing a vibrant, educated, innovative human resource; focusing on cutting-edge, state of the art technologies helping in diversifying and developing a dynamic industrial base; and ensuring security, equity and justice for all citizens of society’.

This mission then needs to be translated in quantified objectives where timelines and targets for every single area highlighted in the mission are realistically formed to create a yearly path leading to the culmination of the eventual vision. This exercise, of course, should not be undertaken in isolation but with the consultation of all major stakeholders in which government, industry and civil society representatives are involved in order to create a participatory spirit of ownership of the process.

The vision must then be turned into action, in fact 80 per cent of strategy failures are those of execution. Planning is the easier part and in the past we have had many fancy plans which somehow never produced tangible results. Thus the real test of this government will be to demonstrate its ability to deliver on these plans.

The government must create civil service reforms to create more accountability in the public sector. This requires carrying out a massive cultural change programme where these departments are compelled to treat the public as their customers, who if not satisfied, will have the power to endanger their very existence. All ministries need to be given specific targets which need to be monitored quarterly and published in the media to create public awareness.

There are, of course, certain prerequisites for planning as such plans require certain preconditions to succeed. A complete commitment from the top brass to turn the vision into action is needed. This perhaps is where our governments have failed in the past and may do so in the future. The corroborating evidence for this assertion is the issue of the judges’ restoration which despite its extreme popularity and demand has taken a long time to come to its ultimate conclusion.

A monitoring and evaluation system which highlights deviations from the path, not at the end of the budgeted year but on a daily basis before it is too late, is essential to assess the progress of implementation. Again, asking indifferent and apathetic government departments to become efficient and smart is a tall order. Also, there should be a system of reward and punishment which unsparingly reinforces and rewards behaviour and actions leading to achievements, and punishes those who are unable to abide by these requirements. However, with the government’s tradition of rewarding those in power and hanging people of previous regimes, this seems highly unlikely.

To make my wish list even grander, and to further rile the cynics, I would still venture for the unheard of, by saying that the first institution which needs to be privatised is the government itself. That of course does not mean that a private sector company should take over but it does mean that an exercise should be carried out like Al Gore did at the time he was vice president of the United States and by the name of ‘Reinventing the government’.

He introduced the concept of treating every voter as a customer who is the actual shareholder and owner of the government. Intensive cultural change consulting was done where each government department identified their mission to serve their customer, what his needs and wants were and what skills and systems were required to meet and exceed customer expectation. The popularity of Bill Clinton’s tenure lends evidence to the fact that such initiatives are not only possible but very profitable for government popularity and sustainability.

The government must realise that if it does not change, it will be changed. It must accept the fact that the only way to increase its life expectancy is not by making coerced changes in the Constitution but by developing a voter-centric attitude — a system and mechanism in which actions speak louder than words, where merit and integrity prevail and where public sentiments are respected, regarded and responded to with humility and accountability. Only then can a public office recover its lost dignity and credibility.

The writer is a consultant and CEO of Franklin Covey.

andleeb@franklincoveysouthasia.com

Cost of combating terrorism

IN the 1980s, Pakistan boasted about being a frontline state in the fight against Soviet expansion. When Russian troops were forced to withdraw from Afghanistan, the empty rhetoric emanating from the Foreign Office was that the last battle of the Cold War had been fought and won on the frontiers of Pakistan.

This was repeated ad nauseam by the leadership of the country in the 1990s. What happened afterwards is all too well known and today Pakistan is again in the same unenviable position of being a frontline state; only this time the enemy is amorphous and the fight is against global terror.

Soaring casualties in this war have become a statistical nightmare. No province in Pakistan has been spared the merciless and unremitting chain of terrorist violence. Statistics, however, are impersonal and can never portray the anguish of an entire nation yearning for peace and stability.

In his recent article in the Los Angeles Times, titled, ‘Target: Bin Laden’, Steve Coll, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars, has predicted that the capture of Osama Bin Laden is near. He bases his assumption on ground realities within Pakistan as opposed to any ingenious counter-terrorist strategy emanating from Islamabad or Washington.

International opinion polls cited in the article indicate that Bin Laden’s popularity rating had fallen by half to 24 per cent in Pakistan because of the unprecedented level of terrorist violence in the country over the last several months.

Even more astounding is the finding that his support among locals has plummeted to single-digit percentages in areas where he is presumed to be hiding, i.e. the NWFP and the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan. Bin Laden is no longer considered the folk hero who took on the US and the West to advance the cause of the Islamic world.

Coll is of the opinion that the Bush administration’s myopic reliance on President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistan army in its efforts to defeat terrorism created ‘perverse incentives’, i.e. the exploitation by vested interests of the Al Qaeda threat to keep the aid pipeline, estimated at $10bn since 9/11, flowing.

With the rapid erosion of Bin Laden’s local support, Coll believes that the new civilian dispensation in Islamabad, unlike its military-dominated predecessor, can reap rich political dividends if the Al Qaeda leader is either killed or brought to justice. Should this happen, massive economic assistance would also be forthcoming from the US-led West, and democracy would be strengthened in the country.

It is interesting that the silhouette of a tactical shift in the US assistance policy to Pakistan is slowly emerging. Emphasis on support for the democratic civilian leadership, as opposed to the military, is gradually taking shape. There is a realisation that broad-based support from civil society is indispensable to the fight against terror.

