Patronage Versus
Policy
This column has been
harshly critical of the Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz
Sharif era that cost Pakistan tremendously throughout
the 1990’s. In contrast, the Shaukat Aziz
era has seen consistent and significant economic
progress. Just last week Aziz announced that Pakistan
will achieve its goal of 14 billion dollars of exports
this fiscal year, and he wants to double that by
2010. In addition, tax receipts are coming in above
expectations and should clear 580 billion rupees
this year. Compare that with only 300 billion in
Nawaz Sharif’s last year.
The big question of Pakistani politics is whether
Sharif and Bhutto have learned anything over the
last decade that would give us any confidence in
their ability to run the economy? Or is there something
very different about how Aziz does things that allows
him to be so much more successful?
The answer to this is buried inside the very nature
of the political parties that Sharif and Bhutto
run. In a Western democracy, political parties exist
to carry out policies. People support those political
parties because they want those policies enacted,
whether it be tax cuts, new social programs, changes
in foreign policy, or greater attention to a given
social problem. People do not join these parties
or vote for them in anticipation of direct benefit
for the most part. One does not vote for George
Bush or work for the Republican party in order to
get a government job. In fact most Republicans want
the government to leave them alone and cut their
taxes. Support for policies are based on the sense
that those policy choices are best for the country
as a whole, and as the country is better off, the
individual voter becomes better off. Now opposing
political parties can have a very different sense
of what is good policy and that is why there needs
to be elections.
In Pakistan, there are very few policy based political
parties. The PPP and PML (Nawaz) are not policy
based but rather patronage based. A patronage party
offers no particular policy, but exists as a vehicle
for its supporters and core members to access government
power and thereby personally benefit. A supporter
of Benazir expects to get a government job in a
government run company, or get a loan from a government
bank that he otherwise would not be entitled to,
or have the ability to manipulate the bureaucracy
or legal system to his benefit. The same goes for
Sharif supporters. As the two groups alternated
in power, their brazenness in grabbing personal
benefits became astonishing. This is why Pakistan
drifted into such severe high level corruption.
For Benazir or Nawaz to try to stop this whole process
at any point became impossible, as the very basis
of their political support was this patronage system.
In contrast to the PPP and PML N the religious parties
are not patronage parties. They are true policy
based parties. The policy they want to enact though
is rather disturbing to the rest of society, which
is why they cannot get above 15% of the total vote,
as the rest of Pakistan does not want to live in
a Taliban style state.
What sets Aziz apart is that he has pursued policy
rather than patronage as his core approach. Politics
always requires some degree of compromise, and the
recent package of goodies for Baluchistan fit that
mold, but the overall direction of the state has
been driven by growth-oriented economic policies.
These have yielded fantastic results. For the business
sector, they are now seeing that real business in
a briskly growing economy returns far greater profit
than what could be had under the patronage economy
of the 90’s.
The opposition of the PPP and PML N to the privatization
process is also rooted in their patronage reality.
Because they need a vast network of government run
businesses and banks to provide adequate patronage
opportunity for their supporters, they can never
accept real privatization in the economy. By reducing
the size of the economy run by the government, Aziz
has reduced the patronage opportunities for Benazir
and Nawaz. This is what has them so distraught about
the process. Comments can reach me at Nali@socal.rr.com.
