Social sector setbacks

In many areas of social sector development and key indicators Pakistan is far behind most of the South Asian countries, particularly in respect of women. All that begins with a sustained high population growth and a repressive social policy which leaves us with too many mouths to feed, too many children to accommodate in schools and elders in hospitals.

The government has been claiming that the rate of population growth, which was over three per cent until the middle of the 1990s, has been coming down and will soon touch 2.2 per cent. Now officially it is admitted to be 2.69 per cent.

The Mahbubul Haq Human Development Centre's report for 2003 says the population growth rate was 2.62 per cent during 1995-2000 and is expected to rise by 2.44 per cent until 2005. The fond hope that the population growth will come down to 2.2 per cent soon following the success of the population restraining policies, is too far to realise.

As it is the population growth rate in Pakistan is far ahead that of not only Sri Lanka and Bangladesh but also India and Nepal. Such a high rate also results in a high infant mortality rate, which is brought to our notice by all international aid agencies, and leaves us with too many ailing and handicapped children.

The high population growth offers the fewer opportunities for economic activities to the women which at 15.2 per cent is the lowest in South Asia. Female economic activity in Pakistan is only 15.4 per cent compared to 57.2 per cent in Bangladesh, 85 per cent in Nepal, 43.5 per cent in India, 41.6 per cent in Sri Lanka and 28.6 per cent in Maldives. It is easier to let more women sit in the assemblies and the Senate than enable them earn a living to feed their children and tend the ailing.

Where the report goes wrong is in accepting the misleading official reports about unemployment in Pakistan of both men and women. It says unemployment rate in Pakistan during 1995-2001 was 7.8 per cent and yet was higher than India's 7.3 per cent, 3.3 per cent in Bangladesh and 1.1 per cent in Nepal! The report also says the percentage of female work force was 29 per cent in Pakistan and the second lowest after 22 per cent in Maldives.

Even when a small number of women are in the active work force, the female unemployment rate in Pakistan is the second highest at 14.9 per cent after 16.9 per cent in Sri Lanka.

Evidently with so many mouths to feed while so few hands work or are able to find jobs, poverty has to increase. So the report says the incidence of poverty and unemployment in Pakistan has increased over the last 15 years and is almost the highest in South Asia. The Mahbubul Haq Human Development Centre pointedly blames the macro-economic strategy of the military government based on its structural adjustment programme suggested by the IMF and the World Bank.

The report says the macro-economic strategy based on structural adjustment of the economy was designed to improve the balance of payments, control inflation and revive economic growth but had the opposite effect in practice. It says Pakistan had economic growth at the rate of 6 per cent a year until the 1990s saw a deceleration of growth in recent times, especially in sectors like manufacturing.

The report adds the incidence of poverty has increased over the 1990s as a result of the combination of deflationary measures following the micro-economic policy measures and de-industrialization following trade liberalization. It has resulted in low employment-generation and increasing poverty during the past decade and a half in Pakistan.

While the report talks of the flaws in the policy being pursued by the government and its adverse consequences it does not come up with a clear alternative policy or a parallel programme. The report should have specified which of the current policies or programmes need to be dropped or what quantitative changes be brought into the current policies.

The ill effects are obvious. But what alternate policy should be followed now so that we do not become the sick man of South Asia. The report talks of the democracy deficit, social deficit, of corruption and political instability as deterrents to economic growth and social justice.

While the number of the poor is increasing, the super-rich are multiplying. We are told the number of the crore-patis has risen to 7,583. Not only the size of the assemblies is expanding but also the strength of the federal and provincial cabinets. The size of poor Balochistan's cabinet has been raised to a record 30.

The strength of the Punjab cabinet has risen to 40 from 26. The Sindh cabinet is to expand further although it is already too large along with many advisers with little valid advice to tender. And the federal cabinet is also to expand further. Along with that the salaries and allowances of the ministers, including the house rent and telephone allowance are being enhanced.

The World Bank has offered to raise its annual loan to one billion dollars from an average of 800 million dollars a year. The Asian Development Bank has also agreed to raise the loan to around a billion dollars. Meanwhile Pakistan will be repaying fast one billion dollars of high-cost loans so as to reduce the excessive debt burden.

