The mother of all ills
Syed Mohibullah Shah

As election fever spreads, arguments are gaining momentum. The question is: will the elections change the fortunes of the people suffering from poverty, widening disparities, increasing unemployment, stagnating economy and the concerns of safety and security? Or indeed, change the fortunes of the country itself and pull it back from its lowly positions on several indices of corrupt and failing states?
No appointment of a chief election commissioner has drawn such widespread acclaim and respect as that of Justice (r) Fakhruddin Ebrahim; and rightly so. Trying to meet the challenges ahead and encouraged by the Supreme Court, he has been pushing to remove deformities embedded in the electoral process over the years and freeing it from corrupt and coercive practices. But he needs help from every state institution because the powerful, vested interests against such a reform agenda will throw several spanners in the works under one pretext or the other. There are well-entrenched and heavy stakes involved that want to carry on with ‘business as usual’.
A tongue-in-cheek argument passes the buck to the poor people to usher in good, honest and competent leadership to save the country. If only it were true! Long subdued under a thick-crust of interconnected levers of power, people in Pakistan have often lived on the periphery of the governance games played by a few thousand ambitious adventurers in their name.
How helpless the large majority of the people feel in changing their status quo was brought to light through a recent nationwide survey. The Pew Research Centre – a non partisan think tank based in Washington – conducted a broad-based survey of Pakistan in 2012 including all the provinces and in all major languages of the country.
According to this survey, only 31 percent of the Pakistanis think they can rely on democratic dispensation to resolve their problems, while 61 percent believe their fortunes have a better chance of improving under a broad-based reform agenda with ‘a leader with a strong hand’.
And why do they think so? The answer is provided by their response to another question. When asked, what do people consider more important for ‘themselves’: a good democracy or strong economy? 34 percent said democracy, while 58 percent preferred strong economy over democracy.
Poor governance has continued to afflict the country for long and compounded its problems without much rectification of underlying causes. Not only have governance problems been highlighted through reputed surveys and media reports but even by friendly advice from respected world leaders.
Back in 1997, a great Asian leader and good friend of Pakistan, Dr Mahathir Muhammad, former Malaysian prime minster, while on an official visit to Pakistan, told the then prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, (in a meeting attended by this writer) that if the way the country was being governed was not improved, ‘people with assets and marketable skills would leave Pakistan’.
That advice was water off a duck’s back. Dr Mahathir’s words rang true when 15 years later the Pew survey found 87 percent of the Pakistanis “very unhappy” at the way the country had been governed and desired to leave.
It was these startling findings of the 2012 Pew survey that CNN’s Becky Anderson put to former prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani during an interview in London last June, asking him how he explained the frustration of the people with the governance since 87 percent of them wanted to leave the country? But instead of explaining government policies and the environment around Pakistan, Gilani displayed his new found arrogance towards poor fellow citizens and replied: “Then why don’t they leave; who is stopping them!”
This then is challenge for the upcoming elections: whether it can help give the country leadership that could win back the trust of at least a majority of these 87 percent Pakistanis? Can it deliver rule-based governance to the people or will it be ‘business as usual’, several rounds of which have resulted in driving the country into these dire straits?
A law-abiding society and rule-based governance are the best protections for the weak and the have-nots; just as these are anathema for the big and the powerful. And the first stepping stone towards achieving this objective through elections is to apply the letter and spirit of the law on everyone claiming to take a leadership role in governance.
Nurturing leaders that the people perceive as prospering by bypassing or even breaking the laws of the country would create legions of followers wanting to emulate and similarly prosper by bending or breaking whatever laws they can. In a culture where ‘everything goes’ for the few thousand that control decision-making, reversing the country’s lowly fortunes on notorious indices would become well-nigh impossible.
Whatever their promises or manifestos – most of which, in any case, are forgotten on coming into power – can the ECP ensure that the upcoming elections will give leaders who believe in the two fundamental laws of democracy: equality of all (rulers and the ruled) before the law and equal (economic) opportunity for all? Can it produce law-abiding leaders who respect the law, fear its reach and punishment for its breach?
“When we pass a law” said Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore in one meeting with this writer, “those in leadership positions – in the government and business – are the first ones obliged to abide by it. Their failure is heavily penalised and publicised. That is what makes it easy to enforce laws on others and create a law-abiding society in Singapore which also suffered from the same ills afflicting a developing country.”
Rule-based governance has influenced the rise and fall of nations throughout history. Like rule-based Singapore, which has overtaken many richer but poorly governed Asian countries; poor and backward England in Medieval Ages – also on the strength of increasingly rule-based governance by its institutions – overtook Italy which was richer, more educated (Galileo), better informed (Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus who respectively introduced China and America to Europe), and culturally advanced (Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci) – all within a span of a hundred years. But despite these superlative advantages, Italy’s fortunes suffered at the hands of personalised, unpredictable and whimsical governance by its ‘princes’.
The reasoning for rule-based governance is rooted in human nature. Rule-based social, political and economic institutions help protect society from rupturing its national fabric by ambitious, whimsical or lawless rulers. It also opens up opportunities – otherwise controlled and denied by the rich and powerful – for ordinary folks, promotes meritocracy, encourages entrepreneurship in them and protects their rewards from being usurped by rent seekers with the powers of the rule of law.
The upcoming elections provide an ideal opportunity to the country to improve the quality of governance which reputed surveys, media reports and advice from friendly heads of foreign governments have been urging for a long time.
Instead of wasting time and resources on peripheral issues, Pakistan can quickly get on the rising curve, if the mother-of-all-ills is tackled first – by ensuring that politics and governance in the country are conducted according to the law, not above and beyond it.
Cognisant of the forces entrenched against such a reform agenda, the withering state and its weakening institutions have an existential battle on their hands. Can they pull together to enforce rule-based governance in Pakistan and put the country back on the rising curve?
The writer specialised in FDI from MIT and designed the Board of Investment and First Women Bank.
Email: smshah@alum. mit.edu