Patterns of opposition politics

DURING the current year, Qazi Hussain Ahmed of JI issued many a call for agitation. The ARD conglomerate signed the Charter of Democracy and promised to launch a countrywide movement. More recently, the opposition forces in Balochistan staged public demonstrations against the Musharraf government for killing Nawab Akbar Bugti. The opposition’s bid for agitation has been comprehensively constrained up to now.

The opposition has been skirting around the project of a mass movement against the Musharraf regime. The prospects of the emergence of a grand opposition alliance are uncertain but grim. So is the consensus on the objectives and direction of an opposition movement at present.

Among the three major streams of opposition — ARD, MMA and various lesser parties and alliances ranging from POONM to TI — ARD formally represents an alternative to the present scenario, at least in terms of its potential vote bank and national leadership. However, both sources of mobilisation are redundant at this moment. The public vote can be relevant only after the election campaign starts, sometime before the fall in the year 2007. The leadership of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif can produce tangible results only after they come back, if at all, from their exile.

The leading issue for the two major parties — PPP and PML-N — is re-entry into the political system. Their leadership suffers from double jeopardy. On the one hand, it lost the autonomy of political life from a guardian-president committed to safeguarding the interests of the military establishment, as expressed through the loss of parliamentary sovereignty under the 17th Amendment. On the other hand, the law has become an instrument of politics, as reflected in legal cases against the leaders-in-exile.

Much more than the PPP, which has been able to keep its political base from thinning down to a non-electoral entity, the PML-N has lost to PML-Q its leadership role, cadres and constituency-based workers. This falls discreetly in the old Punjab tradition of the King’s party, represented by the Republican Party, Convention League and currently the PML-Q. President Musharraf recently claimed that he had created the PML-Q. Under these circumstances, Nawaz Sharif’s political comeback is problematic, even though a last-minute bargain with the establishment remains a possibility. The second stream of opposition represented by the MMA is relatively less predictable than the mainstream contenders for power. The performance of this alliance of Islamic parties in the forthcoming elections may not reflect the level of its victory in the 2002 elections. It has not been able to mobilise the public in the direction of a mass movement. While it spearheaded demonstrations against the West on issues ranging from the invasion of Iraq to the Danish caricatures of Islam, it failed to capture the political imagination of the nation.

Various factors are responsible for the MMA’s lack of action within or outside the parliament. The alliance has a reputation of being the establishment’s creation. Starting from the days of Al-Badr and Al-Shams, Islamic parties individually and sometimes collectively moved along the chartered path, through the PNA movement of 1977, the Afghan resistance movement in the 1980s and the pro-Taliban policies of the 1990s. After the 2002 elections, the MMA pursued the politics of accommodation vis-a-vis the military establishment at various times. Most crucially, it helped the Musharraf government to pass the 17th Amendment which, among other things, deprived the parliament of sovereignty. Secondly, it joined the PML-Q government in Balochistan as a partner. Thirdly, largely as a quid pro quo, MMA leader Fazlur Rahman was appointed leader of the opposition even though only a minority of opposition members supported him.

However, the MMA has been the most visible opposition force on the political stage during the post-2002 period. Its leadership operates from within Pakistan, not outside it. It is the only opposition party/alliance that runs a government in the Frontier. It has taken a clear anti-US stance as opposed to the pro-US policy line of the Musharraf government. It now has a political base of its own in the form of a vast electoral constituency concentrated in, but by no means limited to, the NWFP and Balochistan. It frequently draws on sources of inspiration rooted in the emerging dichotomy between Islam and the West, as operative through regional conflicts in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The MMA has shown a lack of will to opt for agitational politics, the JI’s rhetoric notwithstanding. Far more than the ARD, it is part of the system in Peshawar, Quetta as well as Islamabad. Its calls for mass movement lack substance. The MMA feels that it is destined to lose the initiative in favour of the mainstream parties in this situation. Confusion within the ranks of the MMA about its role in the system at large partly reflects the divide within the alliance between the JI and JUI. While the JI draws on urban middle and lower middle class sections of the population, it operates along a vision of Islamic revolution and seeks to change the perceived pro-western and secular character of the ruling elite. But, the JUI is relatively pragmatic, patronage-oriented and constituency-based in both substance and style. It is more sensitive to, and therefore more accommodating towards, the realities of power than the JI and, by the same token, less prone to oppositionist politics. The MMA may enter into a political understanding with the Musharraf government either before or after the next elections.

