Good and bad leaders

MANY years ago a judge of the Lahore High Court remarked that a nation got the leaders it deserved. More recently Barbara Kellerman, author of a book on bad leaders, has noted that there is no bad leadership without bad ‘followership’. I do not accept these interpretations.

Reasonably intelligent and well-meaning people have occasionally made an error of judgement and elected a wrong person to high office. The election of George W. Bush as president of the United States is a case in point.

Anyone wishing to succeed as a leader should be intelligent, energetic, decisive, determined, an effective communicator and ambitious. He will be reckoned a good leader if he is also willing to practise self-denial and place the public interest above personal and private interests. One may have some of these characteristics (energy, determination, communication skills) and end up as a bad leader if he is rigid, intemperate, callous, corrupt and incompetent.

Before we proceed further a clarification may be in order. Beyond national independence and territorial integrity, specifics of the public interest and the means of achieving it are not always known and settled. Eradication of terrorism is indisputably a part of the public interest in Pakistan but the meaning of terrorism and the identity of terrorists are open to dispute.

The spread of education and health care and the provision of numerous other amenities are doubtless components of the public interest, but the means of delivering them are matters of debate. It is a good leader’s obligation to identify and adopt the best-available version of the public interest, one that is the closest to the aspirations of his people.

Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah is the only one in our recent history who possessed all of the aforementioned qualities of a good leader. He is the model for others to follow but we know that none has even approximated his level of attainment. Looking for the more notable leaders after Jinnah, we find that Liaquat Ali Khan was a good public speaker, a reasonably competent administrator and capable of self-denial. But his political judgement and his interpretations of the public interest were not always sound.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was brilliant, a fantastic orator and a very effective mass leader, but he was lusty of personal power, arrogant, impulsive and intolerant of dissidents. Some of his policy choices, expressing his understanding of the public interest, were misconceived and ended up hurting the country. His daughter Benazir was an elegant woman, bright, a good public speaker with excellent rapport with the masses. But as prime minister she turned out to be inefficient as a manager of public affairs.

Let us now look at the knights in shining armour currently doing battle on the ground of Pakistani politics. Mr Nawaz Sharif has a substantial following in Punjab. His communication skills and his posture generally have much improved since 1999 when Gen Musharraf overthrew his government. The forced solitude during his years of exile has given him greater maturity and poise. Ideologically he remains a conservative. His concern for the dictates of political ethics has become firmer. He inspires trust and his popularity has been increasing since his return to Pakistan.

His brother Shahbaz Sharif is believed to be an honest and decent man. He is an effective communicator, exceptionally efficient as an administrator, but said to be ruthless in dealing with officials in his administration who in his judgement stand low on the scale of competence or integrity.

Mr Altaf Hussain, head of the MQM, represents an amazing phenomenon. He is a British citizen who has been living in London for the last 15 years or so. An eloquent public speaker, capable organiser and fund-raiser, he has a huge following among the Urdu-speaking people in Karachi and some of the other towns of Sindh. He is stern with dissidents within his party. His followers may or may not love him but they do hold him in awe, admire him and consider it the better part of wisdom to obey him. He in turn does all he can to advance their interests.

Asif Ali Zardari, who runs the PPP and also the country, is a clever tactician and a good organiser. He has undeservedly inherited some of Benazir Bhutto’s charisma and the PPP elders unquestioningly do his bidding. He subscribes to Machiavelli’s teaching that princes may break the undertakings they have given to other princes. Not surprisingly then he does not inspire trust. His dedication to the public interest appears to be diffused.

Yusuf Raza Gilani, in spite of a long and varied political career, is ineffective as prime minister, wanting in energy, decisiveness, drive for power and competence. He is, however, a good and conscientious parliamentarian. Sherry Rehman is at this time the PPP’s only noteworthy asset: she is remarkably bright, a fine speaker, and an able exponent and defender of her government’s policies and actions. The PPP would be much the poorer without her.

Asfandyar Wali Khan of the ANP is committed to his avowed principles, a man of the people dedicated to Pakhtun causes and interests. He is content with being a regional leader and seems to have no national-level aspirations. Pir Pagara is not much of a politician. His following in Sindh is based on his status as a feudal lord and his claim to divinity.

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain (PML-Q) is deficient in all categories of evaluation. His influence, such as it is, probably derives more from his wealth than his charm or charisma.

