Gilani’s arithmetic

PRIME Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani seems to have lost track of the simple arithmetic he learned in primary school. Talking to newsmen on Nov 6 he justified the recent recruitment of 22 new ministers and 18 ministers of state on grounds that appear to be flimsy.

The prime minister said the move would not place a burden on the exchequer. This is hard to believe. In addition to the usual salaries and allowances, the new ministers will have furnished homes, automobiles, servants, guards and other perquisites. All of this will cost many millions of rupees which the government will pay out of the exchequer.

The prime minister based the above assertion on the premise that the expenditure on having a minister did not exceed that required to maintain a parliamentarian. This premise is not valid for as we all know a member of parliament does not receive in addition to his salary the perquisites (mentioned above) that a minister does.

Consider also that the parliamentarians (342 in the National Assembly and 100 in the Senate) represent the sovereign people and the legislature they compose is admittedly the highest organ of the state. The cabinet is a committee of parliament to which the function of executing the laws has been entrusted. Parliament, being the principal, may give the cabinet, its agent, policy guidelines to follow, oversee its performance and dismiss it if the same is not satisfactory. It is wrong to imply that the two institutions are co-equal.

The prime minister contends that a large cabinet is needed to match the large number of divisions that compose the government, and to respond to the questions of 442 parliamentarians. This argument is not viable. Questions are asked during a specified period of time (usually one hour) on appointed days. Thus, only a limited number of questions can be asked on any given day. Note also that many a member has never asked a question during his entire parliamentary career. Many of the ministers are absent from the house when questions relating to their departments are being asked. It follows that the number of questions asked in parliament has no bearing on the cabinet’s size.

That each division must have a minister to run it is equally fallacious. Two relevant facts should be kept in mind. First, the existing ministries have been split into segments to create ministerial positions. Quite a few of them do not have much to do. A minister can easily look after two or three of them concurrently.

Second, rare indeed is the minister who goes to work every day and stays at his desk from morning until closing time. Some of them do not put in an appearance even for an hour or two each day. Work is not the love of their lives, and they may not even be interested in the mission of the department whose head they have become. They are interested primarily in the title and the good things that come with it. There is, in any case, not much for a minister to do. Implementation of the applicable law and policy is carried out by career civil servants headed by a secretary. They are also the ones who will formulate decisions on important issues, including any changes of direction that may have been deemed desirable, and present them to the minister for his formal approval. Normally, he will go along with whatever they have proposed.

The rules of business say that if the minister cannot accept the secretary’s recommendation the matter is to be referred to the prime minister for a final decision. This does not happen very often. In other words, the minister does not normally overrule the secretary. One may then conclude that the charge of two or three ministries is by no means a back-breaking burden for a minister.

Finally, there is the issue of living within one’s means. This is a rule of prudence that applies to public authorities as much as it does to private persons. Being a trustee of the people and custodian of the monies they have provided, a government is morally bound to be frugal as much as possible. This rule has never commended itself to governments in Pakistan.

Even in the best of times, they have chosen to rely on domestic borrowings and foreign loans and grants. Far from being the best of times, the present is an exceptionally hard one. Much of the world is caught up in an economic recession that may become a repeat of the Great Depression of the early 1930s and in a severe financial crisis which is driving corporations and governments to the verge of bankruptcy.

These crises have hit Pakistan as well and it is placed between the proverbial rock and a hard place. It faces the very real danger of defaulting on its scheduled debt payments. Its president and other officials are going around, hat in hand, begging the international community to bail it out by pumping tens of billions of dollars into its economy and treasury.

But alongside these professions of extreme adversity, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani chooses to act as if the global economic crisis cannot touch his government. Dismissing calls for austerity as irrelevant, he has added 40 new ministers to his cabinet and intends to take five or so more within the next few days. It has evidently not occurred to him that foreign donors and lenders might take a dim view of his reckless extravagance.

Mr Gilani is expanding his cabinet not because his government cannot function effectively without 45 more ministers. He is doing it because he cannot, or does not want to, tell parliamentarians of his own party, and those of his coalition partners, that he cannot give them ministerial posts as a price for their support, and that they should be content with being legislators and serve the country in that vital role.

If that course of action does not work and they threaten to withdraw support, he can go back to parliament, openly state his predicament and offer to resign. The lust of certain covetous legislators having been made public, it is possible that parliament will ask him to remain in office and pass a vote of confidence in him. Either way Mr Gilani will go down in history as a man of honour and courage, and a statesman.