The third stream of opposition is represented by the nationalist forces, currently led by the Baloch in tandem with Sindhi nationalists, and, at least symbolically, by the ANP leadership from the NWFP. The Baloch movement is brewing and may take a while in maturing into a strong challenge for the ruling set-up. In the post-Bugti framework of politics in Balochistan, Islamabad will be required to do a lot of tight-rope walking at the grave risk of alienating the tribal elite still further.

How does the Musharraf government see opposition politics? It has a military as well as a civilian dimension, represented by President Musharraf and the PML-Q led by Chaudhary Shujaat Hussain respectively. The former’s priorities may sometimes run counter to the latter’s preferences beyond a certain level of cooperation and co-option. The establishment has been in contact with the PPP leadership as confirmed by the two sides at various times. It sees a lot of sense in talking to the PPP.

The latter has liberal and modernist credentials. It enjoys a tacit approval of Washington as a potential partner of the government in Islamabad. What makes the PPP a strong candidate for a deal with Islamabad is its perceived weakness as an anti-establishment party, which makes it vulnerable to charges of all kinds. On the other hand, the party has a popular base, which is considered to be a great political asset.

At the other end, the PML-N has been one of the candidates for partnership with the government. This brought about a change in the leadership of the party between the two Sharif brothers some time ago. However, the adversarial relations between Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif may not allow the closing of the gap between them in the near future. Even more significantly, opening up to Nawaz Sharif through dialogue does not promise political dividends to the military establishment in addition to what is already available to it in the form of the PML-Q leadership.

The civilian dimension of the current system represents a relatively inflexible approach to the prospects of widening the political base of the government. Shujaat Hussain at the head of the PML-Q can be expected to look at the PPP from across the line of blood drawn by the murder of Chaudhary Zahoor Illahi. For the PML-Q leadership, PPP represents evil in political and moral terms. Similarly, for the Chaudharis the idea of accommodation of the Sharifs into the party or politics is tantamount to pushing them into the political wilderness in their home base in Punjab. The PML-Q leadership has jealously guarded its political constituency in Punjab by planning to keep the MQM away and constraining the operations of the two mainstream parties and their leaders in that province. It has looked relatively more favourably at the MMA, essentially because the epicentre of the latter’s appeal lies in the NWFP, not in Punjab. Also, it enjoys partnership with MMA in the Balochistan government. By the same account, PML-Q shares with the military high command a distance and dissociation with POONM and other nationalist forces.

In contemporary Pakistan, the typical scenario of the opposition politics is not agitation but dialogue, even as one often hears loud calls to hit the street. The profile of the opposition-in-dialogue occupies a centre-stage position in the post-2002 politics. President Musharraf conducted a dialogue with various groups of parliamentarians after the 2002 elections for the purposes of government formation. He was able to finalise an agreement with the MMA on his constitutional amendments, even as his commitment to shed the uniform did not materialise. Maulana Fazlur Rahman of the JUI is generally understood to be in dialogue with the government, while Qazi Hussain Ahmed emits anger over the official policies.

The PML-N and PPP have been holding dialogues with the government at various times. The Baloch leadership belonging to various nationalist parties represented in the parliament has been part of the official committee and the sub-committee on Balochistan. The government seems to rely on dialogue either to pre-empt a crisis looming on the horizon or to devise a way out of the perceived gap of legitimacy or credibility. The opposition is typically cynical about initiatives for dialogue, which allegedly aim at defusing a situation rather than resolving it.

However, it finds no option other than dialogue with the government in the absence of a united platform, a consensus-based agenda and the requisite organisational resources. The recent controversy about the Hadood Ordinance exposed the internal divisions of the opposition, and testified to the ability of the government to keep the political initiative in its own hands by controlling the agenda-setting organs of the state.

