Domestic Conflictual Themes

[Yasser28]

Decision on Kalabagh Dam
THIS is with reference to the Wapda chairman’s statement published in this newspaper on March 25 that land acquisition for construction of the Kalabagh dam has started. In the next sentence he is quoted as saying that ‘the Kalabagh dam could be completed in seven years if the government gave the go-ahead for its construction today’.

Please note the contradiction: according to the statement, the government is yet to give approval for the construction of the most controversial dam in Pakistan but a government agency has already started spending people’s money to acquire land for the project. What should one make out of it? Who would be responsible for the funds already spent in case the government did not approve the project? Or does it mean that the government has already decided in secret to commit another illegal act and start work on the dam without any proper approval as it did in the case of the Greater Thal Canal?

That would be a highly objectionable act by the government and would cause disorder and discontent in the NWFP and the lower riparian province of Sindh in the present already volatile situation in the country. One must realise that any move to start work on the Kalabagh dam would simply add fuel to the fire and provoke more people to rise against the government. It would be prudent on the part of the government to take note of technical and legal objections against the project and the multiple resolutions passed by three out of four provincial assemblies in Pakistan opposing the Kalabagh dam. The government should also listen to the water experts who have warned against the construction of mega dams on the Indus River without ascertaining the availability of water. These experts include the head of the government-appointed Technical Committee on Water Resources, Engineer A.N.G. Abbasi.

Another point to consider is that the mega dams are gigantic projects and would involve huge costs putting the country under colossal debt, which they may never be able to pay off.

Hence, these projects need to be properly debated in the Council of Common Interests and the parliament, duly elected through free and fair elections, before making any decision. Any move by the present unrepresentative government will not go well with the people.

http://www.dawn.com/2007/04/16/letted.htm

[Yasser28]

Greater Role for Provinces

By Shahid Javed BurkiPAKISTAN’S senior economic policymakers believe that the country should be focusing on what they call “second generation reforms”. The first generation concerned the need to obtain macroeconomic stability, a goal that was reached in about four years after the assumption of political power by the military in October 1999. That effort involved reducing the budget deficit, reducing the burden of external and internal debt, as well as the rate of monetary expansion.

All this was achieved but at the cost of squeezing growth. However, growth returned in 2003-04 when the government and the State Bank relaxed both the fiscal and the monetary stance. At that time, policymakers in Islamabad began to talk about second-generation reforms involving a host of policies concerning various sectors of the economy, the government’s role in encouraging and regulating the private sector, strengthening and building institutions of economic management, and generally improving the environment in which the newly energised private sector could operate.

The government also revived the privatisation programme thus adding to the strength of private enterprise. What the identified second generation effort did not explicitly include were relations between the federal government and the governments at the subnational levels.

The evolution of the Pakistani economy has reached the point where the next big push will need to come from the provinces that are part of the federation. While Islamabad must continue to facilitate and regulate, the provinces need to get more fully involved in using the resources available to them for accelerating the rate of economic growth and addressing the problems of poverty and uneven distribution of income.

They will need to establish the goals they should aim to reach, determine how they will be reached and define how the public sector will need to work with private enterprise to move forward. If the provinces must move into the driver’s seat, they will have to be much more explicit in giving shape to public policy in reaching the defined goals.

Public policy itself must be shaped by discourse between those who govern and the citizenry. This dialogue must be conducted within a well defined institutional framework so that a tradition can be established for continuous consultation and feedback into the decision making process.

An institutional mechanism now exists that can be used to have on-going discourse between those who govern and those who are governed. Thanks to the promulgation of the Local Government Act in 2001, a mechanism is in place that can become part of this institutional process. This act established elected councils that have the capacity to work closely with the citizenry and to communicate the people’s aspirations to the higher echelons of government.

Given Pakistan’s history — if we begin history with the launch of the movement to create an independent state for the Muslims of British India — the country should have created a political structure that allowed considerable autonomy to the provinces. That did not happen. Of the three constitutions that have been used with varying degrees to govern political life in the country, those promulgated in 1956 and 1973 were supposedly federal in their design.

