Dealing with drugs
November 14, 2012
A new Drug Regulation Authority has been set up, with the president signing the relevant law on Monday. The legislation aims to control the sale of spurious and poor quality drugs, while also ensuring they are available to people at affordable prices. This law had been sought by all the provincial assemblies, given the scale of the problem in Pakistan, with parliament passing it after some debate on its provisions. The real test though comes now – as we see what measures are taken to enforce the new law. These drugs, produced in backstreet units, too often harm rather than heal. In some cases dangerous substances, including lead, have also been found in these medicines. The new regulatory authority faces an uphill task – shutting down these units will not be an easy task, as the present and previous governments have discovered.
The new DRAP law, as it has been dubbed, however gives the authority created under it new powers, emulating those that exist in the developed world. While bodies such as the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) play an important regulatory role, we should not forget they are prone to pressures from giant drug manufacturing corporations, leading to frequent errors in judgement. We must ensure then that the powerful pharmaceutical companies at home are also tamed by the law. During the signing ceremony, the president called for more efforts by Pakistan’s own companies to engage in research and development to improve standards. While this could help exports, it could also help control the price of medicine. The entire healthcare mechanism will need to be examined in detail; even at government-run hospitals patients are frequently forced to purchase their own medicines – at prices they can barely afford. While healthcare is a basic right of all citizens, the government must also make sure people are spared the menace of spurious drugs. We must hope the new law, which has much potential to alter things, can achieve all that it sets out to do, leading to better health service in the country. This has become a pressing need in our country, with unregulated drug sale over the past so many years firmly entrenched in the system.
Civil service
November 14, 2012
An essential underpinning of any civil service anywhere in the world is that it is free of political interference and pressure, and exists as a completely separate entity to the political life of the state. A breach in the firewall between politics and the civil service is to the detriment of both – but in Pakistan, the mirror state, things are a little different. The Supreme Court has ruled, entirely correctly, that civil servants are not the paid help of ‘transient governments’ and that they should adhere to the state and the constitution rather than the whims of politicians. They are not bound to obey political orders that are illegal or unconstitutional, and must not be penalised for refusing to do so.
The ruling arose from a petition brought by a civil servant after the incident involving MPA Syeda Wahida Shah slapping a member of the polling staff in the course of a by-election. The petition asked that ‘the standing of the civil service be restored’ along with a revival of the independent, impartial and professional status of the civil service. The petitioner had said that the legal and constitutional safeguards that were there to protect civil servants needed to be reaffirmed. The issue is that those in the civil service are caught between a rock and a hard place. Civil servants wanting to do their job without fear or favour live in the knowledge that if they do not bow to the will of powerful politicians they can find their careers quickly blighted – posted far from their homes and families, or placed ‘On Special Duty’ for unspecified reasons and for indeterminate periods of time. Such is the curse that hangs over all civil servants, a Damoclean sword that politicians have no compunction about swinging. The net result is that we have a civil service that has institutionalised mediocrity through political appointments that circumvent custom and best practice. This is not to say that all civil servants are corrupt; there are, and have been, some fine upstanding members of the civil service. But it is a measure of how far the service has been dragged down by political interference that the Supreme Court has to restate underlying principles. The law has prevailed, but it remains to be seen whether it can be made to parallel unhappy realities.
A faint hope
November 14, 2012
A significant impediment to peace in Syria has been the fragmentary opposition and its inability to come together under a single flag. The Assad regime has benefited from this disunity, and proven to be remarkably durable. Those external players who might have been supportive have stayed their hands for the most part, or worked through proxies to arm several of the groups fighting the Assad government. There was also legitimate concern that the opposition groups that were demanding support were not representative of the Syrian people in the broadest sense. All this may change if a deal brokered in Doha on Sunday holds together until this coming Friday when there is to be a donors’ conference in London. Deals of any sort in the current febrile environment are notoriously short-lived. Now, a new body called the ‘National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces’ is being promoted as the single entity that will manage the political and military affairs of the many opposition groups as well as being a focal point for humanitarian and military assistance.
If there is one thing the Assad regime fears it is a united opposition and political recognition for an entity that could lead to the formation of a credible government in the event of Assad falling – which is as yet far from certain since he still enjoys considerable support in some parts of the country and in the military despite defections. A very large fly in the ointment could be the Syrian National Council that was formed in August 2011 with much the same purpose as the new body – to represent the Syrian people internationally. The SNC, on its part, was concerned that the new body could lead to its eventual dissolution but, having been given 60 seats in the new body, is willing to go along with the Doha deal. It is envisaged that Alawite, Kurdish, Christian and other minorities will have places in this parliament-in-waiting, which nobody is yet referring to as a government. The supporters of the new body are hoping for swift international recognition, and the Friday moot in London could be a step along the way to that.