The Panamanian road to nowhere

The writer is an analyst and
commentator.

The Panama Papers were released on April 3, making this week the seventh consecutive week of Panama-generated political drama in Pakistan. The amount of newsprint and airtime that the Panama Papers have consumed certainly amounts to a political crisis for the prime minister. Yet neither he nor his political opponents would like to admit how much of this crisis has been manufactured by the prime minister’s own blunders in managing the fallout.

From the ridiculous effort to claim victimhood during his April 5 address to the nation, to the wild attacks on other politicians (especially Imran Khan) as a defence-mechanism, PM Sharif’s Panama Papers strategy has been an unmitigated disaster from day one.

Luckily for the prime minister, his political opposition is composed of three core components of equal importance, but also, impotence. The first is the PTI, a party that has enough people of questionable wealth at the top of the organisation to allow a cynical PML-N to target it. The second are non-PTI opposition groups, led by the PPP, a party which can only talk about corruption and rent-seeking as a punch line to a lesson in irony. The third is whatever anti-civilian sentiment there exists within the rank and file of the military, which is allowed oxygen through occasional signalling via the ISPR and other tools available to it.

What is being asked of the prime minister? At one extreme, people are calling for his resignation, with some hoping for an early election and others hoping for some miraculous interim government of the pure and holy. Most Pakistanis would be happy enough to see a serious investigation of the financial matters of the prime minister and his family. It would only strengthen this country’s democracy to have a credible investigation process to assess the financial propriety of the most powerful man in the country. Short of a serious investigation, the bare minimum that Pakistanis may expect are some limits to the potential abuse of power that produces rent-seeking behaviour and corruption in government. Sadly, none of the above is about to happen.

Of the three important groups that are challenging the prime minister, none have the potency to produce a threat great enough to the prime minister to cause a resignation or an early election. And because PM Sharif is Crisis Man, once he knows he will escape the crisis with his prime ministerial role intact, he is left with no incentive in either proving his innocence, or in reforming institutions. To add insult to injury, neither the PTI, nor the non-PTI parties, led by the PPP, nor the anti-government sentiment within the military, have the wherewithal to force his hand.

Our most recent lesson on this came from the August 2014 to December 2014 dharna, which was supposed to have transformed the electoral regime in the country. Yet only a few days before the release of the Panama Papers, the country’s political parties (through the Council of Common Interests) collectively agreed to delay the national census, rendering the next election to be as good (or bad) as the 2013 election, and delaying any major transformation in how elections are conducted to the 2023 election at the earliest.

This has some tragic and deep implications for Pakistan in the immediate short and medium term. Two weeks ago, in a salutary piece about the important work of bureaucrats (and particularly DMG/PAS officers that I am otherwise consistently, and legitimately, quite critical of), I had argued that during times of political crisis, Pakistan continues to chug along. This much remains true. But is chugging along good enough for Pakistan? If Fawad Hassan Fawad, the principal secretary to the prime minister and Younas Dagha, the industrious secretary for water and power are doing their jobs well, is that good enough for Pakistan? How many people need to be doing their jobs well in order for the country’s institutions to function effectively?

In Balochistan, Mushtaq Raisani, the secretary finance was caught with more cash in hand than what is available to many departments in Balochistan all year. Suitcases full of stolen money were retrieved from his home, his car and his office. In Islamabad, the secretary establishment transferred DPO Bahawalnagar Shariq Kamal Siddiqui because he had dared to do his job and arrest a thug working for MNA Alam Dad Laleka. When IG Mushtaq Sukhera was asked about the federal government transferring one of his officers, he said the “competent authority” had acted.

What an ugly stain on the word competent we are fashioning here. If MNAs can have district police chiefs moved at their whim, with the top cop in the province feigning a lack of agency in the process, you are not living in 2016, you are living in the Mughal Era. We all know how deeply centralised power is in Punjab, but in KP, things are supposed to be different. IG Nassir Durrani has been given the freedom to act, without constantly being interrupted by CM Pervez Khattak and his patronage network. Yet when Imran Khan asks his own supporters at a rally in Bannu whether there is less corruption and better police behaviour, they respond with a resounding no.

How do we reconcile the brilliance of a Younas Dagha helping accumulate megawattage for the country’s next thirty years of economic growth on the one hand and a Mushtaq Raisani in Balochistan on the other? How do we interpret the reform instinct of the PTI in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa succeeding in offering more freedom to cops in the province, but failing to transform that freedom into a tangible change for the people of Bannu? How do we process CM Punjab being able to build in mere months infrastructure that takes years, yet allowing officers like DPO Bahawalnagar to be victimised by MNAs with a medieval mindset?

To understand this, we need to understand the difference between the momentum of narratives of reform and the reality of structural inertia. All the talk of electoral reform has led to exactly how much electoral reform? The Panama Papers hullabaloo sure helps us discuss important issues around transparency, taxation, financial disclosure. Sadly, however, the Pakistani polity does not have the capacity to pivot the national debate from big picture issues into crisp, manageable and effective bits of public policy.

Some bureaucrats working hard and doing their jobs does not indicate that all is well in the republic. They will keep the republic chugging along, but they are not about to reform the very system that they are a product of, and to which they are beholden, structurally, institutionally – and for most – personally. Reform can only come from politicians and the political discourse.

Greater transparency and financial integrity are certainly worth aspiring for, but they will not be achieved without political consensus of the kind that mobilised around the Charter of Democracy in 2006. It took another four years after the charter’s signing for its key points to be codified into our constitution in the shape of the 18th Amendment. And it took the decade of the 1990s and the long periods of excommunication from Pakistan for Shaheed Benazir Bhutto and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif before the charter took shape.

Perhaps Imran Khan will be the leader that helps mobilises that kind of normative shift in our institutions on the issue of corruption and transparency. However, given that he is in his sixties, and incredibly susceptible to the temporary blip, rather than the permanent journey, this seems less than likely.

Meanwhile, it continues to be to Pakistan’s misfortune that PM Sharif, while possessing the necessary attention span and understanding of the long arc of politics, does not possess the ability to work beyond his person, his close family members and those that ingratiate themselves to him through sycophancy. This means that issues of national importance, both of immediate short-term urgency, like the fast deteriorating relationship with the US, and more medium-term salience, like the sputtering normalisation process with India, tend to take a back seat to defending the PM and his family.

Sadly, none of the three sources of resistance to the prime minister – the PTI, the non-PTI led by the PPP, and the anti-government sentiment within the military – seem to care very much either. Once again, Pakistan’s enemies are licking their lips, whilst we Pakistanis charge full speed ahead in a debate leading to nowhere.