Who is to educate our youth?

LAST Friday Prof Muhammad Yunus, nicknamed the banker for the poor from Bangladesh, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 2006. It is an honour that he and the Grameen Bank, the institution he founded, fully deserve.

Though it has not been generally noted, Prof Yunus has moved on from his original initiative of providing easily accessible micro credit without collateral to the poor, especially the doubly oppressed — that is the women.

Now he has postulated his theory of the social entrepreneur (SE) becoming a social business entrepreneur (SBE) to make his projects self-reliant.

Prof Yunus is critical of the market (which we call the private sector). He describes it as “an exclusive playground of the personal gain seekers” who “overwhelmingly ignore the common interest of the communities and the world as a whole”.

He sounds the alarm bell when he warns that with the dizzying speed of expansion of the economies, with personal wealth reaching unimaginable heights, globalisation threatens to wipe out the weak and the poor.

But he appears to have accepted the fact that the marketplace is there to stay. Hence he proposes an approach to avoid this catastrophe: recognise the role of the social entrepreneur who is social-objective driven. Prof Yunus starts from the premise that the SEs are not interested in profit maximisation. “They are totally committed to make a difference to the world and give a better chance in life to other people,” he observes.

According to him, these entrepreneurs seek to achieve their objectives by creating sustainable business enterprises. They thus emerge as social business entrepreneurs (SBE) which is a moment worth celebrating since they have overcome, what he calls, “the gravitational force of financial dependence” and moved from the world of philanthropy to the world of business.

The social business enterprise will strive for profits but the qualifying factor will be its over-arching social goal.

Prof Yunus has already put his philosophy into action. The Grameen Bank has 20 companies in its network and now it has entered into a joint business venture with the French food giant, Danone, that had a sale of $16 billion in 2005. Prof Yunus says he will use the prize money to finance this project.

Can the Nobel laureate’s ideas be implanted in Pakistan’s conditions? This should be food for thought especially at a time when the thrust is towards entrusting the private sector with the responsibility of fulfilling the social needs of the people. Take the education sector. A few days before the Nobel prize was announced, the federal minister of education released the findings of the first national education census held in 2005.

This sheds interesting light on the division between the public and the private sectors of the responsibility of educating Pakistan’s youth. Of the 245,682 institutions covered by the survey, 81,103 (33 per cent) were found to be in the private sector. In other words, the government is rapidly moving towards its goal of shifting the load of education to the private sector.

Significantly, the pattern of ownership of educational institutions that emerges from the census is also somewhat worrying. The institutions in the private sector are not evenly spread out at all levels.

Thus the private sector has more schools at the secondary and middle levels (61 per cent) than the government has. Again the private sector operates more technical, vocational and professional institutions, such as polytechnics and monotechnics, (70 per cent) than the government is running.

Obviously, the private entrepreneurs are investing their money where the profit is. These institutions are the ones that teach the skills which make a person employable. Hence they are in greater demand. Since ours is now a market driven society, people wishing to enrol in these institutions have to pay the relatively high fees demanded by them.

A comparison between the private and public sector institutions at any level finds that as a rule the private schools/colleges and universities impart education of a better academic standard.

The paradox in the situation is that the government is spending a hefty sum per capita — more than the private sector — on the poor quality education it is imparting to the masses. Thus the government’s expenditure is calculated to be Rs9,746 per head on educating 21.258 million students from the primary to the post-graduate and professional levels.

The private sector’s expenditure is more difficult to calculate because, as the census document states, 9,000 institutions did not provide the financial information (for reasons of tax evasion?). But according to a rough estimate the private sector spends Rs8,940 per head to educate 12.121 million students.

Yet the private institutions are performing better. They have more accountability and the parents feel that they get a hearing and their complaints are addressed.

A mother from the low-income class who withdrew her children from a government school in Korangi and had them enrolled in a private school in the same locality said that in the government institution the headmaster/class teacher was not even present to listen to what she had to say.