But such high spending leaves the people cold. They are now told that gold covered copper would become available in Balochistan in large measure from now on. From time to time we are told of new finds of gas and oil in Sindh and Balochistan. That too leaves the people cold as the benefit from them does not come to them. Instead they are asked to pay more and more for petrol, diesel and kerosene.

The task force on poverty reduction now wants the government to divert 10 per cent of the sale proceeds of the privatization to poverty reduction programme. That certainly should be done. Along with that, there should be more open and clear accounting of the manner the sale proceeds of the privatization are allocated.

This should cover the previous funds. Now that bigger public sector units like the KESC and PSO are to be on sale after Habib Bank and UBL, the funds should be publicly accounted for. And some more of the privatization funds may be diverted to poverty reduction on a loan basis.

The Task Force also has asked the government to ascertain whether the public sector funds being allocated now for poverty reduction are enough or more should be allocated. The answer can be only a positive one to this question. There has to be a real sense of urgency in this area.

The conference of economists held in Islamabad by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics has suggested more public sector funds should be allocated for poverty reduction, particularly for job creation and infrastructure development. Clearly, a consensus is being developed on spending more on poverty reduction instead of the development expenditure being confined to a meagre 3 to 4 per cent of the GDP, as has been happening.

Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali has come up with an ambitious scheme to provide housing to all central and provincial government employees down to the district level and use the government lands for the purpose. It is a costly scheme but will benefit 42 industries involved in house building, he says. What will be the cost of the project and how will the centre and the provinces share the cost? There should be no waste and no scandal, as often happens when such housing schemes are launched. The houses should be functional and not grandiose.

But while a large number of skilled and semi-skilled workers will get employment through this means all over the country, the question of educated unemployment would remain. This is an old problem, getting worse all the time. That does not mean that serious attention should not be given to that now when more and more of the unemployed are committing suicide. And we cannot ask the young seek costly higher education or technical education without providing employment to them.

Now the investment banks which suffered an eclipse following the merger of the NDFC with the National Bank and the undermining of Bankers Equity following its privatization are to play a large role in this area. Nine new areas are to be earmarked for the investment banks in two to three years, says finance minister Shaukat Aziz. Joint investment banks, too, are to be set up in association with Iran and some other countries, as has already been done with Libya and Kuwait very successfully.

The success of the 12th SAARC summit would open large avenues for investment banks, says Shaukat Aziz. He wants investment banks in the region to form a strategic alliance. Saudi investors are showing keen interest in investing in Pakistan. Following the first group which came this month to set up a billet-making plant, another group has arrived to explore possibilities of large scale investment seriously. The Al Zamil group is an old investor in Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, the US Chamber of Commerce wants a free trade area agreement with Pakistan. Pakistan welcomes that move, although that will be a slow and cautious process. The Minister for Privatization Dr Abdul Hafeez Shaikh has appealed to the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry to set up a group to bid for the KESC which is to be privatized soon. If they can take over the power production unit instead of it going to some foreigners that will be a welcome development.

The businessmen of Pakistan should learn to work together as corporate colleagues instead of wanting to manage private limited companies or run public limited companies more like private concerns.

They need to develop true corporate psychology. That is all the more essential if they want to set up large production units for export like the Japanese or Korean companies. Globalisation should bring about corresponding major changes at home and a visionary approach.

Political cleansing in Iran

Iran's Guardian Council, the supreme constitutional body designed to safeguard the rule of Islam, has disqualified thousands of applicants from contesting the February 20 parliamentary election. The election laws allow the Council to disqualify applicants who are found not respecting Islam.

Based on this screening standard, pre-election disqualifications have particularly hit hard among others, the members of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, a reformist political party. Among the disqualified are 80 sitting members of the parliament, including President Khatami's younger brother who heads the Front and accuses the unelected Guardian Council of abusing the rule of law.

Part of the crisis stems from power politics. Political cleansing in the name of Islam is a conservative device to win the elections through disqualification rather than political competition After losing seats to reformers in the previous election, the religious right, headed by the Guardian Council, is resolved to prevent reformers from reclaiming the parliament. Cleansing would remain incomplete, the Council has concluded, unless both the incumbents and new reformers are simultaneously disqualified from the electoral contest.

To achieve its political objective, the Guardian Council is using election laws to disqualify its opponents for not respecting Islam. But what does the charge of not respecting Islam mean? A case-by-case disqualification might be acceptable if an independent court determines on the basis of solid evidence that an applicant has violated what Iran's constitution calls "the essentials of Islam."

