Opinion

PM Shaukat Aziz and the PML(Q) Cesspool

By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA

In “snooty” and sophisticated English, expressions like “Ambulate with extreme vigilance; avoid premature surrender to excessive anticipation; or husband cautiously your oral aperture before you forcibly expel sounds from it that induce a blast”, in today’s functional English would mean, “Walk carefully; don’t be nervous and watch your mouth”.
I have no clue why these three expressions keep racing their way to three ministerial bigwigs of Pakistan’s current Cabinet, and they stick to them like tags. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz for the last five months in office had been rather “ambulating” with such an “extreme vigilance” that the much awaited and expected “Dawn of a new Social and Economic era” appears somehow to be getting delayed indefinitely.
The new Interior Minister, Mr. Aftab Ahmad Sherpao, rightfully befits the second expression: “avoid premature surrender to excessive anticipation”.
Acts of terrorism had been happening right and left of him, and his excessive anticipation could neither forestall nor mitigate their occurrence. The result had been his “premature surrender” to that excessive anticipation which in simple English can be called his “pathetic nervousness”. And who could dare claiming the ownership of the third expression than our Sheikh Rashid, the Information Minister, whose “oral aperture” often causes a louder blast than the guns of the General Headquarters.
President Ronald Reagan during his 1980 Presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter once stuck a nerve when he asked a rhetoric question to the American people, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The world saw that the high interest rates and the sagging economy even constrained President Carter’s supporters to answer this question with a resounding no.
A similar question is being asked in Pakistan these days, “Are you better off now than you were five years ago?” A majority spontaneously responds, “No, neither now, nor then”. It is true economic changes do not take place overnight, but hopes do.
It is not premature to say that PM Shaukat Aziz, notwithstanding his energies, efforts and zest to reduce poverty, and to provide fresh drinking water to the masses in Pakistan has cleverly been side-tracked and has been put on a course that leads to the classic cesspool of squabbles and intrigues of a party on whose behest he rules the country. This political party, the ruling Muslim League, is by definition a club of turncoats whose sole aim in life has been to stay elected and stay in power. The party, thus is such a bottomless sinkhole, a sandpit that “all is grist here that comes to the mill”. And PM Shaukat Aziz appears to have joined this club.
This party, the PML (Q), can be likened to the mythical Hydra that has five heads (Junejo, Functional, Nawaz, Quaid and Zia, with 15 tentacles known as vice presidents), and, tempted as I feel to express my impressions in the Medieval and snooty English, this league of opportunists had always had the singular knack to “rouse itself to a vertical position whenever the gray aurora of power dawned in the North/Eastern hemisphere of Islamabad”.
It has remarkably sustained itself so far by engorging a goodly portion of the nutritious resources of the country it claims to have created, and has the amazing gift of “regarding with deference and esteem those whom it unfailingly spots saddled in the seat of power”.
The recent affray and brawl between Imtiaz Sheikh and Dr. Arbab Rahim, both stalwarts of PML(Q), is a re-play of the old duel between Mamdot and Daultana; between Sardar Qayum and Daultana; between Hamid Nasir Chattha and Mian Nawaz Sharif with the accompanying casualty of Junejo government; between Mian Nawaz Sharif and the Chaudhrys of Gujrat. The stage has been set; only one needs to wait to see “for whom the bell tolls”.
THREE ECONOMISTS: THREE ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Politicians talk; economists deliver. ManMohan Singh is one such economist. India in 1991 had a fiscal deficit as high as 8.5 percent of the GDP. Foreign reserves of India were reduced to one billion dollars, hardly enough to two weeks’ imports, and there were no foreign lenders in sight to rescue India.
Singh, after assuming the mantle of the Finance Minister, confronted Mr. Narsama Rao, the then PM, and told him in no uncertain terms that India was on the verge of a collapse. “It is possible that we will still collapse, but there is a chance that if we take bold measures we may turn around, and that is an opportunity. We must convert this crisis into an opportunity to build a new India, to do things which many people before us have thought and said should be done, but somehow were never done”. Singh got the government off the backs of the people, particularly off the back of the entrepreneurs. He introduced competition, simplified tax system; made risk-taking much more attractive and much more profitable; removed large number of regulations; broke away India’s economic isolation and redefined India’s self-reliance by integrating it into an evolving world economy. Singh did not blame India’s poor for being lazy and burdensome, nor did he underpin population-growth and corruption in the government as the main excuses for not blasting the economic stonewall of self-reliance. Instead, he took the challenge boldly and remained clear-eyed about when he planned to do.
