Can PML-N or PTI win this zero-sum game?

The writer is an analyst and commentator.
If you step back from the daily news cycle, you’ll notice a startling consistency across certain kinds of storylines. It starts with deep dissatisfaction about something – it could be anything really: from the May 2, 2011 Osama bin Laden raid on Abbottabad, to the May 11, 2013 general election results; from the non-conforming use of residential buildings in Islamabad to the rate of fees elite private schools are charging their customers; from the quality of food being served at restaurants in Lahore to the price of samosas during Ramazan.
The most recent addition to the list? The obscene manner in which election spending rules were flouted in the by-election for NA-122 in Lahore on October 11, 2015.
What do these storylines have in common? For beginners, because we live in relatively free democracy, we have the freedom to write about these things in the papers, talk about them on television, and make clever or trite quips about them on social media. In the broader Muslim world, these basic freedoms are not taken for granted the way that they can be here in Pakistan. Young Pakistanis need to remember that these freedoms were not easy to win, and we owe much to our much-maligned political parties, our lawyers, and our civil society leaders.
But the similarities go much deeper. Each of these storylines has also been noticed by formal state institutions. The 2011 Bin Laden raid generated a high-level inquiry commission, the May 2013 general elections generated a dharna, which produced a judicial commission, the inconsistent application of non-conforming use of residential buildings in Islamabad was noticed by the Supreme Court, parents with children at elite private school fees made sure that education departments like Islamabad’s Private Education Institution Regulation Authority (PEIRA) had to respond to their outrage, unhygienic conditions at restaurant kitchens in Lahore produced a reaction from the Punjab Food Authority (PFA), food prices in Ramazan is a core area of work for DMG officers and their provincial colleagues working at the district level.
We don’t know if the Election Commission of Pakistan will do anything to acknowledge how ridiculous the combined wealth of Aleem Khan and Ayaz Sadiq made the Republic look – but on the evidence from our post-information age track record, there should be an ECP statement ‘taking note’ of the situation any minute now.
There is one final layer of similarities across these storylines that we need to acknowledge. It seems that no matter what level and what layer of formal state institution is in charge, there is a universal agreement that the quality of the Republic’s response to these challenges is uneven, inconsistent and unsatisfactory.
In the Bin Laden Commission report, a deeply incisive analysis of long and short-term security failures has been wasted because no one owns the report’s outputs. The judicial commission’s assessment of the electoral system’s weaknesses is not dramatically different from European Union electoral observation mission reports going back at least to the 2002 general election. And yet despite major investments, the systemic faults in the process have largely persisted.
The Supreme Court instructed the Capital Development Authority to indiscriminately shut down businesses operating from homes – but the very businesses that the CDA shuts down on Tuesday are open for business on Wednesday. The impressive boldness of the Punjab Food Authority spurs food authorities in other parts of the country to use their powers unevenly, targeting high-street chains that generate Facebook shares and likes, leaving main-street violators to continue serving contaminated food to Pakistanis who don’t use Facebook. The price of samosas in a district depends on the luck of the dwellers of the district: a superstar DMG officer in Sialkot might prevail over the market, but the same officer may not have the same effectiveness when posted in Rajanpur.
Does anyone believe that the Election Commission is capable of even calculating how much more was spent by candidates on the NA-122 election than was supposed to be spent, what to say of controlling that spending?
Politicians like Imran Khan and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, for all their differences, are remarkably similar in one dimension. They are both equally powerless to do anything about the Republic’s consistent failure to change itself into a more effective machine. Our national political discourse stands paralysed in the face of these challenges. This isn’t mere conceptual alarmism. It has real meaning for the day-to-day and hour-to-hour operations at the level of both institutions and individuals.
PM Sharif will not be able to end the power crisis for the same reason that the Election Commission will not be able to remove the weaknesses the judicial commission identified in its report. Imran Khan will not be able to put every child in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in school for the same reason that Shahbaz Sharif will not be able to force teachers to know how to teach mathematics to primary school girls in Layyah, Toba Tek Singh, and Attock.
The CDA can scurry and take down the commercial signs on residential buildings, but it cannot and will not stop businesses from operating from in residential buildings. The Punjab Food Authority will not be able to sustain its run of cleanliness, and corruption in food departments across the country is about to sky rocket, because of the arbitrary 19th century powers that the state has vested in the hands of BPS-18 officers here in the molten, caramel-core of the 21st century.
Occasionally, an exceptional man or woman will deliver stand-alone successes. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Inspector General Nasir Durrani, with PTI-generated autonomy, has successfully implemented many police actions without political interference. In Punjab, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, with PML-N-generated autonomy, has successfully built infrastructure in Lahore that is the envy of the rest of the country. As a system however, the moment we try to conceive of the replicability and scalability of these successes, we are paralysed by the knowledge that there is no system. Success is being generated in our public sector by disruptive innovators from the top, with no systemic support or space for creating processes or mechanisms that can add an element of consistency, or predictability to the public sector’s behaviour.
The administrative infrastructure that helps get Pakistan from point A to point B is broken. Every conversation in the country echoes this obvious fact. What is terrifying is that every action to try to address broken things is itself broken. How many high court and Supreme Court-enforced administrative actions have we had in the last five years? How many inquiry commission reports? How many functions will we vest in court actions?
The fact that media exposure and court actions can spur government action is something to be celebrated in an emerging democracy. But now that we are approaching eight years since the restoration of democracy in 2008, can we keep indulging in the sentimentality of the system’s fragility of 2009? The things we may celebrate in an emerging democracy should be red flags in an established democracy.
Pakistan is in urgent need of a wholesale and fearless reconstruction of its administrative infrastructure, its federal and provincial government organograms, the Basic Pay Scale grades system, the occupational groups of the civil services and the manner in which all of these parts interact with each other to form the institution of the executive.
Sadly, this urgent need will continue to be ignored by both PM Sharif and Imran Khan. Both are better served by finding and taking opportunities to undermine each other. In the meantime, the civil-military divide will keep widening. By the time Imran Khan does manage to satiate his ego with that black sherwani (if ever), winning the office of prime minister will feel less like winning and more like losing. Since PM Sharif is the one more likely to keep winning, as he did in NA-122, he happens to have the greater stakes in revisiting the zero-sum game he keeps winning. He would be well advised to remember that zero plus zero still equals zero.