Ancient buses, dream trains

AS far back in time as a senior citizen can recall, say 40 years ago, the federal and provincial governments and the municipality of Karachi (also a government now) have been talking of a mass transport system for the city.

At various stages projects have been contemplated or sanctioned for rapid transit corridors, for elevated roads and rails and for CNG buses.None of these promises or projects materialised nor will they do so as far as surviving senior citizens can see. What actually has been happening may be quickly recounted here for the sake of nostalgia. The trams which were Karachi’s pride stopped running 35 years ago and their track from Keamari to Soldier Bazaar to Cantt Station lies buried under layers of asphalt; the circular railway (it was not even semi-circular) closed down 20 years ago, its remnants lie in ruin; the bus fleet has been aging and dwindling.

Today, the newest bus on the road is 20 years old and the oldest 60 years with the exception of the few hundred buses that came under the Nawaz Sharif government’s loan and subsidy scheme in the 1990s. Huge sums that have gone into the construction of the city’s flyovers and underpasses are meant to benefit only the motorists. Public buses are not permitted to use them — not even the horrendously expensive and delayed Lyari freeway.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from what was promised and what actually happened is that successive governments were either being irresponsible or were knowingly making fun of the citizens or fooling them. Whatever it was the habit hasn’t died. The three urban transport schemes recently announced, or sanctioned, are likely to meet a fate no different from that of the grand plans of the past.

The first, and most authentic, of the three is the revival of Karachi’s circular railway — with the circle completed and spurs added — costing $872m over three years. This capital cost which is based on the prices of 2006 will surely double given the present rate of inflation and almost certainly delay the completion of the project. Resultantly, the stipulated single trip fair of Rs50 will also double.

Though the Japanese government is said to have agreed to meet the foreign exchange component — $654m — and the federal government will provide the local cost of $218m in rupees, the final approval, crucially, hinges on a commitment by the Sindh and city governments that neither of the two will demand any subsidy from the federal government for operating losses.

Unmindful of this condition, a row has already erupted between the province and the city over who would head the board — the transport minister or the nazim — which is to oversee the operations by a private company. Seemingly, the row is not about who can do a better job but the patronage it involves. It invokes a fear similar to that among country peasants for whom the robbers arrived on the scene before their village came up.

Leaving the capital cost, operational subsidy and management issues aside, the project will benefit only a small segment of the population if buses do not connect each railway station with localities in the vicinity. Even if that can be organised, which is unlikely, the commuters would rather take a bus all the way from home to work than wait in transit and pay the amount twice over. That was the chief reason for the huge loss and ultimate closure of the semi-circular railway.

The circular railway project, both for reasons of huge cost and limited benefit, is wholly unfeasible. So also is the rapid-corridor project for which the city district government claims to have secured aid to the tune of $800m from the Asian Development Bank. It can be straightaway dismissed as no more than boastful deception. So should be the claim of the nazim that he had already received Rs2.5bn for CNG — from where, the city government’s propaganda brochure doesn’t say.

The federal government, indeed, has approved a project envisaging subsidy to private investors who elect to operate CNG buses in major cities with Karachi getting the first priority. But no operator has come forth in a year.

The CNG bus scheme has lost whatever little attraction it had for investors with a recent government announcement proposing to equalise the price of all types of fuel. The private sector now can be persuaded to buy and operate CNG buses only if one or the other government was to pick up the difference between the price of the diesel and CNG which is around 30 per cent.

Fifty years is a period long enough to deceive commuters and keep their hopes alive. The schemes now being bandied about hold no promise of improvement for city transport for another decade. In fact, the situation will aggravate if we do not resort to the only practical and affordable remedy which is to modernise and expand the bus fleet.

This is the solution always put across by those who know the transport business or, like this writer, have unsuccessfully tried to regulate it. Mr Enrique Penalosa, who turned Bogota’s chaotic transport system into the envy of the developing world, was godsend at this moment of critical choice. He too has broadly supported this very pragmatic approach with his experience and demonstrable success as mayor of Bogota.

As advised by Mr Penalosa, wherever the road width permits tram lines should be laid alongside the bus lanes. That would revive a part of Karachi’s folklore besides providing its citizens an economical means of transportation. The planning commission chief Salman Faruqi who is more of a doer than a dreamer should lose no time in putting his money on Mr Penalosa than the international financiers and big-ticket players at home. Both have an axe to grind.