It is also felt that the private institutions have a more effective administration and are relatively efficient in their working. Since they are result oriented, the teachers and the management are more focused and motivated.

Even though they operate in a sellers’ market and face little competition, they have to show a reasonably good track record to attract their clientele.

These advantages notwithstanding, the private sector institutions, barring a few noble exceptions, exhibit the typical characteristics of an entrepreneur operating in a free market. Their fiscal management is directed towards maximising profits.

They stretch each rupee to by charging relatively high fees and in many cases exploit the teachers. The high fees make many private institutions unaffordable for the masses.

On the contrary, in the public sector educational institutions the fees are a nominal Rs 10 or so a month and the teachers are not under so much pressure. If anything, those who are not too conscientious take advantage of the lack of effective monitoring and many of them actually become partners in the corruption that is rampant in the education departments. Where school management boards exist their role is not very effective. Small wonder the education authorities have failed to deliver in spite of their massive spending.

The census reports that 12,737 institutions in the public sector are “non-functional”. This is not a small number. The biggest failure of our education managers has been their inability to motivate the teachers and sustain their motivation to put in their best performance.

In this dichotomy between the private and the public sector, it may not be easy to find a solution that protects the interest of the user. As Prof Muhammad Yunus observes, “The market is always considered to be an utterly incapable institution to address social problems. To the contrary, the market is recognised as an institution significantly contributing to creating social problems.

Since the market has no capacity to solve social problems, this responsibility is handed over to the state. This arrangement ... did not last long... we are back to the artificial division of work between the market and the state.” This is what has happened in Pakistan as the education census amply demonstrates.

Are we ready to introduce Prof Yunus’s revolutionary concept of the social business entrepreneur in Pakistan? The problem is that the worlds of philanthropy and of business are so far apart in this country that they do not meet institutionally. The social entrepreneurs depend on public donations to sustain their enterprises.

Many big businesses donate to them generously. But this relationship is an ad hoc one. The government has now been encouraging the corporate sector to donate at least one per cent of its pre-tax profit to philanthropy.

Can we ever hope that the private schools that make hefty profits will divert a substantial share of their profits to set up institutions that charge modest fees to impart high class education to the children of the poor and impart equally good education to them?

The new reformers

PAKISTAN has too many well-meaning do-gooders who do good to no one for the simple reason that the public is inclined to take them as crackpots. The result is that all their unique and noble ideas, and the inane sincerity with which they want to implement them, come to naught.

For example, look at these angelic chaps in the organization called Public Help Programme Pakistan (PHPP) who now admit that its was they who had carried on the campaign for two years to call corrupt officials bad names like zaleel and kameene — roughly translated as iniquitous and depraved — and also confess now that the effort to reform these crooks had proved a failure. Readers might recall that campaign. It was conducted through paid newspaper advertisements and wall posters and car stickers.

Neither the fellows who were called zaleel and kameene felt any pangs of guilt nor did the people at large wanting to address them by these appellations and boycott them socially, as exhorted by the campaigners. In fact, most people, instead of condemning them wanted to follow in their footsteps and become zaleel and kameene themselves and turn rich overnight if they could.

I suppose the basic problem is that you can’t point your finger at the corrupt among the public servants because there are so many who are given to graft and kickbacks and commissions and misappropriation of state funds. You can however point your finger at those who are honest, but that is not the same thing.

In a pamphlet received by post, I find that the PHPP wants to launch a new programme to fight the corrupt and seeks your help and mine for it. But before I tell you about it I want to solemnly affirm that not a word will be added to the programme by me, and I shall be repeating only what the pamphlet contains. I am saying this because the whole thing is so bizarre as to be unbelievable. For one, it carries no name and address. Like genuine Good Samaritans they wish to remain incognito, or maybe they feel that the thick-skinned people of this country will laugh at them if they disclose their identity.

