Where do the billions that donor agencies give to Pakistan in order to improve the country’s educational system vanish?
“ONE of the things that would be useful for the World Bank to have is monthly regular reports on changes that affect people’s lives. We have a fascination on how many jobs are created in America each month, yet we don’t have the same interest in more basic measures elsewhere.”
To paraphrase Paul O’Neill, former US treasury secretary and author of this rebuke: the World Bank has been slow to demonstrate results. Period.
Now, would it not have been super for James Wolfensohn, the World Bank president, who streaked across Pakistan not too long ago, to talk of how many Pakistani lives had the bank’s much touted ‘poverty alleviation’ programme touched?
Simplistically put, he could have employed the five Ws and one H as his pathfinders, dressing up his presidential address with flesh and blood success stories of Pakistanis living on the fringes. Why could he not have dexterously skipped over the bank’s bureaucratic boilerplate with a formulaic format predictably reserved for Third World rulers?
On the contrary, postulating broad sweeps, Wolfensohn blushed a rosy portrait of Pakistan: lauding Pervez Musharraf for his leadership; applauding Shaukat Aziz for his vision; and cheering Pakistan for its impressive economic growth.
“Seven per cent growth by a country which was hovering around three per cent a few years back is quite an achievement,” gushed Wolfensohn, giving Messrs Musharraf and Aziz an award of $1-billion annually for three years.
The billion, added Wolfensohn, was for the poor of Pakistan. “The country is now ready to unleash its potential ensuring that benefits reach the most vulnerable, significantly reducing poverty and improving living standards for the population.”
He then flew away, leaving 45 million poor Pakistanis drooling and praying that may Allah put fear in the hearts of their leaders and prick their conscience to give to them what Wolfensohn had pledged and not pocket it themselves or fritter it away on crack-brained projects with cash filtering down to cronies and political lackeys.
Click! Before we proceed any further with how the rulers are going to apportion the billion among themselves, I mean the army wallahs, the mullahs, the bureaucrats and of course the politico schmucks, we have already stumbled into a stinking body of evidence pointing to pilgrimage by our rulers as sarkari kharcha. Our men, the prime ministers — Shaukat Aziz, Shujaat Hussain and Zafarullah Jamali — alone wiped off Rs43 million from the public treasury on Umra in a single year. Is it not the undying belief of lesser mortals that Allah only accepts Haj or Umra of those who pay for their trip, board and lodging themselves? But, I guess, there are separate laws for VVIPs — they must have a private hotline with their Creator. How else to explain such perfidy to one’s own people?
Of course, in their defence, they can cite their official audiences with the Saudi royalty, and a plug for Pakistan. And I grant them this leeway. But what about airlifting the whole caboodle — amiji, abaji, bahenji, bhaijan, baita, baitee, nephew and nieces and, of course, the begum sahib? The list of freeloaders does not end here, but extends to all those dirt bags that shamelessly hop on to the VIP plane headed for Saudi Arabia, all expenses paid.
Millionaire Shaukat Aziz, who owns a handsome brownstone in Tudor City — an address to die for in New York — should feel the need to take money from the taxpayer for his Umra and 49 of his extras costing Rs11.12 million? Et tu Brutus?
Mr Wolfensohn sir, are you there? We know you’re retiring soon and there’s already a long list of Americans lobbying for your job that Bush alone will handpick, but do you earnestly believe that the wish list you left behind in Islamabad will be given any earnestness, given the greed of the ruling cabal?
Calling Pakistan’s progress “terrific”, Wolfensohn listed the “very poor, women, children and the disabled,” of Pakistan as the “vulnerable sections of society” who needed to be bailed out by Musharraf and Aziz.
He did talk about something regarding human development goals and its achievement. He also in passing spoke of ‘empowerment of women’.
Included in his wish list was “improvements in education and health; strengthening and supporting small and medium enterprises; special emphasis on rural development; and provision of all related infrastructure holds the key to substantive poverty reduction in Pakistan.”
Pious thoughts, but first plug the official plunder and then talk development.
The big bank loves conducting studies and whatever its consultants come up with is considered sacrosanct — both by the bank and the country under study.
Pervez Hoodbhoy’s bone-chilling exposition about the pitiable state of our universities is a wake-up call for the World Bank who according to Hoodbhoy’s former colleague at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Dushka Saiyid, has admitted giving “wrong advice to the developing countries”.
The World Bank first lectured Pakistan to give “low priority” to higher education, according to Saiyid. Now, to quote Hoodbhoy, “foreign donors worried about the implications of Pakistan’s sinking educational system obliged. The higher education budget zoomed by 12 times (1,200 per cent) over three years, a world record.”
Instead of husbanding the money, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) under Dr Attaur Rehman, the chairman, asserts Hoodbhoy, has created “very dangerous, possibly lethal, systemic changes” that have resulted with the HEC allowing importers to flower freely with their phony academic standards and sham degrees. Quackery has the upper hand today.
Calling it a “numbers game”, he says these so-called universities lack “infrastructure, libraries, laboratories, adequate faculty, or even a pool of students academically prepared to study at the university level.”
So much for the 600lb perennially pregnant gorilla placed in our midst by the World Bank who blithely blunders on with extravagant baby showers on the HEC as it delivers a university-a-day from Karachi to Khyber.
Hot off the press is yet one more World Bank study on “Punjab’s poor” on both sides of the border. Ijaz Nabi of the bank organized in Washington DC a seminar that included Salman Zaidi and Deepak Mishra — the two authors of Pakistan and Indian Punjab study respectively.
Sure as shooting, the esoteric analyses of both the dons travelled the road less travelled by making the path to achievement quite inaccessible, in our lifetime at least, to a better life for Punjabis on both sides of the divide. (But who cares about Punjabis, when the rest of the country groans under grinding poverty, human rights violation and injustice?)
Knock on the doorsteps of the poor anywhere and they’ll tell you what poverty really is. It’s time the World Bank stopped conducting these highfalutin studies that measure poverty not in human terms but by theoretically cold and purely academic pedagogues.
And why pick Washington DC, the World Bank headquarters, for discussions on life of the poor rotting thousands of miles away? Makes no sense, does it?
Wolfensohn insists he will work “very hard” until June (when he retires) and as a parting kick — oops! I mean a gift — will leave behind a “transition manual ... an ABC guide on how to run the bank.”
He told newsmen that the “bootlegged copies will be made available to the press, and then you can all know the secrets of the institution, but in any event I’m going to try and get that together because it’s something I lacked when I came in and I’d like my successor to have it.”
Ego massaging of Third World corrupt rulers, I bet, will top the list of things to say!
Where do the billions that donor agencies give to Pakistan in order to improve the country’s educational system vanish?