Even judicial decisions are sound only if disqualification standards are clear and constitutionally permissible - for the constitution specifically prohibits investigation of one's beliefs. But when the Guardian Council uses elusive standards and unsubstantiated accusations to disqualify its political opponents en mass, an outside observer would conclude that the law of disqualification has become a tool of the intolerant.

In the midst of intolerance, the conception of Islamic democracy itself is at stake. Does Islam allow political dissent and diversity of viewpoints? The Iranian reformers, including President Khatami, are committed Muslims. They do not want to abandon Islam as a guiding force, nor do they wish to establish a secular state. They simply assert that an open democracy, under which political parties with diverse viewpoints are free to contest elections, is compatible with Islam.

A democracy with no normative constraints, the Guardian Council fears, would undermine the theocratic foundation of the republic. Committed to protecting Islam from the corrupting influence of unchecked freedoms, the Guardian Council has been overly vigilant in combating reform ideas.

First, intellectuals have been arrested and newspapers closed. And now the political process is being engineered to eliminate reformers from the parliament. The story of the Council's self-righteousness splattered across the pages of world newspapers gives credence to the stereotype that Islamic democracy is inherently intolerant.

So what can be done? Any radical proposal to dismantle the Guardian Council is unlikely to win popular support. Even the reformers understand that the Iranians are not ready for any big restructuring, let alone for a counter-revolution that would disempower the clerics for good and establish a western-style liberal democracy.

It appears to most observers that Iran will remain an Islamic state in the foreseeable future, unless the Guardian Council through its unreasonable hold on power completely de-democratizes the political process.

To save Islamic democracy from subversion via extremism, the Council must be shepherded away from politics and confined to its constitutionally mandated juristic obligation. The Council can be a valuable juristic institution in overseeing the conformity of parliamentary legislation with the Quran and the Sunnah.

Many Muslim countries, including Afghanistan, are embracing the idea of a juristic council. As a juristic body, however, the Council must not interfere in the ins and outs of political parties and electoral competition. Even in its juristic role, the Council must be pragmatic and open to modernity. It must respect legislative choices of a popularly elected Islamic parliament. For otherwise the Guardian Council would block, as it has in the past three years, much of the legislation passed by what it perceives to be "reformers."

Iran's Supreme Leader must discharge its constitutional obligation in changing the Council's orientation from a political guild to a juristic body. Ayatollah Ali Khameini is a progressive leader who believes in science and development. He has already demanded that the disqualification crisis be settled in accordance with the rule of law, a demand that the reformers have also made.

But the rule of law requires that decision-makers should not have a blatant political stake in the outcome. As currently oriented, the Guardian Council identifies itself with the conservatives and refuses to acknowledge that Iran cannot develop as a progressive Islamic state unless political competition is free and elected officials are not arbitrarily disbarred from the parliament. De-politicization of the Guardian Council is a gradual process, but it can begin by allowing the reformers to freely contest the February parliamentary election. The writer is a professor at the Washburn University School of Law in Kansas, USA.

In search of a candidate

There is one man who can beat George Bush. Send out a search party: his name is Generic Democrat. Latest polls show that when Americans choose between the current president and a hypothetical figure known only as "the Democratic candidate", the two end up in a statistical tie. Some surveys have even shown our friend Generic Democrat with a slight edge.

The trouble is, Generic cannot be on the ballot paper in November. The Democrats need to have chosen an actual person to take on the president by then, and that task just got a lot more complicated.

For while Bush was putting the finishing touches to the State of the Union address he gave on Tuesday night, the Democrats were slugging it out in what is now a genuine four-way contest. That is good news for Bush, as the breakfast TV in America testified.

Footage from Iowa showed four exhausted, sweaty Democrats physically punching the air or rhetorically jabbing each other while a White House photograph captured a contemplative Bush preparing for his speech. Not-so-subliminal message: Let these guys squabble in the playground; I am presidential.

True, Bush's ideal outcome from Iowa's Democratic contest, the first of the 2004 campaign, would have been a knockout victory for Howard Dean. White House planners, led by chief strategist Karl Rove, have been drooling for a year at the prospect of running against the former Vermont governor, who they reckon could be easily lampooned as the latest in a long line of anti-war liberals from the American north-east (think George McGovern and Michael Dukakis). But Bush will take as a consolation prize a drawn-out, rancorous internal battle that keeps Democrats' fire trained on each other rather than on him.