The programme is super-revolutionary in nature and deserves to be taken up by the National Accountability Bureau. If it could be meticulously implemented (it’s a big if, I know) and if the corrupt do not take over the organization itself (of which there is always the danger) no bribe-taker would be left in Pakistan. No, I am not being facetious or sarcastic. According to PHPP’s pamphlet, every day about one thousand corrupt officers and clerks would be pensioned off and blacklisted. In one month (with no holidays) the number would be 80,000; in a year almost 360,000, and in five years more than 1.5 million vacancies would be created by throwing out the bad hats. (These figures are all from the pamphlet). These vacancies will be filled by “educated, unemployed and hardworking young men.” The paper does not require them to be honest.

I am simply dying of curiosity. I want to find out who is the genius behind PHPP, for he must have an extremely fertile brain. Then, is it one genius or a whole group of geniuses who have drawn up the plan? And mind you, it is not just verbiage. It includes the use of electronic gadgetry to catch culprits red-handed. It’s a pity they don’t want to disclose their identity.

The following ultra-modern, sensitive instruments are proposed to be employed. Mini auto remote cameras, mini telephones, audio and video recordings, finger-printed coded gifts, and of course plain cash, even though it cannot be electronic. If you haven’t heard of some of them before it only shows your ignorance. To catch officers in Grade 17 and above, experts would be imported by PHPP from Europe, but preferably from Muslim countries, and after training they would be given “a Pakistani look and identity.” Don’t ask me how. So the scheme involves the use of ultramodern technology to achieve its ends rather the end of the corrupt and the wicked.

The trouble with all anti-corruption measures is that if a charge is proved against a public servant what happens at the most is that he is sent to jail. Otherwise he merely loses a lucrative job. PHPP says the jails are already full, and punishments to those found guilty should be of a social nature. Here they are, and you must give credit for them for they are highly ingenious.

The faces of those found guilty will be smeared with indelible ink — red, blue, green and yellow, according to the colour allotted to their department — and they will then be allowed to go their way. The plan does not say what would be done about those who may go into hiding to avoid the taunts of the people and come back only when the ink wears off. The very corrupt will have their heads shaved and rubbed with luminous paint, also indelible. Here again the plan fails to deal with the matter of growing hair which may hide the paint after a while.

At this point come the corrupt maulvis. Coloured bits of straw will be inserted in their beards and fixed with the help of Elfy, the super adhesive. Reminds one of the Urdu saying about straw in the beard of the guilty. The plan doesn’t say so but I suppose an operative from the anti-corruption department will keep them company to ensure that they do not shave off their beards.

The police will not enter the scene at all, PHPP envisages the employment of retired army men and commandos to carry out its operations. Moreover, “highly educated ulema, khateebs and imams will be inducted into the department.” The poor chaps will probably live in constant fear of being Elfied.

The other noteworthy punishment for the guilty will be to cut off half the little finger of the left hand, for which legislation will be enacted. This should reduce their capacity for further grabbling illegal money by at least one-tenth. That is if they are retained in their departments after the amputation.

The PHPP plan is certainly thorough and looks after every detail. The primary base for anti-corruption operations will be “secret cellars in the basements of mosques where, after prayers, the corrupt will be pointed out.” Which means that the project may have to be put off till such cellars have been provided.

Appropriately enough, the HQ of the operations will be “underneath the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad.” So, whether the corrupt in the federal capital are caught or not, they will be laughing at the plan and saying to one another, “See you at the Faisal Mosque on Friday. Beware of Elfy!” I may add that no punishment is provided for those who make fun of PHPP and its way!

Correction

Owing to a computer glitch, certain errors crept into Mr Anwar Syed’s article “Unhappy state of teaching” that was published last Sunday (Oct 15). Lines 7, 8 and 9 of para 12 should have read, “The Sarala Birla Academy for Boys in Bangalore was offering between Rs18,000 and Rs28,000 per month...” Lines 2, 3, 4 and 5 of para 13 should have read, “A denominational (DAV) secondary school in Chennai (Tamil Nadu) wanted a math teacher for Rs9,555 per month...” Lines 6 and 7 of para 13 should have read, “Another private school in the same state, AKT Academy, offered to pay Rs8,000...” The errors are regretted.