Senator Joe Biden, a Democrat from Delaware, has proposed a seven-billion-dollar aid package for Pakistan and a democracy ‘dividend’ of one billion dollars. If the proposal is approved, the level of civilian assistance will rise to $1.5bn per annum. The unspoken bottom line is that the new civilian leadership must intensify its efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani has committed his government in this war against terrorism by claiming it to be Pakistan’s war. The country has not only been the foremost player in the fight against terror but has also been a major victim of extremist violence. The commitment is there; however, there is a dearth of resources to pursue this conflict indefinitely.

The trade deficit stands at a staggering $20bn as against a projected oil import bill of $11bn which can only be paid by completely depleting the country’s foreign exchange reserves. The trend is unlikely to be reversed. The price of oil five years ago was a mere $25 per barrel, today it has reached $120 and is set to rise further.

Currently, the government is said to be providing subsidies of up to Rs17-18 per litre. It can no longer afford this and has raised fuel prices from Rs53.70 to Rs66.03 over a span of six weeks. This trend is likely to continue.

Inflation, as a result, is reaching pandemic proportions. Food inflation in the country already hovers around 20 per cent and is set to rise further. This is a global phenomenon; however, its impact is particularly grave in developing countries where it is estimated that 70 per cent of the meagre income earned by an individual is consumed on the purchase of food. The number of ‘food insecure’ people in Pakistan is said to have risen to 77 million.

These statistics belie the overly optimistic assessment propounded by Steve Coll. Bin Laden’s popularity may be diminishing; however, a mix of bad administration and socio-economic realities has resulted in the frictionless and constantly accelerating momentum of militancy which has reached such proportions that it has even made Bin Laden irrelevant and inconsequential. The movement will continue, with or without him, so long as there is widespread poverty.

Despite these daunting challenges, the civilian leadership has done nothing more than bicker about power-sharing arrangements at the centre and the provinces. A well-thought-out economic and social programme is yet to be articulated.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Criterion Quarterly.

mushfiq.murshed@gmail.com

Cuba: wind of change

IT has been a week of announcements for Cubans from their new president Raul Castro and on Friday shoppers gathered in Havana malls to gaze for the first time at computers legally on sale.

The computers cost almost GBP400 and the average wage is under GBP10 a month so most were just looking.

But it is the other, less flashy reforms that may bring a more profound impact — reforms intended to breathe life into Cuba’s economy by giving farmers incentives and freedoms. At May Day celebrations the government announced it was shifting control from the ossified agriculture ministry to 169 local delegations. In a further assault on bureaucracy it may abolish 104 unnecessary departments.

The Communist party newspaper Granma said the move was needed to ‘stimulate agricultural production, perfect its sale and increase the availability of food and, in this way, substitute imports’. Salvador Valdes Mesa, head of the Cuban Workers’ Confederation, reinforced the point. ‘It is fundamental to concentrate efforts on increasing production and productivity, above all, of food,’ he said.

The government has signalled a transfer of land to private farmers, who are quietly recognised to be far more productive than state-owned enterprises. The state, which controls 90 per cent of the economy, is to further loosen its grip by allowing farmers to buy supplies directly. It has also doubled and in some cases tripled the prices it pays for some produce.

With Havana’s hungry people packed on the plain below, 38-year-old Abel was having a bad day. Two oxen were working a field of potatoes but a rod on the plough kept snagging in the soil. Abel had no wrench or hammer so he did what his Old Testament namesake might have done.

He picked up a rock and bashed the offending equipment. Cuban agriculture is a disaster. Farms like this — a collective-run enterprise — lack not only tractors but basic tools. This is a fertile Caribbean island littered with dysfunctional farms which cannot feed the 11 million population, let alone export.

The three biggest successes of the communist revolution are health, education and sport, goes the old joke, and the three biggest failures are breakfast, lunch and dinner. That could change. If Raul Castro succeeds in boosting agriculture he will bolster the post-Fidel transition. Nobody starves but most Cubans struggle for decent nutrition. Farmers are strangled by red tape requiring permission to buy as much as a hoe.

‘The handcuffs are being taken off, though there is still a ball and chain around the ankles,’ said one foreign expert in the capital. Some 150,000 individual farms and co-operatives are estimated to produce two-thirds of Cuba’s food using just a third of the workable land. Anaemic state farms occupy the rest.

The government has experimented with reforms before, notably after the 1991 collapse of its Soviet benefactor, only to row back to Fidel Castro orthodoxy. Since stripping large landholdings in 1959, starting with his father’s estate, the maximum commandante was loathe to relinquish state control.

Now Fidel is 81, ailing and eclipsed by the more pragmatic Raul, the brother inaugurated as President last February. Raul has studied in China and Vietnam where the regimes have retained political control while freeing the economy. He wants changes to boost output. ‘The land is there to be tilled... We must offer producers adequate incentives.’ Cuba imports 80 per cent of its basic food with a third coming from the United States which exempts food from its economic embargo. The imports cost GBP800m annually, a drain on state coffers set to worsen as global prices rise.

Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a Cuba expert at Pittsburgh University, fears that the reforms do not go far enough. ‘Many Cuban economists believe that in agriculture, only market mechanisms and foreign investment will prove able to truly overcome stagnation,’ he said. But the mood among farmers was upbeat. ‘We have been waiting for this for so long,’ said Luis Pi, head of a co-operative growing vegetables. ‘We can do it if they let us. Come back in a few months. You’ll see.’

—The Guardian, London