A good people may not be able to make a bad leader good but I believe a good leader can, by the force of his example, contribute to the improvement of his people’s political culture. Are any of our present leaders capable of making such a contribution? Not the ones belonging to the PPP, MQM, PML-Q and PML-F (Pagara). The PML-N did not act as an agent of reform during Mr Nawaz Sharif’s two terms as prime minister.

Some people may regard his sponsorship of a Sharia bill as a reformist measure but that was a kind of reform that a great many people in this country did not want. If my impression is correct that he is a lot more upright now than he was in the 1990s, his virtue may filter down to politicians and civil servants who work with him if he gets to be prime minister again. Whether this will actually happen remains to be seen.

The writer is a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics.

anwars@lahoreschool.edu.pk

A household of 180 servants

SOME time ago a press reporter asked President Zardari whether Pakistan stood in danger of being declared bankrupt. Mr Zardari’s weary reply was that Pakistan was not a company or a business that it should go bankrupt.

As all of us now see, the nettlesome reporter was justifiably worried but a piqued president was unjustifiably complacent. Any organisation which is unable to pay its debts is bankrupt. So will be a country. It may not be so declared by a court but international agencies do so by their ratings.

When Pakistan’s friends and allies declined to help despite their sympathetic concern, they had obviously determined that Pakistan was on the verge of bankruptcy. The IMF’s loan of $7.6bn is intended to enable Pakistan to pay back its debts as they fall due so that it remains bankable for friends.With external debt now exceeding $50bn and domestic borrowing only a little less, Pakistan can still go bankrupt if embezzlement and the extravagant use of public money were to continue unchecked, as in a recession income will not increase nor all subsidies can be withdrawn.

I am one of those columnists who, in the estimation of some economists, know next to nothing about economics. But that is precisely the reason why I have no doubt that the challenge that Pakistan faces today is not financial. It is moral. The moral values are declining all around, but are declining faster and steeper in politics and public institutions.

How much of the revenue due to the state is not collected remains a wild guess. Some would say more is evaded and misappropriated than is recovered. The public money squandered or embezzled by the politicians, officials, contractors and suppliers is now reckoned to be as high as 40 per cent. Today’s Mr 10 Per Cent could pass for Mr Clean if he were an official whose salary is enough to subsist on. For big guns it is insultingly too little.

Rumours abound and so do anecdotes. One rumour that all tend to believe is that the officials who owe allegiance to one or the other party, which these days many do, get targets for the funds they must raise to sustain the party establishment. The number of such officials, hence the amount, has been increasing as nomination rather than merit has all but become a rule for initial entry and later for assignment to lucrative posts.

Out of the anecdotes that abound, just one, may be recounted here. The nominee of a minister went back to him complaining that though a letter of appointment was given to him he was not being paid as no post in the department was vacant. The minister’s reply was convincingly simple: it is the job and not the salary that matters. On the other hand, the country’s Public Service Commission is carrying hundreds of vacancies in the superior services from year to year as the candidates of the required standard are not forthcoming.

That is quite understandable. The kind of young men the commission looks for get four times as much in the private sector as the best service in government would pay. The son of a CSP officer who had followed in the footsteps of his father resigned to join a private company when the key posts of the cadre — commissioner and district magistrate — were abolished.

The incompetent and corrupt officials in conjunction with the politicians fitting the same description, only more numerous, have lowered Pakistan’s credit rating much more than the flaws in its economic policies. Then, the excess of manpower and extravagance in expenditure is witnessed at all levels but is most bizarre at the top. It can be said in general that the government in Islamabad, as also in the provinces, can work and indeed perform better with one-third of the present strength.

But let the focus for a while be at the top — the president and the prime minister. According to the budget book, the president’s secretariat has a staff of 761 and the expense incurred in a year is Rs306m. The prime minister’s secretariat has a much larger staff —1,005 — but the expense, mercifully, is only Rs13m more, i.e. Rs319m. The number of the PM’s household servants alone is 180. Maybe someone who had seen the households of Liaquat Ali Khan and H.S. Suhrawardy would tell us how many servants they had.

The president and the prime minister having secretariats of their own is, of course, a latter-day innovation which besides extra expense has been a source of delay, duplication, intrigue, conflict and corruption. The secretariat of the government is indeed their secretariat but the present-day incumbents of the high offices do not listen as they must have their own men and many.A year after independence when I was a student in Gujjar Khan, a town in northern Punjab, the school building had no desks, the boys squatted on the floor and the teacher spoke perched on a stool. But then the education minister (the forgotten and not today’s Mr Dasti) came visiting one day riding a tonga. 60 years later schools are still without desks but the ministers have fleets of cars.