The writer, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, is currently a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics.

anwarsyed@cox.net

Delusions of grandeur

PRESIDENT Zardari’s misplaced notions had led him to believe that he could take everybody on board and then conjure $100bn out of thin air to save the country from bankruptcy and terror.

This banana-skin interpretation of the prevailing situation dangerously detracts attention from the real weaknesses of our politics and economy.

The bizarre reality of Pakistan’s political culture is that every politician wants to be a minister or to hold another office of profit till he becomes one. This race to capture public office does not remain confined to the elected legislators. Competing with them is a larger number of friends and cronies of the party chiefs and power brokers. Both categories then are buttressed by advisers and technocrats to form a behemoth that costs a lot but does little.

From this assorted lot Mr Zardari has already taken on board 61 men and women not including the ambassadors-at-large (the more familiar ‘at-large’ are criminals) who could form another dozen. This number may add up to a hundred if Altaf Hussain and Maulana Fazlur Rahman have it their way when their parties join the government.

Nawaz Sharif too is willing to get on board provided Mr Zardari undertakes to repeal the 17th Amendment. His is an admirable stand. The gay abandon with which his nominees (Khwaja Asif, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, Ishaq Dar and one or two others) having joined the cabinet walked out of it was a rare and edifying spectacle in Pakistan’s horse-trading politics.

Nawaz Sharif’s apparent hesitation to lead the opposition and his continuing cordial contacts with Mr Zardari however point towards his willingness to meet him halfway. If the PML-N finally decides not to board the gravy train and yet not rattle the government either, the Q-League Chaudhries may not take long to jump on to the wagon. Then only the maverick Imran Khan and some others — angry or disgruntled — may be left to criticise the government in the parliament.

The parliament, as it is shaping up, commands little public attention — far from being supreme and sovereign as the litany went. Rhetoric flowed freely when the parliamentarians debated the terrorist violence but they failed to give any policy direction either to the executive or to the armed forces on how to conduct, or close, the war on terror. With a parliament that has yet to chart its course and a cabinet that is large but heterogeneous, the executive and legislative authority was bound to travel up to the presidency. That has happened. The control of state policy which should vest in the parliament and the cabinet now lies entirely with Mr Zardari.

Likewise, the burden of giving voice to popular discontent has also fallen on the press and the professions outside the parliament. The lawyers, for instance, wouldn’t have been marching on the streets if the parliament were to legislate on the controversial issue of judicial independence. The lawyers and judges both would have felt compelled to abide by such legislation for they are the chief exponents of the rule of law.

It is a strange coincidence (or is it by design?) that while the chief sources of anxiety today are the spreading violence and faltering economy, the men responsible for maintaining law and order and managing finances are unelected advisers and not elected ministers.

It caused little surprise when the finance adviser announced his three-stage plan (that never was) for the rehabilitation of the economy as his own and not in pursuance of the direction of the parliament nor, seemingly, will the parliament ever get to approve the IMF conditionalities. The appreciation, or the blame, for going back to the IMF once again will thus belong to Mr Tarin alone. The affairs of the state in areas most vital are thus being handled by the president and his advisers.

The parliamentary institutions are little more than bystanders. So is the nation. With little say, or interest, in matters of public policy the ministers are tending their daily routine with a keen eye on jobs and other favours for their kin and constituents. The jobs given through the prime minister’s task force alone are said to be 5,500. Most among them would be teachers and policemen. If the parliament and the civil society today acquiesce in this diabolical abuse of power they should not be heard tomorrow complaining of rising crime and falling standards of education.

Though the salary of a minister is not much, it costs the public treasury no less than a million a month to keep him in office. That sum is enough to employ 100 trained teachers. The taxpayer is thus hit twice over: first, he is made to pay for a minister or adviser who is not really needed and then he has to pay for teachers who are unfit to teach. The assumption that the public career of a politician is made by the favours he dispenses has proved wrong time and again. For once they should give fair play a chance.There is much hullabaloo over Pakistan going to the IMF. The Fund’s conditionalities are believed to be anti-people for they tend to curb subsidies and government spending. Now that there is hardly any subsidy for the common man but government spending is lavish, the people shall have a reason to be grateful to the IMF if the following strings were to be attached to its loan.

One, the savings derived from the cut in the fuel subsidy and all other subsidies should be spent only on housing for the poor, rural schools, public transport. Two, the government’s non-developmental expenditure should be frozen at the average of the last three, allegedly extravagant, years of the Musharraf regime. Three, the number of ministers should not be more than in America (said to be 15) and the expenditure on the presidency or the prime minister’s house should not exceed the expenditure on the White House (Qazi Hussain Ahmad’s information is presently it does). Four, all appointments in the public sector should be made through independent commissions on the basis of merit.