The second, authored by President Ayub Khan in 1962, was federal only in name. It prescribed, for all intents and purposes, a unitary form of government with concentration of power in the hands of the president. By design, the 1973 Constitution gave more power to the provinces and created institutions such as the Council of Common Interests (CCI) to which the provinces had recourse in case the federal government violated the basic principles governing the division of powers between different tiers of administration. It also entitled the provinces to receive compensation for the exploitation of their natural resources for national development.

These provisions notwithstanding, the system of governance that is in operation now concentrates most powers in the hands of the president who, in effect, is not only the head of state but is also the country’s chief executive. The CCI remains inactive and the National Finance Commission has been convened but not at regular intervals as mandated by the Constitution.

The last time the Commission offered an award was in February 1997 when an “interim administration” — between the dismissal of one elected government and the election of another — was in place. It was reconvened by the government of President Musharraf but, in spite of having been in session for a number of months, it was unable to reach a consensus on the distribution of financial resources to the provinces.

The formulas for compensating the provinces for their mineral wealth and water resources have become the subject of considerable controversy. They need to be updated. Many of the functions related to economic and social development continue to be performed from Islamabad. In short, provincial autonomy, while granted on paper, has not become the guiding principle for the design of public policy.

In order to realise the full development potential of its people and its endowments, Pakistan must allow more space within which the governments at different level can function without the centre’s often stifling control over the provinces. This implies the allowance of not only greater provincial autonomy but also the grant of a greater role for the various institutions that make up the system of local government. For this to happen, the systems already in place don’t need to be changed.

The 1973 Constitution allows considerable autonomy and operational space to the provinces. The local government system created in 2001 has introduced elements of political accountability to the people who now have the power to serve local communities. Laws don’t need to be changed. It is the spirit in which they are followed that needs to accommodate the need for greater delegation of political and economic authority.

There is also a growing body of economic literature that focuses on the very positive role subnational governments can play in bringing the process of development closer to the people. There is a consensus among the practitioners of development that bringing government closer to the people promotes economic development. It also provides a valve through which economic and political tensions can be released.

What happens to Pakistan’s four provinces will affect the country’s economic and political future in several different ways. Not only will the provinces deeply influence the country’s economic progress, they will also profoundly impact its social and political development and its relations with the outside world. There are many examples of the way the provinces will affect the direction and pace of the country’s economic progress. Some of this will happen for non-economic reasons.

To take one obvious example, whether the country is able to control the rise of Islamic extremism and overcome the challenges posed by the strengthened Al Qaeda will depend to a considerable extent on what happens to the North West Frontier Province and to the province’s tribal areas. These areas are, at this time, in the eye of the international storm. Pakistan is being constantly pressured by the West to apply force to bring under control the rapidly deteriorating situation in the tribal belt.

But force alone won’t work. The Iraq war has amply demonstrated that it takes more than the display of military strength and the use of military might to induce political and social change.

The same applies, albeit to a lesser extent, to Balochistan. There is a widespread impression in the West that Quetta, Balochistan’s capital, has become the command and control centre of the resurgent Taliban. Ethnic strife in Balochistan will also affect Pakistan’s economic future. The province has hosted an insurgency aimed at gaining greater political autonomy for several decades.

What is sought is a loosening of Islamabad’s firm control over the way the province’s economy is managed. Inspired in part by the tribal chiefs who fear loss of power if the province develops economically, the movement has at times threatened the integrity of the Pakistani state. This insurgency can also be overcome through rapid economic progress.

The province has vast mineral reserves not only of natural gas but also of coal and copper and many other minerals. It will also be the area of transit for the pipeline that is planned — and may be built some time in the future — connecting Iran with Pakistan and India.