But Mr Faruqi’s first and almost insurmountable task should be to make the government reconcile itself to the principle of subsidising the urban transport operations as it is done the world over — even in the freest of market economies. Punjab under Shahbaz Sharif has started doing it in a modest way with visible improvement in the quality of city bus services. Sindh is there only to dither or dream and squabble.

kunwaridris@hotmail.com

Accountability of rulers

ACTIONS have consequences that catch up with us sooner or later. But this law of nature does not seem to apply equally to rulers. Presidents and prime ministers often get away with the improprieties they may have committed. The procedure for punishing their wrongdoing is very tedious.

An American president may be removed for his violations of the law through impeachment by the House of Representatives and trial in the Senate. Actually, no president has ever been forced out of office. President Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1866 but the move to convict him failed by one vote in the Senate. Richard Nixon, facing the danger of impeachment over the Watergate break-in scandal in 1974, resigned. The House of Representatives impeached Bill Clinton for perjury in connection with his affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, but the Senate acquitted him.

In parliamentary democracies a prime minister may be removed by his own party or by the voters at the next election. Another way is for a majority in the lower House of parliament to pass a vote of no-confidence against him. Governments have fallen in this manner in some European countries, notably France, but I can’t recall the same having happened in recent British history. Nor has the central government in India or Pakistan fallen as a result of a no-confidence vote.

The constitution of Pakistan allows the president to dissolve the National Assembly where the prime minister is the leader of the majority party. If the assembly is gone, so is the prime minister. This is a weird method for the president to get rid of an unwanted prime minister in that the institution being penalised — the National Assembly — has done no wrong. Presidents Ziaul Haq, Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Farooq Leghari resorted to this method. They did so because they did not get along with the prime minister, but the reason they gave in each case was that her/his government had been corrupt.

Condemnation of corruption from the public platform is loud even though it appears to be deeply entrenched in the Pakistani political culture. All decent men will vote for the ways and means that can be effective in eradicating corruption. I am, however, very sceptical of the efficacy of two of them.

If my recollection is correct, it was during Mr Nawaz Sharif’s second term as prime minister that an agency called the Ehtesab Bureau was set up. It went after Mr Sharif’s predecessors in power — Benazir Bhutto, her husband and associates — and filed numerous cases of corruption and misuse of authority against them to be heard in courts located in different places so that the accused had to run from one city to another to present their defence. These cases went on for long as did cases filed under the National Accountability Bureau installed by Gen Musharraf in 1999.

One reason for these cases to drag on was that the charges in most of them were said to be bogus, the supporting evidence was inadequate and the prosecution incompetent. Another reason was that the sponsoring government was more interested in harassing and tiring out its rivals than in delivering justice. Charges were also brought against other public officials such as former ministers, legislators, and civil servants, but on a partisan basis. Those among the corrupt who had made deals with the current regime were left alone. Friends of the bureau’s own staff were also spared. Plea-bargaining and out-of-court settlements were allowed in which the accused surrendered a part of his loot and was let go. NAB became notorious as the regime’s instrument to persecute its political opponents.

There has been some talk of disbanding NAB, which is a good idea but has not been implemented so far. Its funding has been reduced substantially and as a result it has had to lay off many employees. Perhaps it will have a slow death by attrition.

Let us now look at another way to detect and deter political corruption being used in Pakistan. The Representation of the People Act of 1976 requires legislators to submit annual statements of their assets and liabilities to the chief election commissioner (CEC). These statements are to cover, in addition to the legislator himself, his spouse and dependents.

According to a recent news report, the CEC has called upon members of parliament and the provincial assemblies to submit their statements by Sept 30, 2008. Failure to do so will result in the suspension of the defaulter’s membership of the relevant assembly. This requirement is open to several objections.

First, the CEC is being asked to deal with some 1,200 statements. He is most unlikely to have the skilled manpower to examine that many statements and compare them with those filed during the preceding years to see if any extraordinary increase has been taking place.

Second, those filing the statements will probably understate their assets and overstate their liabilities. The election commission is in no position to verify their accuracy.

Third, unlike officials in the executive branch, legislators do not have the power to offer or deny citizens substantial gains. They may obtain small favours for their constituents by interceding on their behalf with ministers and civil servants whom they happen to know well, but their ability to do so is limited. They cannot make a whole lot of money through corrupt practices even if they want to. The CEC’s annual scrutiny of their assets would then seem to be a dysfunctional exercise.

Fourth, assets include not only money in the bank, which can be counted, but also immovable property such as homes and their contents (furniture, appliances, paintings and other works of art), which the election commission has no way of evaluating.