More similar conditions could be added. The country’s wayward leaders and weak institutions surely need a supranational watchdog. For lack of a better alternative let it be the IMF. The vibes coming from the common man who is never heard are very disturbing.

kunwaridris@hotmail.com

Realism in Ukraine

THE brawl in the Ukrainian parliament last Tuesday was an undignified ending to the country’s two-month political crisis, but something important has changed. In the immediate aftermath of the Orange Revolution of 2004, the more extreme Ukrainian nationalists fantasised that the country could break all its links with Russia and become an entirely western state, but realism is starting to prevail.

To the extent that ideas play a role in Ukrainian politics, they are mainly ideas about Russia. Is it a friendly neighbour, close to Ukrainians in language, culture and history, or is it a perpetual threat to Ukraine’s independence? The answer people give is mainly dependent on whether they speak Ukrainian or Russian at home (and about half of Ukraine’s citizens do speak Russian at home).

The more extreme nationalists would deny that, insisting that the great majority of the country’s citizens speak Ukrainian, but that is a wish rather than a fact, as a walk down the streets of any big Ukrainian city except Lviv in the far west of the country will quickly reveal. Centuries of Russian political domination mean that Russian is the dominant language of urban culture almost everywhere in Ukraine, and in the heavily industrialised east of the country even the ethnic Ukrainians mostly speak Russian.

Many, perhaps most Ukrainian nationalists believe that Ukraine can safeguard its independence only by integrating itself into the major western institutions. Since the old ex-communist elite was finally forced from power by the Orange Revolution in 2004, President Viktor Yushchenko, the leader of that non-violent revolution, has been pushing hard for membership in the European Union and Nato. But not all the leaders of that revolution think the same.

Yulia Tymoshenko, with her trademark braided hair, became almost as famous as Yushchenko during the events of 2004, and afterwards she became prime minister. She subsequently fell out with Yushchenko, but was back as prime minister by December of last year. She is unquestionably a Ukrainian nationalist, but she was uncharacteristically silent when the conflict between Georgia and Russia blew up last August.

President Viktor Yushchenko, now her bitterest rival, was outspoken in his backing of Georgia against the Russian “invasion”, and urged the European Union and Nato to speed up their response to Ukraine’s applications for membership. But Ukraine is deeply divided on those questions, with around half the population opposing Nato membership, and neither western organisation responded with an unequivocal yes.

Tymoshenko didn’t say much about that, either, and then in September her party in parliament voted along with the pro-Russian Party of the Regions in a move to curb the president’s powers. President Yushchenko saw this as a betrayal, since Tymoshenko’s party and his own “Our Ukraine” group were in coalition in parliament, so he dissolved the coalition and called an early parliamentary election in mid-September.

Quite a few people in Ukraine suspect that Tymoshenko has made a secret deal with the Russians. She intends to run for the presidency against Yushchenko next year, and the theory is that she promised to keep quiet about Georgia and not push for Ukrainian membership in the EU and Nato in return for Moscow’s tacit support in the presidential election.

Moscow is very unhappy with the openly anti-Russian stance of President Yushchenko, and the September vote to curb his powers was just what it wanted to see. It couldn’t have passed without Tymoshenko’s support, and many see it as proof that she has made her deal. She is positioning herself as a Ukrainian nationalist who is not anti-Russian, and that may be enough to win her the presidency next year. But it unleashed two months of political chaos in Ukraine.

Aligning herself once again with the pro-Russian Regions party, she used their joint majority in parliament to resist Yushchenko’s decree of fresh parliamentary elections: they simply refused to vote the funds for an election. Meanwhile the global economic crisis swept into Ukraine, forcing it to seek a $16.5 billion emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund.

Yushchenko has now accepted that he cannot force new parliamentary elections at least until the new year. It may well turn out that he cannot force them even then — and his party would probably lose if he did. Moreover, he is very likely to lose office himself when the presidential election rolls around later in the year.

So Tymoshenko and Moscow win — but so, perhaps, does Ukraine, for the extreme pro-western and anti-Russian positions taken up by Yushchenko were not wise. Moscow does not appear to harbour any ambition to regain the control over Ukraine that it had in Soviet and Tsarist times, but it would see a Ukrainian government that joined Nato as an enemy of Russia. Ukraine’s independence is probably safer outside Nato than it would be inside it.