What is it that Brazil, Ghana, Uganda, Bangladesh, China, India and Turkey could do and we could not? Why could they build a nation and we could not? Why could they surpass the colonial barriers, both perceptual and real, and we are still stuck with them? How could they find leaders committed and dare to dream while we are still groping in the dark to find one? After 65 years, the call to build a new Pakistan sounds weird. Even parties that had been winning previously, formed or became part of different governments have hijacked the sought after slogan to build a ‘new Pakistan.’ What is so archaic or obsolete about Pakistan that now every party wants to get rid of? Then, what do we need to do to build a new Pakistan, as the slogan goes? So far not a single party has given any priority list that would actually define new contours of a Pakistan that we know now. Unless we prioritise the drivers of development and progress the desire to build a new Pakistan would remain farfetched. Even before that, there is a need, in the Pakistani context, to define ‘development’. A misnomer, and left to the imagination, development like religion means as many things to the 180 million Pakistani as they could think of.
Development, essentially after the 2008-09 financial crises has not been considered borne directly of high GDP or trade growth. The staggering growth of some countries during and after the world financial crisis, when the developed world was sinking financially, piqued the curiosity of the development analyst to find ‘what’ about the south that made it rise. It emerged that human development achieved through enhanced capabilities of the people of a given country was the key to move up the development ladder with a relative ease. Therefore, the priority goals of countries in the south that made a difference, when the developed world had clay feet, were health, education and nutrition. The lesson posted reinforced that the link between economic and human development was created through a conscious effort. Neither development could be left to chance nor could market be relied upon for automatic transformation. Through pro-poor policies along with high investment in education and health, countries like Ghana, Brazil, Uganda and India have managed to sustain development and open up to diverse opportunities globally.
In a nutshell, the debate is all about having a proactive developmental state. Wherein it the state that takes up the responsibility of being a catalyst of change and devises, adjusts or creates policies, in line with new realties and challenges of global market. This is where the problem lies in Pakistan. Did Pakistan ever act as a state? Is there anything called owning development as a ‘nation’? Was there any effort made to make the country take these two challenges for the sake of progress or development.
The response to all these questions has been no. The only time that Pakistan performed as a state was between 1947 and 1950, when it rehabilitated the refuges, defined and created institutions, made decisions on foreign policies. Since then it is a story of downward spiral. The legal framework of the country has been established, pursued and maintained as such that it locked in the influence of the elites, creating in corollary high inequality. The political elites that the country created during Ayub Khan’s reign and which the Bhutto tried to dismantle through nationalisation, and land and civil service reforms backfired. Bhutto’s reforms were not gradual. He rushed into things. In the process to remove the binding constraints to progress — unemployment, poverty and inequality — through a long list of reforms, he alienated the industrialists, the feudal and the bureaucrats; the important components of the power structure. The result was he achieved none. Unless a state ‘regulates’ and owns the developmental strategies, reforms can only be skin deep. This is where the rub lies. Regulation is a nonbinding thing in Pakistan, something that can be skewed easily. The ownership of development strategies has always been absent in Pakistan. That explains why as soon as a government is out of office even the most successful projects and policies are binned. That explains the tendency of our government to fleece the exchequer on the name of new projects. And that goes to explain the failures of many development projects as they had neither been thought through nor initiated with the will to see it implemented. In the absence of ownership, development strategies are nothing but window dressing.
The issue that comes to bear the fault is the mechanism of the state’s operation. The centrality of a proactive developmental state is its people. Irony isn’t it? We have elections and a parliament representing the will of the people, yet the state is oblivion of its people. Consider Pakistan development friendly, would there be load shedding of this humongous proportion. Would there be seven million school dropout children and three million who would never find their way into any academic institution. Would there be 70 percent of the population having no access to primary and emergency care; 1.2 million people dying of waterborne diseases; a child dying of some disease every minute; nearly 70 women succumbing every minute to pregnancy related complexities and not to forget that Pakistan is still struggling to eliminate polio, measles, tuberculosis and malaria.
If Brazil, Ghana, Uganda, Bangladesh, China, India and Turkey could make right polices and then prioritise them right as well and could devise methods to govern their institutions, why could not we? That these nations share and we lack? Is it that we have yet to reach that level of one nation, one state and one destination? Individually, the people of this country have made stupendous strides. As a nation it is standing at the backyard of modern states. If there could be atomic power, what is keeping us from gaining the economic power that comes from human development? Is it something to do with the mindset! It has been hard for the governments in every era and period to make privatisation a complete success. Even Punjab that has endeavoured to take up the public-private partnership concept could not allow it to reign free of government influence. The local government enigma, which every party considered important, but would not let it happened for five years. They wanted a singular power all the way down to the last tier. Yes. It is power, and an all encompassing power that matters. Unless this mindset changes, human development that comes through private sector’s potential to contribute and state taking responsibility to own the development strategies, could not be realised. This is exactly what the south did to succeed.
The writer is an Assistant Editor at Daily Times and can be reached at [email protected]