Lots of ‘projects’ but no reform

The rumour in Islamabad is that the prime minister is, in fact, very much alive to the damage done to his government and his stature by the evergreen youthfulness of Imran Khan and his supporters. Insiders (or anyone paying close attention to anything other than the talk shows) know that for several weeks, small groups of PML-N leaders have been getting together, ironing out the mental kinks and trying to grapple with the scale and scope of the Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri challenge. For many people, this is a nonstarter to begin with. Given the Alamgiri method of governance preferred by Pakistani patriarchs, what does it matter what the really smart guys in the PML-N think?
Prime Minister Sharif is a remarkably agile politician. No one becomes PM three times without access to some distinctive internal mechanisms that enable victory, repeatedly. However, he is also stuck in a time warp. Many of his close advisers are too. The fresh blood that the PM has access to is relatively ineffectual because getting a hearing with the PM is a challenge, and getting the PM to clearly articulate decisions, swiftly and firmly, is an even bigger battle.
The stream of consciousness in which the Sharif political enterprise exists is essentially geared towards delivery of tangible and visible products and services: like trains, highways, metros, loans and laptops. In Punjab, this extends to some aspects of service delivery, like teachers’ attendance, and patients per BHU. Yet the instruments that should be working to deliver such outputs, we all know, are wholly and irredeemably broken. Let’s review.
First, the delivery of outputs in the public sector requires money. Pakistan doesn’t have it. The tax-to-GDP ratio is, we all know, very low. The appetite to raise fees and payments for service delivery is, we all know, very low. The capacity of the political class to take difficult decisions, especially after the dharna diarrhoea of the last several weeks, we all know, is extremely low. In short, we don’t have the money to pay for high quality public sector outputs.
Second, the delivery of outputs in the public sector requires people, both technical expertise and managerial excellence. The state of the bureaucracy is worrisome. The unwillingness of politicians and bureaucrats to acknowledge this human resource disaster is shameful. The prospects for improvement do not exist. The habitual interventions of donors exacerbates the dynamic, by crowding out (and pricing out) the market for highly skilled technical experts on the one hand, and by substituting (and pre-empting) the hard work government should be doing to find such expertise on the other. In short, we don’t have the right people in the right jobs to deliver quality outputs produced by government.
Finally, we are in an era of unprecedented state shrinkage and retreat. The global discourse around state capacity and state responsibility has been so very deeply wounded by the unmitigated greed hoisted upon us by the Reagan and Thatcher eras that one must now regularly apologise in decent gatherings for daring to assert, for example, that the delivery of a high quality education is a state responsibility. In 2014, this simply means that to deliver decent public sector outputs, like a meaningful laptops programme, or good functional metro bus systems, countries like Pakistan need to have innovators, creative thinkers and entrepreneurs driving down the cost of business, and driving up the effectiveness of government solutions.
Since we don’t have the money, and we don’t have the people, it would only follow that we not have any innovation in the public sector. The truth is that even in an environment of great hostility to knowledge, science, mathematics and evidence, Pakistan regularly produces innovators. This is not as counter-intuitive as it would seem. Bureaucrats and technical experts working in government have to regularly skirt around the decay carcass of our civil services to actually get things done. Sometimes, this produces brilliant innovations.
Punjab, under Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif offers a range of pretty compelling examples, but it may even be happening at the local level in districts like Panjgur, Dadu and Ghizer. The problem is that because the overarching systems of delivery are broken, innovation is rarely institutionalised and most often punished.
These three systemic weaknesses are not new. They have existed in various shapes and forms for over a quarter century now. The economic growth, urbanisation and openness of the national discourse have exacerbated our knowledge and awareness of the system. The terrorists have exploited these weaknesses to disgusting, but powerful effects. The political response to all this has been a tendency to centralise, informalise and obfuscate decision-making. Part of this may be informed by low, mid and high level rent-seeking and patronage distribution, or “corruption”. A lot of it however, is a genuine effort to move quickly to deliver public sector outputs, without being held back or slowed down by the system’s inherent weaknesses.
What ends up happening is actually quite strange, and very dangerous. Political leaders, like Shahbaz Sharif, and increasingly those ministers and chief executives in other provinces who want to get things done, find a winning combination and then power through and get things done. This is how the Lahore MetroBus was made, it is how the dengue response took place in Punjab, it is how, at a much smaller scale, Nisar Khuhro in Sindh and Dr Malik in Balochistan are trying to tackle challenges to education, and it is how various members of the PTI government in KP are trying to grapple with police reform, with corruption in procurements and with education.
In most cases, the winning formula ends up working in the short term. The money comes from many places, but often includes contributions from donors, both western, like the UK and the US, and non-western, like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and China. The people come from experience: once a civil servant proves his worth to a hands-on politician who wants to deliver, he doesn’t sleep until the next elections. I have seen too many bureaucrats in their mid-thirties age by two decades in a matter of months.
The short-term delivery, however, comes at a large and unsustainable long-term cost. The role of foreign money in Pakistani public policy is now so deeply embedded that even hardcore nationalists tend to want to avoid the topic. You cannot be sovereign if your finance minister’s most important meetings are all with foreigners. The need for speedy money also takes a toll on our public financial management system. The auditor general started to be ignored in the 1990s when the finance babus wanted to fast-track donor money into projects like the PPAF, and decided to have all audits done by ‘third parties’.
The only way to spend in a timely manner is to blast through all the processes meant to protect taxpayer investments in infrastructure and service delivery. Even when there is no corruption taking place, such habits create the space for corruption.
Finally, this mode of governance and delivery deepens the crisis of our civil services. The brilliant men and women of Pakistan’s various occupational groups can alter the course of the nation, given the predictability, firmness and accountability that a public sector requires. The laissez faire, build-at-all-costs approach undermines all these necessary qualities in government.
No matter how many meetings PM Sharif presides over, how many new loans and grants Dar Sb secures, and how many projects the PML-N launches, the state of the Pakistani state will continue to worsen under this mode of governance. Real reform requires courage and vision. Can PM Sharif rise to the occasion?
The writer is an analyst and commentator.