He asserted that foreign policy was an outcome of economic policy, and India must have intensive engagement with the global economy, and the more India did that, the more powerful it will become. India thus forged ahead without inhibitions its integration with the world economy; second India extricated itself from the neighborly security complexes that had tied it down, and it went ahead with its plan of integrating itself with the rest of Asia.
An economically awakened India awakened its neighbors too. “We can jointly create reciprocal dependencies for mutual benefit. So far this potentially benign process has been hobbled by narrow political calculations”, so would say an assertive Manmohan Singh. Globalization, pluralism and openness became the keynotes of India’s economic engine and the results have been obvious. A vibrant middle-class is on the rise and Nehru’s teeming millions stuck in abject poverty are on the decrease.
STANLEY FISCHER AND ISRAEL’S ECONOMY
Who would believe that between December 1978 and March 1986, prices in Israel rose by 109,187%, (Economist, Jan.15, 2005), and who could venture to accept the challenge of restoring monetary calm to such an economy! Mr. Fischer did. He came up with a stabilization program that was so successful that even Mr. Fischer wondered if it was not too successful. Israel did not suffer enough from its bout of inflation to fear a repeat, and in the words of Mr. Fischer, 1995, “Israel’s episode of runaway price did not leave enough antibodies to inflation in the system”. The Israeli economy has since been thoroughly purged of the inflation bug. The country even suffered deflation in 2003 and 2004, according to the IMF. As per the 1994 figures, even Israeli cows yield the maximum annual milk, some 9,200 kg. America, a runner-up, extracts about 7,000 kg of milk per head of cattle, and India/Pakistan a mere 500 kg.
This Zambian-born vice-chairman of Citigroup, a former number two at the IMF, and one of the world’s best-known macroeconomists, and a Professor at MIT, has once again been asked by Israel, and in fact, has been nominated as the next Governor of the Bank of Israel and Mr. Fischer has accepted the nomination. Once the Israeli Cabinet approves him, Mr. Fischer will be renouncing his American citizenship, will be willing to swallow a severe pay cut, and will be very happy to help his fellow countrymen. As the Economist reports some Israelis doubt his Zionist credentials. One former Cabinet Minister expresses his concerns and says, “If he has not been in the wars, and his heart did not palpitate, and he did not go through our anxieties in terror attacks, he is cut off from the Israeli experience”. The defenders contend by saying, “Must a central banker feel what the nation feels? … according to one theoretical macro-economist it is better if central bankers do not share the values of the nation at large: to establish the credibility of their fight against inflation, they must be more hawkish than the public they serve”
Pakistan’s PM, Mr. Shaukat Aziz, coming from Citigroup, has had a similar background, if not academically, at least, performance-wise. He could afford being hawkish, and he did not; he did not have to delve in the drawing-room comedies and intrigues of the PML(Q), but he did. President Musharraf could have cut the wood for him, what he needed to do was just to start carving on it, and being distracted he didn’t. President Musharraf could tell him, “Mai hoon naa” to take care of Imtiaz Sheikh vs. Arbab Rahim squabble, but he did not. The result is obvious: polarization and parallelism in power politics, like too many cooks busy in cooking the broth is discernible in every field.
JEFF SACHS: AN ECONOMIST WHO INTENDS TO CUT WORLD POVERTY IN HALF BY THE YEAR 2015
Jeff Sachs contends that economists are not like wallpapers, mere decorations in the hall of politics and power. They are real players like he himself had been. Jeff has been with the Pope; he has been with the UN Chief, Kofi Annan; and he had been with his sidekick, save-the-world. The challenge he has accepted is grand but risky. If the donor countries raise their annual aid to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals fund by 0.7 percent of their GNP, starting with an extra $70 billion per year as of 2006, he promises to cut poverty in half in the world by 2015.
Sachs had been a star at Harvard, a tenured Professor at 28. In a seminar on Bolivia in 1985, a country that was battered by hyperinflation, he confidently rose to say that he could fix it. The Bolivians accepted his offer. What he had neglected to tell the Bolivians was that he had never actually worked on a real live economy. He made good on his word, and stabilized the currency of Bolivia. He later developed a radical economic program for the Solidarity-led Polish government that helped Poland create a market economy. He slightly failed in Russia because kleptocrats there always tried to undermine his program, and he was quick to quit the job.
