Daily Times

The PPP chief, Ms Benazir Bhutto, has launched her party’s manifesto Friday for an election in which she will participate under protest. According to the manifesto, if the PPP comes to power, its policies would be based on five Es: employment, education, energy, environment and equality. Pegged to employment — something that the people have come to expect from the party — the policies will strive for “employment opportunities” for people through various initiatives, including “a Public Works Programme, which would provide guaranteed employment for one working member of 25 percent of the poorest families in the country for at least a year”.
Ms Bhutto further stated that “literacy schemes would be initiated with the objective of providing short-term employment to educated youth”, and “reforms would be initiated in madrassas and syllabuses” and that “madrassas would be purged of arms”. She pledged to lift the ban on student unions, too. She will revive her party’s “1996 scheme of Apna Ghar”, which would provide free boarding schools for socially and economically disadvantaged children. On the much-troubled sector of energy, “her party will work on bio-fuel technology and form a team of experts for it”. She will mobilise the communities on environment, helping the people overcome water shortage, climate change and eco-degradation. For social justice, the party will move forward under the old party banner of Roti (bread), Kapra (clothes) and Makan (house).
But let’s face it. All over the world party manifestoes have stopped meaning anything to the voters. In the advanced countries, they cloy with their uniformity: you can no longer tell Labour apart from Conservative mainly because of the narrowing options in the realm of the economy which dictates against public spending. In the third world, manifestoes have stopped exciting people because the national economy is never buoyant enough to allow space for collection and spending. If the rains are bad and virus has attacked the crops, all indicators go down and the economy needs help from the foreign-rich instead of providing help to the domestic-poor of the country. Socialist slogans once worked their magic. But after nationalisation went wrong in Pakistan the idea of pruning the rich and beefing up the poor is no longer credible. Not even in India, where poverty has outlasted the Nehruvian model.
First, get the money. Second, get the ability to spend that money as a development budget. In Pakistan, if you have the money, as in the past four years, the provinces don’t have the expertise to invest it on the people. The first chief minister of Sindh left more than half his development budget unspent, and the last incumbent has left thousands of jobs in the education sector vacant, mostly meant for the rural population of Sindh. The PPP must therefore determine that it will bend all efforts to develop the ability to spend the money it has on projects that benefit the people. Education is one sector where no one will mind the state spending money even today. Since it is bound to be in the next coalition government in Sindh, the PPP should take note of the thousands of rural Sindhis who came to Karachi last month to get employed as primary school teachers and were sent back by the bureaucracy.
For everything else the PPP will have to look after the economy and make it user-friendly for the private sector. It will need to allocate funds for the infrastructure; and its Public Works Programme will certainly absorb a lot of the jobless if it is handled efficiently. If the infrastructure is developed through the private sector, it will work; if it is handled by the bureaucracy it will be familiar disaster. Past record on this is not good. Special housing schemes started by the PMLN during its term in office fizzled out more likely because the term was never completed. Stepping into sectors like transport where the private sector is already performing well would be ill-advised.
Should manifestoes include such pledges as the party will never try to topple its rival from power because incomplete terms affect the economy most negatively? And that the party will never opt for nuclear testing as a means of enhancing national pride because it isolates the country, undermines the economy and increases poverty which destroys a nation’s honour more effectively than eschewing war. And that the party will avoid international isolation at all costs even if the masses are shouting for it in the streets. And that the party will quickly normalise its relations with its neighbours, including India, and break the state’s resistance to receiving investment from there just as it asks for investment from the Western economies.
So let the people see the colour of money in times of peace where the state doesn’t need to spend colossal amounts of the people’s wealth on the army. And let manifestoes ask and answer these questions for the benefit of the people and the nation state. g

Nawaz Sharif must
make up his mind

The All Parties Democratic Movement (APDM), led by the PMLN chief Mr Nawaz Sharif, is expected to convene again to decide whether or not all its members wish to boycott the January 2008 elections. But this session will probably be redundant and may even be boycotted (sic!) by the likes of the JUI of Maulana Fazlur Rehman who has categorically refused to boycott the elections. And looking at the kind of aplomb with which he faces his rival, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, within the clerical alliance MMA, his party is squarely behind him. And there is the PPP which opted out of the APDM because of the MMA and now says it will participate in elections with the black arm-band of protest.
The Maulana rebukes Mr Nawaz Sharif for heeding parties “that exist only on letter pads”. This accusation has also been voiced by another small-party representative, from the ANP, saying Mr Sharif is surrounded by “low-stakes” leaders who want him to believe that agitation will soon force a mid-term election. Anyone surveying the scene will vouch that the PMLN is bound to gain if it participates. However, there is danger in waiting till the constitution is changed into allowing him to become prime minister again. It is more important to keep the party alive now that he is at the top of the list of popular leaders than agitate and wait for a change that may or may not come. *