13 years after independence when I was a section officer in the West Pakistan secretariat at Lahore only the chief secretary had a government car and that too for official use. For the rest, secretaries and all, there were five cars in the pool. A proposal for the sixth then mooted was turned down by the Finance Secretary A.G.N. Kazi. In today’s four secretariats which have replaced that one, the problem is to find parking space for the government cars.

The press reported some time ago that a Sindh minister had 10 cars in his use. Every other minister had two or more. Only the agriculture minister Ali Nawaz Shah had one. If I get to see Mr Shah one day I must ask him, pray, why? Perhaps it is because of such like men that the country is still a going concern. But with such extravagance and embezzlement all over and the ‘who cares’ attitude above, should we be protesting against the IMF for trying to keep the country a going concern when no one else, not even Saudi Arabia or China, would?

kunwaridris@hotmail.com

Andha dhun firing

A PATRIOTIC visually challenged man goes to a policeman and requests to be recruited in the force, saying that he wants to help his country. The policeman, a little confused, asks him, “Tum toh andhey ho. Police mein kia karo gey?” (You are blind. What will you do in the police?) The sightless man replies, “Sir, andha dhun firing!”

Unfortunately, good intentions alone are not enough to change our country. Everybody is passionate about educating the masses but it seems that the strategy of providing this education is becoming less and less effective, like the andha dhun firing of the police. In our welter of ghost schools and drug addict shelters, our well-meaning NGOs come forward to add more and more school buildings. True, these structures are much whiter than our peela schools. They are cleaner too and have teacher-training programmes. But the larger problem of outdated textbooks remains unaddressed.

Buildings and furniture are important but do not constitute the core of the crisis in education today. Even teacher-training becomes ineffective when the basic tool of imparting education — a textbook — is severely substandard. A poorly trained teacher using a good textbook is still far ahead of a well-trained teacher using a poor textbook. If the textbook itself captivates a child and catches his interest half the battle is won. Of course, a teacher is invaluable in facilitating learning and understanding, clarifying ideas and motivating a child to progress. However, currently our textbooks and the majority of our government school teachers are failing to deliver.

Many new schools sponsored by NGOs are coming up. But in their vicinity only a few kilometres away invariably stands a structure that goes by the name of a government school. It has a building that is twice as big and a playground that would be the delight of any sportsman’s heart. But the sad thing is that this building is in ruins and the ground is home to stray animals and anti-social humans rejected by society. This is a school where the basic facilities are already in place.

They only need to be renovated. But no one wants to touch this school because philanthropists feel that by doing so they will dirty their hands. Their biggest fear in working with the government is that their contribution will be transient — a time will come when all their efforts will be rolled back. They will lose control over their domain when some one else with official backing will seize it from them. Then false accusations, for instance of land-grabbing, will be levelled against them.

On the rare occasions that NGOs do work in government schools, they only go as far as bringing about cosmetic changes, with good intentions of course. Take the case of the ‘adopt a school’ programme launched several years ago when patrons faced stiff resistance, when after bringing about structural improvements they tried to improve the working of a school. Can one really blame a person for feeling it is pointless working with the government if fundamentals like textbooks, teaching methods and the administration of a school are not to change?

The fact is that it is the NGOs that will have to bring about this change and they have to do it with zero tolerance. They are not willing to do that because this is controversial, requiring as it does their moving out of their comfort zones and confronting vested interests. What these NGOs and educationists do not realise is that working in the public sector of education is the only way out. It is without doubt a much harder fight to fight. But healthcare and education can only lie with the state if their provision reaches all and sundry. NGOs and passionate educationists can keep opening up new schools in the hope of educating our masses but what they do not realise is that their efforts will remain isolated and eventually ineffective.

The government alone has the resources with which to put together an education system that is both far-reaching and well-maintained. Although these resources are not being properly utilised, there is no denying the potential of the existing system — it only needs a lot of repair. The need of the hour is not more school buildings. A beginning has to be made by improving the existing infrastructure that the government has already created over the years.

If we continue to shun the public education sector, nothing will change. I request all the NGOs who seriously want things to improve to join hands and work together and strengthen the government education system. Let us create a culture of true learning and bring equality to these schools where the rich and poor can study side by side. Let us oil the government machinery so it can start running all over the country. Our NGOs bring their own technical resources and commitment; let us use this wealth collectively towards a common goal.

The writer, a singer, is president of Zindagi Trust, an organisation working for child welfare and education.

royzad@gmail.com