Dear Prime Minister,
Personal egos can easily turn even extremely well-meaning intentions into intransigence. Your passion for retrieving “looted money” and eradicating corruption is indeed noble.
After nearly 17 months into the office, your rhetoric on corruption remains as vociferous as it has ever been. The consequence; the economy is caught in a vicious spiral. It has become a chicken and egg situation. The real estate sector is stagnating. Large-scale manufacturing, we understand, has shrunken. Unemployment has consequently touched new levels.
The status quo – business tycoons and bureaucracy – is pushing back hard and the discomfort, if not rejection of FBR chairman Shabbar Zaidi, stands out as an example. FBR bureaucrats , who have sucked the blood out of this economy like leaches for decades, want only a soul-mate from among themselves to head the organization.
Afraid of losing their piece in the pie, all officers are up in arms against Zaidi and giving him a bad name – despite his good intentions. Common man is reeling from the worst ever inflation, also because of the extractive nature of state policies i.e. revenue generation though excessive utility bills and high fuel prices. The likelihood of repatriating “billions of dollars” stashed abroad – as of now – looks minimal. And the exit of Mr. Nawaz Sharif basically dealt a deadly blow to what opponents dub as “your endless rant” on corruption.
Dear Prime Minister, it appears you are missing a big point that you could have learnt from our close friend China; the anti-graft campaign there began on the back of a stunning near 9 percent GDP growth for over 15 years. President Xi Jinping turned the anti-corruption campaign into a national agenda – beside poverty alleviation and governance restructuring – when he took charge of the Communist Party of China in 2012.
President Xi consciously pursued the mission because he believed that deeply rooted corruption had contributed to income inequality and compromises the Communist Party.
Records of China’s anti-corruption watchdog records show that about 20 vice-minister level officials were punished last year, including former Yunnan party boss Qin Guangrong, according to South China Morning Post (January 11, 2020). A total of 485,000 party members of different ranks faced disciplinary action in the year, with 19,000 cases being handed to prosecutors.
Mr Prime Minister, President Xi could pull it off because he is both the supreme commander of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) as well as the supremo of the Communist Party.
Unfortunately, you are not in Xi’s enviable position. Neither did he have to seek opposition parties’ support in the parliament on certain issues; you are clearly hamstrung by various socio-political push-pull factors ( bureaucracy, business community, self-serving political elites including the thundering opportunistic allies and an overbearing military establishment). Not to speak of the strident National Accountability Bureau (NAB) which seems to have taken the anti graft campaign to farcical lows. Which big wig has this institution taken down thus far? Even some of your own party men weigh you down because of their unguarded populistic rhetoric and thus your greater enemy.
Dear Sir, the stagnating economy and teeming millions of unemployed demand a balance between anti-corruption campaign and the efforts to revive the economy.
Secondly, the emphasis must be on changing the ways the government spends its money. Regardless of how much you can generate, without radically changing the public procurement and tendering systems, the national kitty will keep profusely leaking.
Thirdly, without de-bureacratizing the decision-making, you will find hard to extricate yourself from the bureaucracy that has ruled the roost for over seven decades. These baboos can hijack and irreparably damage best of your plans. Look how they have held the Higher Education Commission (HEC) hostage for not releasing approved funds for ongoing scholarship programme (for Afghan students in Pakistan and Pakistani students abroad).
For petty procedural issues these bureaucrats don’t give an iota to the damage their conduct does to the image of Pakistan. This is a shame that recipients of scholarships have to take to streets to demand payment of funds they have been promised. Without acting out of box, jettisoning the bureaucrats from decision-making and reigning in NAB, your dream for a take-off in 2020 would largely remain a mirage.