Can Murad Ali Shah change Sindh?

The writer is an analyst and
commentator.

Among the various roles Karachi plays in national life, being the seat of the government of Sindh is one that tends to be overshadowed by its other personas.

Karachi is the economic engine, home of the MQM, witches’ brew of crime, obscene cocktail of deprivation and wealth, ode to both inertia and to innovation, and modern metropolis being held back by a country clinging to the nineteenth century in a twenty-first century world. For the most part, the absence of the national spotlight on governance in Sindh means that there is no ambient crisis in Tharparkar or Badin.

The platoons of our national outrage thrust into action sparingly when it comes to Sindh, largely because many of us in Pakistan’s big, entitled cities have given up on Sindh. But something other than the Rangers does stir in Karachi, and shockingly, it is associated with that dinosaur that so many of us keep writing off: the good old PPP.

It is hard to ever tell if former President Asif Ali Zardari pays attention very much, and harder still to figure out how much it matters that Bilawal Bhutto Zardari pays rapt attention to the fortunes of Sindh. But we know this: new Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah has been paying attention, and though it is still early days, it may matter quite a bit. If the early signs are indicative of what is coming, Sindh could finally be awakening from the somnambulant disinterest in its future.

What is Murad Ali Shah doing and how is it different? These things are not spoken of openly in polite English-language newspapers but, like everywhere else, the ethnic discourse in Pakistan tends to employ biases, often offensive ones, as shorthand. The construction of ‘the lazy Sindhi’ has many roots and origins, but it seems one place it will be offered no oxygen is in Murad Shah’s Sindh. Two generic changes he has made suggest he understands the importance of busting these kinds of stereotypes. Bravo to him.

The first is timeliness. Those that do business with the Sindh government have been finding government offices fully functional at nine o’ clock sharp. Across the range of Sindh government departments, the fear of the chief minister showing up to question the rate of work, has inspired ministers in his cabinet to don the same attitude. Before CM Shah took office, the concept of setting up a meeting at 9am with a senior Sindh government official would be laughed at.

This isn’t a small reform, if it can be institutionalised. It challenges both ethnic and national stereotypes, and it engenders a degree of responsibility. Can just one man, Murad Ali Shah, coming into the office on time sustain and embed this change in Sindh?

The second is open communication. Social media timelines associated with the Sindh government are alive with activity. It is easy to dismiss the appetite for public relations on the part of executive offices in an electoral democracy, “of course they like sharing pictures of themselves working!”. This is true, but the substance of CM Shah’s effort to disseminate how he spends his day is rooted in what seems to be at least a passing interest in open government. This is the PPP’s Sindh, a party whose culture is desperately lacking openness. Can sharing details from CM Shah’s every meeting on Facebook be the start of a genuinely more open and inclusive culture of governance in Sindh?

CM Shah has to be doing a lot more than starting work on time, and posting details of his day for us to be genuinely excited about what he’s bringing to the table. There are signs that he is indeed. The first is his work as finance minister, where he has learnt that effective fiscal stewardship of a province like Sindh whilst batting away the decidedly non-federal instincts of the PML-N’s Ishaq Dar is not an easy job.

As chief minister, CM Shah will have a better grasp of the operational circuit board through which provincial volition is regularly short-circuited. Our first evidence of whether he will be able to use this intimate knowledge of the system to the advantage of the people of Sindh will come from how he positions his province at the Council of Common Interests. If Sindh comes and goes from the next CCI meeting as meekly as it has during Qaim Ali Shah’s tenure as CM, our optimism about Murad Shah will certainly need to be revised.

For me personally, the treatment of education by the provincial governments is a daily preoccupation, as I work on the DFID-funded Alif Ailaan campaign. Sindh has been blessed with a sparkplug of a bureaucrat in the shape of Fazlullah Pechuho, an eccentric, politically-made-of-teflon, DMG/PAS officer who has put in place a vast infrastructure of decision-critical information that has never existed before. On September 8, CM Shah will meet with the new Minister of Education, Jam Mehtab Dahar, and Secretary of Education Pechuho to review the state of affairs in education. He should not allow this to be a one-off orientation.

The evidence from Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is that nothing succeeds in education like the sustained and detail-orientated attention of the province’s chief executive. Of course, regular stock-takes of the education sector writ-large are problematic too, because they assume that a top-down centralised way of working is a good thing. To find the right balance, CM Shah needs to identify three key metrics that he tracks on a weekly basis, and trust Secretary Pechuho and Minister Dahar to ensure that the system keeps inching toward improvement. He must also invest his personal political capital in retooling the personnel available to the education department to enact and sustain improvements.

The divisional directorates are staffed with rankers in whom the province has invested nothing but political patronage, and these men and women are therefore wholly incapable of delivering better math scores in Dadu, or Larkana or Thatta. At both the district and divisional level, Messrs Pechuho and Dahar need qualified, energetic young men and women not beholden to local elites. It is an easy enough problem to talk about – we have been at it for 70 years. Perhaps we have been waiting for an all-action, take-no-prisoners type of CM like Murad Ali Shah?

What hangs in the balance when we consider the answers to these questions? Non-urban Sindh is not going to be a battleground in the 2018 election, so why exactly has the PPP appointed a chief minister who seems bent on busting stereotypes and could potentially start tinkering with real, meaningful reform?

We know this much: The vitality and energy Murad Ali Shah brings to work has been spark plugged by a decision in Dubai (or at Bilawal House), not as a reaction to a shift in the narrative about Sindh, or the accumulation of political pressure by an opposition party.

In short, Sindh is not Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where the PTI is responsible for the injection of a new narrative within the political discourse. Nor is it Punjab, where the threat of that new party (PTI) is growing – as Fawad Chaudhry just reminded us, closing the margin of the PML-N’s victory from roughly 73,000 in 2013 to roughly 7,800 in 2016.

The manic work habits and record of delivery of Shahbaz Sharif, and the reform-orientation of the Pervez Khattak-lead Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government are thus, at least partially rooted in the politics of those provinces.

Where will Murad Ali Shah’s motivation to keep pushing the system hard come from? And why would he ensure the institutionalisation of some of the changes he has enacted?

This is the medium-term challenge that the PPP faces. It must not only support and celebrate the refreshing new energy that Murad Ali Shah has injected in the provincial government structures, but also find a critical path that sets the province on the road to meaningful reform. The quality of reflection by the PPP’s brain trust will define how successful new CM Shah will be, and by extension, how bright Sindh’s future can be.