Developments in and around the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea will further enhance the geographic importance of the province. The Pakistani government has recently announced the intention to build another deep water port on the Balochistan coast. The preliminary plan is to locate it at a small fishing village located between Karachi and the under-development port of Gwadar currently under development.The restiveness in these two provinces has one thing in common: they are an expression of the Pashtun sentiment, an ethnic group that is troubled at having been excluded from the way the political and economic power is being distributed among the various groups that inhabit these lands. These movements can be controlled and canalised towards productive ends if the economic and social developments of the Pashtun areas are systematically handled.

What is required is the adoption of a well thought-out and carefully developed strategy to bring economic development to this area’s economically and socially backward people. This will require a large flow of capital from both the central government and the donor community and the building of institutions aimed at regional development.

Balochistan along with the NWFP are the gateways to the resource rich countries of Central Asia. They could become the hub of economic activity if the countries in the region — both South and Central Asia — could find a way of working together.

If Pakistan is to take full advantage of its geographical position — its location on what could become busy corridors of commerce connecting the rapidly growing economies of Central Asia to the country’s north, the Middle East to the west, India to the south, and China to the east — it must develop separate economic strategies for its four provinces.

The province of Sindh — in particular the port city of Karachi — is increasingly becoming a hinterland for the rapidly developing Gulf region. There are already ambitious schemes — for the moment still on paper — aimed at developing Karachi’s housing and tourism sectors with the help of Arab capital.

The Arabs are now much more interested in keeping their incomes and wealth nearer home and they regard Pakistan as a part of their hinterland. There is news of the purchase of a couple of islands lying off the coast of Karachi for the development of tourist resorts on the lines of what has already begun to happen along the coast of the UAE.

There is some hope that what investors have done to the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, to Bahrain and Doha, they could also do to Karachi. Karachi has some advantages not available to the Gulf cities. It has a large population. It, therefore, does not have human resource constraints that inhibit the rapid development of the Gulf cities.However, it is the province of Punjab that will have the most pronounced impact on Pakistan’s economic future. How Punjab could help the country move forward will be the subject of the articles in this space for the next several weeks.
http://www.dawn.com/2007/04/24/op.htm#1

[Yasser28]

The Sonmiani Controversy



THE Balochistan Assembly’s rejection of the Sonmiani port scheme is understandable, as is the suspicion with which almost any federal project is viewed in the province. Support for major federal initiatives will be forthcoming only if the Baloch feel that they stand to benefit from such development plans, and this is clearly not the case now. Matters are not helped when the centre fails to bring all stakeholders on board, which is what appears to have happened vis-à-vis the proposed Sonmiani port in district Lasbela. According to Deputy Speaker Mohammad Aslam Bhootani of the ruling PML-Q, whose family has dominated Lasbela politics since 1970, neither he nor Chief Minister Jam Mohammad Yousuf (also elected from the same district) were consulted before the project was announced. If so, this is hardly the way to go about winning the hearts and minds of the Baloch people and their representatives. Sonmiani’s proximity to Karachi is also causing concern in Balochistan. Senior provincial minister Maulana Wasay claimed in the Assembly on Thursday that the Sonmiani port was a conspiracy hatched by the Karachi leadership which wants ultimately to merge the coastal district with Sindh. References were also made to a statement attributed to the federal minister for inter-provincial coordination, who had reportedly said that a district can be carved out of one province and merged with another federating unit through a simple majority vote in the National Assembly.

Conspiracy theories aside, it is worth asking if there is any need for another port situated so close to Karachi. It would be best to wait until Gwadar is fully operational and then assess Sonmiani’s feasibility in a few years’ time. This would help dispel the impression that the project is being pushed through with unseemly haste. If the Sonmiani port is at all needed, it must be guaranteed that locals will receive a fair share of the employment opportunities that arise. If lack of skills is a problem, training centres should be set up well before the project gets off the ground. The spectre of being overrun by ‘outsiders’ is a genuine concern and it should be kept in mind.

http://www.dawn.com/2007/05/26/ed.htm#2