10
THERE was once a young girl who was interested in sports, but by the time she reached Grade 7 she realised that in her country, sports was a career which was hard for women to pursue. She would not have been able to make it big, so she switched her focus from sports to studies, and set her eyes on joining the civil service.
By the time she received her Bachelor’s degree, she had given up her civil service dreams because, to put it in her own words, there was “little money” in it. She joined the top school of the country to study economics. It was here that she met her future husband who incidentally topped the civil services examinations in 1996 and joined the service only to quit five years later when the couple moved to the US. This is the true story of Dr Gita Gopinath, chief economist at the IMF, and is as pertinent to Pakistan as it is to India — the country of its origin.
The dilemma of countries like Pakistan and India where politicking takes precedence over quality policymaking in running the affairs of the government is that quality human resource is squandered in one form or the other. This leads to brain drain; but even when that quality human resource, after skills have been polished elsewhere, returns, we lose them again by banishing them for their religious views, personal life or work experiences. We are great at spinning conspiracy theories and tagging individuals as American agents, infidels, Jewish lobby members, traitors and what not.
I am sure when Dr Gita Gopinath gave up the idea of joining the civil service and decided to pursue her higher education in the US, her peers from Delhi University must have stuck to their plan of joining the civil service. Today, many among them might have hands-on experience of the civil service, but her horizons cannot be compared to theirs. She was a bird of a bigger cage.
The tragedy is that politicking takes precedence over policymaking.
Now if she has intentions of returning to her homeland to put her relevant experience to use for the betterment of the country, she would be opposed by the forces of status quo who would brand her as someone with a foreign agenda. As it happened with Dr Raghuram Rajan, the chief economist of IMF from 2003-2006, who was appointed governor of the Reserve Bank of India in 2013. He had to face an unceremonious exit in 2016 as Hindu nationalists were critical of both his policies and his perceived lack of ‘Indian-ness’.
Sadly, things are no different in Pakistan;, in fact, they might be worse. The appointment of Dr Atif Mian as member of the Economic Advisory Council was made so controversial that the government had to withdraw it under immense public pressure. Now the appointment of Dr Reza Baqir and Mr Shabbar Zaidi as governor, State Bank, and chairman, FBR, respectively is being made controversial for one reason or the other by the forces of status quo, even though both individuals are highly reputed in their respective fields.
Consider this: if someone from the Pakistan Administrative Service or a retired lieutenant general having little to no experience of the job had been appointed governor, State Bank, or chairman, FBR, no one would have objected because that is what we are accustomed to. This oligarchy is so deeply entrenched that even our courts protect it. Judges who sometimes hardly know about the working of such matters pass verdicts based on popular sentiment.
Our conventional bureaucrats see everyone outside the clan as a usurper, irrespective of his or her credentials. What they fail to realise is that, barring a few exceptions, there has been no value addition whatsoever to what they were at the time of the exam they took decades ago for entry into the civil service and what they are today.
To put it bluntly, our civil servants are so preoccupied with internal politics that excellence seems a far cry. Those who are honest (there are plenty) are too busy wondering how they will make ends meet thanks to the outdated salary structure, while the unscrupulous ones are plotting their next scam. And then there is infighting among various service groups to make matters worse.
In the last couple of decades, while our civil servants were consumed by all this, the outer world moved at a brisk pace, and those who started off just like them in other careers became experts in their fields, and, today, are much more relevant than our conventional bureaucrat. For the sake of the country, these individuals must be given a chance; if we want to judge someone we should judge them on their performance and should not allow our ideas to be based on a siege mentality. Our politicians and civil servants must think beyond immediate political or professional gains while criticising these appointments.
The writer is a former civil servant.
Twitter: @SyedSaadat52
Published in Dawn, May 14th, 2019