And this could be very drawn out. A few weeks back, the Washington consensus was that Dean was unstoppable in Iowa and New Hampshire, and that victories there would wrap up the nomination. Now, though, 2004 threatens to be a re-run of the 1988 Democratic contest when it took months for a winner to emerge. If that happens again, the eventual nominee will be too battered and bruised to give Bush much of a fight in November.

So who is likeliest to come through the long hard slog? Dean cannot be counted out just yet, though his third place in Iowa was a grievous disappointment. He still has substantial assets, starting with the $40m war chest he accumulated in 2003. He retains a devoted following, volunteer "Deaniacs" who have built a strong organization in New Hampshire, which votes next Tuesday. And he has some big-cheese endorsements, from Al Gore and (almost) Jimmy Carter.

But he has been deeply damaged and will struggle to regain the winner's aura he had until a few weeks ago. What once was passion now sounds shrill and angry: hoarse and red-faced, he came on like a man possessed at his post-result event in Iowa. That footage, in which Dean was shown all but screaming, could prove to be his Sheffield rally, as wounding as Neil Kinnock's "Awwwright!!" in 1992. Pundits will ask if he is sufficiently presidential; viewers may conclude that Dean is too mean.

Iowa also suggests that Dean is struggling to reach past his hard-core, anti-war base, and that his phenomenal network of internet-recruited supporters does not translate easily into a more old-fashioned get-out-the-vote machine. More worrying was the exit polling which showed that even those Democrats who agreed with him on his core issue, the Iraq war,did not let that question determine their vote: one in three anti-war Iowans backed Kerry, who supported the war.

It could be that, especially since the capture of Saddam, Iraq is losing its political sting in the US: only 14 per cent of Iowans rated it as the most important issue. That could change, especially if there is a sharp rise in US casualties. But one should never under-estimate the American urge to "move on", and Americans may be doing that now. (The contrast with Britain, where the Hutton report could determine the fate of the government, is clear.) If so, Dean needs to find a new song to sing.

Unproven, because he sat out Iowa, but polling well in New Hampshire is the retired general Wesley Clark. He has a dream CV, especially in an election in which national security is likely to loom large. But those who have seen him in action say the soldier is not making a smooth transition to politics. Away from the script, he is not fluent and his demeanour can seem too stiff, too military.

John Edwards, the fresh-faced senator from North Carolina, has some advantages: he brings a Clintonian message of hope and optimism and has avoided rottweiler attacks on his rivals. His stump speech is effective too, speaking of "two Americas", one of affluence and security, the other getting by on the minimum wage and with no health insurance. He even talks about the poor, who don't vote and therefore rarely arouse candidates' interest, and the rest of the world.

He says there are "two images of America": the old one, in which the US was admired as a beacon of freedom, and the current one, of America "acting on its own, unilaterally, ignoring and disrespecting its allies". In other words, Edwards gets the Iraq issue even if he does not bang on about it.That leaves the victor of Iowa, John Kerry. He now has that precious electoral commodity, momentum.

A decorated war hero in Vietnam, he has Clark's ability to take on Bush as a future commander in chief. What's more, Kerry seems to prove that enough time has passed for Vietnam to have faded as a divisive issue in US politics. It is becoming a matter of sentiment, even nostalgia: witness the emotion stirred a few days ago as Kerry was reunited with the soldier whose life he had saved in Vietnam. A veteran who became an anti-war activist, Kerry wins both sides of that once toxic battle in American life.

His drawbacks are personal. He is a New England patrician who cannot do folksy, a solid, stolid campaigner who verges on the dull. He has a bad case of Al Gore syndrome. Yet it will be one of these men who takes on George Bush in November. Do any of them frighten him? Probably Kerry and Clark, a little bit.

Still, as last night's speech illustrated, Bush already has his campaign themes in place: a president who stood strong after 9/11 and lifted the economy by cutting taxes. Add the images of Saddam in captivity and of Bush serving Thanksgiving turkey to the troops, plus a plan to turn illegal immigrants into citizens (popular with Hispanic voters) and a dream of another moon landing, and you have a man who will be very hard to beat. The Democrats know that - but it won't stop them trying. -Dawn\Guardian Service