Hockey disaster
WITH the national team’s ignominious failure to qualify for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics 2016 at the World Hockey League semi-finals in Antwerp, Belgium, Pakistan hockey has reached a dead end. The recent fiasco, which has come on the heels of an equally humiliating disqualification from the Hockey World Cup in 2014, caps a disastrous period spanning some two decades which has been replete with losses and setbacks with only a few laurels coming the players’ way. Though the Antwerp humiliation has been termed as Pakistan hockey’s darkest hour, there have been countless such occasions in the recent past which clearly put in the shade decades of glory and success achieved by the country in the annals of the game. Bad luck can intrude unexpectedly and play havoc with a player or a team’s progress. Still, Pakistan has no such excuses to offer for its defeat to a lowly-ranked Ireland on Friday or to other less-equipped outfits earlier in the tournament that led to this final blow.
But while the players have erred badly, the blame for hockey’s overall shambolic state lies squarely with the Pakistan Hockey Federation and its utterly incompetent and, often corrupt, regimes. It is ironic that many of the game’s ex-Olympians who once did the country proud by excelling on the field, have been instrumental in blotting the national game’s impeccable record by either indulging in needless ego tussles or resorting to selfish gains at the game’s expense. It is, indeed, a shocking scenario today where out of the 18 hockey training centres or academies, none can be seen as operational anywhere in the country. An overhaul is imperative, with stringent measures in place to keep the incompetent and corrupt out of the PHF set-up. However, with politics having saturated the PHF rank and file and with governments overly keen to run the game through their handpicked officials there is little hope that any serious effort for the revival of the national sport will be made in the near future.
Tariff increase
POWER consumers in the city of Karachi recently woke up to news that read a little like an electric shock. For a while it appeared that not only were their power tariffs about to be hiked significantly, but that they would also have to pay arrears on elevated tariffs being applied retroactively. But as the day progressed, clarity seeped in that the hike was only applicable for the top two slabs of consumers, and all arrears would be paid by the government. In fact, what had happened was a fairly straightforward matter. Since the summer of 2013, the Sindh High Court had stayed any tariff increases for K-Electric, which are decided on a quarterly basis. That stay was only vacated this June. In the meantime, tariff increases had been effected for consumers in the rest of the country, thereby creating a large differential in what Karachi consumers were paying versus everybody else. Therefore, new tariffs were decided by Nepra, the power regulator, for K-Electric spanning the entire period from the summer of 2013 till the present, finally creating uniform tariffs for all power consumers in the country.
It is important that in the matter of key administered prices such as power, gas and fuel, there be no discriminatory treatment between consumers in different parts of the country. The stay issued by the Sindh High Court appeared to interfere with this principle, and ended up creating two different power tariffs in the country. A similar stay issued by the Peshawar High Court in 2011, and extended in 2013, had much the same effect. Not only did these stays end up creating a highly unfair price framework for power in the country, they also introduced serious distortions in the government’s subsidy expenditures and in the case of the PHC order, also wrecked the financial health of the Peshawar Electric Power Company. The exercise of judicial power in the matter of administered prices resulted in hurting consumers, government finances as well as the financial health of the power distribution company. In short, there were no winners. It is true that the government should be dissuaded from passing the cost of inefficiencies in the power sector onto the consumer through regular tariff increases. But the present case illustrates that using the courts to interrupt key policy decisions on administered prices does more harm than good. The courts ought to be more judicious in using their power to grant stays in matters that relate to administered prices.
Implementation of NAP
THE controversial remarks attributed to a Supreme Court bench against the government’s lacklustre implementation of the National Action Plan are unfortunate. The specific issue before the court in that hearing had to do with NGOs, so it would also appear to be the wrong occasion for seemingly off-the-cuff remarks about NAP. Yet, there is no denying that, unfortunate though the language used may have been, there is a serious problem with NAP: namely, that there is no real progress on many of the clearly defined issues in the plan. Consider just this one, small fact – it took media reports of the criticism in the Supreme Court for the interior ministry to pledge to provide up-to-date details on NAP’s implementation. And even in the preliminary numbers of arrests and seizures mentioned by an interior ministry spokesperson, there are some obvious issues. The interior ministry has claimed, for example, that there have been over 60,000 arrests related to the plan since its implementation six months ago. That is a very large number, but is it of any significance? All too often, lawenforcement agencies simply inflate such numbers by rounding up peripheral or even innocent suspects.
What of the extremist and militant groups and their leaderships? The interior ministry has not yet released a detailed list of banned organisations in the country and the specific actions taken against each of them. Which are the groups involved, who leads them, where do they operate, what are their subsidiaries and alternate structures, how are they funded and by whom, and to what extent have specific groups been dismantled or disrupted – none of the facts are known. Without such specifics, few outside government and military circles could have the confidence that the country is moving towards the shutting down of the militant and extremist infrastructure. What the state appears to want to do is to continue with the selective push against certain kinds of anti-state militants while treating the so-called pro-state and pro-Pakistan militant and extremist organisations as a problem for another day. But that will only delay the inevitable. As years of cutting peace deals and delaying military operations in Fata eventually proved, coexistence of the state and radical Islamist militant groups is simply not possible, let alone advisable.
Finally, there is a problem that the interior ministry, the lead ministry in the NAP structure, itself faces: funding. NAP is grossly underfunded, as is Nacta, the counterterrorism authority, and as are the various programmes for building counterterrorism capabilities in the provinces, especially the urban areas. Surely, it is not the responsibility of the federal government alone to fund the entire National Action Plan. But plans can only be executed to the extent that there are funds made available, whether by the centre, the provinces or through external funding, to do so. At the very least, Nacta should be adequately funded.
Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2015
http://www.dawn.com/newspaper/editorial