Sachs is down-to-earth practical, and he calls his economic approach as clinical. He rejected the IMF panacea to cure the sagging economies by making structural adjustments, which to him have been harmful rather than helpful to the poor countries. To him, lack of drinking water, lack of schools, clinics, roads, electricity, ports, soil nutrients, sanitation and the presence of malaria, Aids are a greater obstacle to growth than debt.
“Life doesn’t come with one problem neatly separated from the rest. Specialization is helpful, but you’ve got to see the web”. He labels this comprehensive approach as “clinical economics. The photo-ops with Bill Clinton are easy; nobody is for poverty, he claims. Sachs defines poverty in three stages: Extreme poverty; moderate poverty and relative poverty. Extreme poverty as defined by the World Bank is getting by on an income of less than $1 a day, which means that households cannot meet basic needs for survival. People are chronically hungry, are unable to get health care; they lack safe drinking water and sanitation, and they cannot afford education for their children and perhaps lack rudimentary shelter.
Some 38% people of Pakistan fall in this category of poverty. The total number of people living in extreme poverty is 1.1billion, down from 1.5billion in 1981. While it can be called progress, it is still one-sixth of humanity, mired in extreme poverty. Asia leads in numbers. The poor, according to Sachs, need to get even their first foot on the ladder of development. The world’s main challenge is to stop cursing the poor for being lazy and corrupt; but to take on the soluble problems of geographic isolation, disease and natural hazards, and to do so with new arrangements of political responsibility that can get the job done.
The cure to end poverty in the world lies in the clinical approach. By this he means to approach the disease with precision, and effective knowledge like a medical doctor does. Poverty like a disease cannot be cured through the application of leeches and homeopath powdery packets. Sachs says he can make it happen, and jointly the world can banish extreme poverty in our generation in which some 8 million die each year, only if the world commits 0.7% of its growth towards this mission and honors it each year. Even a little help can make them thrive. America donates only 15cents of its $100 dollars to help alleviate poverty in the world. The richest country of the world, the US has promised repeatedly to give a larger share of its annual output to help poor countries. But year after year, America has failed to follow through. Sachs solution is simple: all the poor and the developing countries, like Brazil, India, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa should join together to issue the call to action; the richest and most powerful countries must actively and substantially participate in global efforts to end poverty and protect the environment because by doing so they would be strengthening their own security; the UN, the IMF and the World Bank must be strengthened; global scientific technology that is helpful to improve standards of living must be shared. The TIME magazine of March 14, 2005 highlights Sachs’ program, as expressed by him in his book “The End of Poverty” and the above mentioned information owes its sources to it.
THE SERIOUS THEMES IN PAKISTAN’S SOCIAL MILIEU
It does not appeal to the Pakistani intelligentsia to focus on why 82% of our women fall a prey to domestic violence; why every day 3 or more children get sexually abused? Why 24% boys and 76% girls between the ages of 5-15 get molested each year? Why 54 out of 100 children enrolled in an elementary school fail to make their way to a middle school and drop out? Why couldn’t a single university in Pakistan be ranked among the top 1,000 universities of the world? Why are 180 universities in the country allowed to function when diplomas/degrees issued by them are not recognized by the institutions of the country that has allowed them to operate? Why even the reputable universities of the country are ranked in equivalency to a two-year community college in a developed country? And why a goodly number of people can’t have access to pure and fresh drinking water?
On the contrary, the discussion held in many a session on TV like GEO, was, “When is Hazrat Mehdi expected to announce his arrival?” The parliamentarians are busy in making preparations to receive their exiled leaders under the new arrangements of reconciliation or are doing over-time to either get Imtiaz Sheikh evicted or restored. The religious leadership is busy in condemning the female participants of the Lahore Marathon for wearing shorts, or is engaged in splitting hair as to how immoral it could be on the part of actress Meera to kiss an Indian Hindu actor? What happened to Dr. Shazia Khalid, Mukhtar Mai, or to the five children molested in Gojra, or why our streets are not paved and are interspersed with filth-depots? Why can’t people drive between lanes and follow traffic laws? Why corruption is so pervasive? Like the people of Baghdad, just before the invasion by the Mongols, we are busy discussing, “Was the meat of Buraq, the winged-horse that the Prophet rode on his nocturnal journey to Heaven halal or not?” May be PM Shaukat Aziz has an answer.

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