Fifth, while an income tax officer is admittedly entitled to look into a taxpayer’s income, the furnishings in his house should be none of his or any other public agency’s business. The government’s entitlement to know must be weighed and balanced against the individual’s right to privacy. This right applies with even greater force to the rubies and diamonds that the legislator’s good wife may happen to own. Her affairs should be entirely beyond any public official’s reach.

The apparatus of accountability has not worked well in Pakistan. It needs to be reconsidered and redesigned.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts.

anwarsyed@cox.net

Politics continue to brew in Punjab

IT is significant that Hamza Shahbaz Sharif, an MNA in his own right and by his own talent, is saying this. In true political and family tradition, the young scion of the Sharif family roared in old Lahore the other day: “We will break the hands of those who try to topple the Punjab government.” Only the naïve would find the chant superfluous, the naïve who mistake the new round of flaunted friendship between the Pakistan Muslim League and the Pakistan People’s Party in Punjab for real.

The latest show of pro-democracy camaraderie starred Messrs Raja Riaz, Rana Sanaullah and Sardar Zulfiqar Khosa. The television crews were given their due when Raja Riaz told them a few days ago that Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif had agreed to give his party, the PPP, its share of power in the province. He went so far as to estimate that the share would be 40 per cent to the PML-N’s 60 per cent domination.

The parleys still go on, as indeed continue the warnings from either side, even if they are a little more subdued than before in the case of the PPP. The two allies of the past were at loggerheads until the other day and while now they promise to take us forward together, they cannot help but be suspicious of each other.

Suppose we agree that the two partners have sorted out their differences, then what realities was the rift made of? In a hurry it can be proven that the PPP, despite its grand power overtures, was never in a position to challenge the well-entrenched government of Mian Shahbaz Sharif, that it was only raising the stakes in the game to get the maximum out of the PML-N government in Punjab.

With some reflection it can be said that the PPP by its manouevres has made it clear to Mr Sharif that if he wanted to rule over Punjab, he can only do so in alliance with the PPP. His scheme, as a first part of which his party comrades had asked the PPP ministers to quit the Punjab cabinet, has been put on hold. The PPP, with the help of a now disintegrating and now coming together PML-Q, has managed to save the situation for now.

The serial has run something like this: the PML-N politicians ask the PPP to quit the Punjab cabinet and occupy the opposition benches, the PPP leaders resist the move and hint to the PML-Q that the two of them together could upset the PML-N applecart, the PML-Q manages to woo some of its dissident MPAs back into its pen, the PML-N could still pull it off numerically but prefers caution to risk-ridden bravado and agrees to play ball with the PPP.

A casualty of these happenings is the thesis that writes off the PML-Q and its leaders, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi. The PML-Q remains a weak entity but to be fair to the Chaudhries they have been able to, even if momentarily, come out of their non-playing status. One explanation could be that the PML-N leadership thought it imprudent to not take on the powers that PPP had accumulated for itself at the centre. If this was the case, the get-rid-of-PPP noise the Sharif coterie continued to create well after the presidential election made little sense.

The most acceptable theory doing the rounds is that Shahbaz Sharif is biding his time. He will try and further boost the numbers by effecting desertions in the PML-Q. That he is no mood to welcome the Chaudhries back is implicit in the recent crackdown on the Wajahat Force, a vigilante group run in Gujrat by Chaudhry Shujaat’s brother, Chaudhry Wajahat.

It is unlikely that the PML-N will be severely challenged in this endeavour, especially if it manages to neutralise Governor Salman Taseer in its ‘desire’ for a hassle-free relationship with the PPP part of the cabinet. Except for Salman Taseer, who at least has a high enough profile, the other PPP leaders on stage do not represent too much of a threat to the strong House of Sharifs. Raja Riaz from Faisalabad stands up for the PPP as the party’s leader in the Punjab Assembly but he is yet to emerge as someone who can effectively take on even the second tier PML-N leaders such as Rana Sanaullah, a gentleman who won much fame after he was tortured by the previous regime.

Innovative and opportunist leadership has eluded the PPP in Punjab ever since Farooq Leghari failed in his attempt to form a PPP government in Lahore after the election in 1988. Shah Mahmood Qureshi was leading the party in Punjab when the latest vote was cast on Feb 18 this year. Like so many others, he opted for the centre when a PML-N-led set-up in Punjab became a certainty. And it has been a climb-down since.

The problem with the PPP’s leadership in the province is that it has at best been able to inspire sympathy. It initiates no political moves of its own and only reacts, as well as it can, to the Sharifs. Even then, as it was too dependent on Benazir in Benazir’s PPP, it relies too heavily on Zardari in Zardari’s PPP.