Mirza Shahnawaz Agha
TOWARDS managing State the cost for governance
is spread over the legislature, the armed forces, the
judiciary and the civil bureaucracy. All these costs together make up for governing Pakistan and these come from taxes plus borrowings local and foreign. These costs are what the people pay and afford, so that these institutions together can look after the welfare of us the tax payers. An overview of the budget 2019 reveals the following dismal picture of Rupees 7,022, billion collected in taxes and in borrowing on interest as the size of the cake. By contrast this amount is meant to cause development in the country and of a nature that provides welfare and basic comfort to the people. The taxes and the borrowings both, are there for this purpose. Ironically though what is spent towards us the taxpayers welfare is 865 billion whilst to spend that sum, 6,157 billion is spent in mobilization and management costs! Things like education, health care, security, the making of laws, the inexpensive provision of justice and the amenities of affordable food shelter and utilities get only 12.32 %.
This is a note worthy classic, for the lopsided equation that exists, between the cost of governance and the cost of welfare to the people. We the people who employ these institutions for our security, comfort and wellbeing by comparison get nothing for what we pay except political rhetoric. What is manifest is an alarming imbalance by comparison to any reason, logic or righteous management. Seemingly we are mad to hire these listed servants (of the people) at a cost that are beyond our cost of welfare. To cause all welfare items put together we should not allow more than a single digit percentage for managers of the State. This only happens with the freedom of enterprise and a free market structure of the economy. It is simple to reason our actual status when we see this lopsided equation even from a layman perception.
The population that inhabits a territory needs basic subsistence and comforts that ought to come out of the territory or land they live on. They therefore employ some managers to do the due. These managers, called government, are mandated by the peoples representatives, again paid for the job, despite a popular electoral process. The legislators plus the three institutions put together make up the cost we the people are supposed to carry for managers we call the Government. What we spend to maintain these people et.all should be a fraction of what we generate as a Nation State from the toil and labour of the populous that pays through taxes for this need. The government should only be viewed in a divide where the elected representatives of the people are there to devise policies and the three institutional bureaucracies are there to execute the mandated agendas. Where the roles get mixed up there is chaos and Government becomes a political game of chess, in total disregard of the welfare of the people who hire these bunch of functionaries.
Reverting to the Pakistan scenario we ironically have a captive environment for enterprise. We are hostages to the bureaucracies in office. The free market structure is absent that destabilizes pricing. The tax structure is insane as it is counter-productive for industrial growth and trading objectives; and worse we are reliant by choice to donors for our development needs. The master plans for dove-tailing natural resources for the benefit of human resource are absent. All this mismanagement is shrouded by cheap political rhetoric and slander only to the detriment of taxpayers. The deceptive political slogan is that only 1% are taxpayers. This is rubbish, as indirect taxes affect the entire population. Without playing any blame games we must analyze where we have gone wrong. The legislators have not done their jobs of planning the country as a unit that must serve the people above all other factors of statecraft. The Army have consequently been overly burdened to retain the security of a State where the basic laws that support global positioning and or support the economics of the state are absent. For the same reason the judiciary is between right and wrong for adjudication and have lost their bite to side with the ethos of justice. They have become politicized. The civil bureaucracy is having a field day because they are able to swing all factors of control in their own favour predominantly to appease political or personal vested interests.
Why have the legislators failed in seven decades to give this country a governing format is because politics is personality based and emerging out of captive constituencies. The same faces are there to crowd the assemblies from captive constituencies with a single agenda of personal political survival. Their ceremonial existence is the biggest security risk for Pakistan. This chess board canvas must be scraped never to surface, should we need to see a change. All laws of political science are denied when manifestos of political parties are not approved first by a panel of experts within the Election Commission and subsequently remain under audit and strict scrutiny. They must be viewed and weighted in monetary terms and not political romanticism. Political parties cannot be allowed to exist as unbridled horses without a regulated regime monitoring deliverables. The often excuse is the doing of previous governments and or the compulsions levied by the donors. This is of course established nonsense. Where Parliaments are formed based on their dependence on institutions of the state or favours of foreign donors they are not representative of the people. That is a fundamental constitutional writ. To break this status quo we need a new administrative setup in the country and a 100% urbanization with fiscal decentralization. We need to reverse the budgetary structure from a ceding Federal revenue base to a collector-ate. The urban units, the industrial parks, the mining zones, and the agricultural corporations, all as corporate entities, must contribute the required resources that enable the Federation to regulate standards within and maintain security externally. Corporate Pakistan is indeed the answer with the standards institute, the academia and research institutions playing the basic role for law making and decision taking at all levels. They need to educate and draw the standard operating procedures for the regulators too. The total independence for entrepreneurship is at the root of this change with our ideological statement on the fundamental status of capital. We need to do a lot more, but for starters the unified force of all the three institutions have to be mobilized to assert a new working order in consonance with our founding ideology. Political leanings and objectives have to be nudged out of this reconstruction renaissance if ever. The uniqueness of our governing structure based on our ideology is the bedrock of our global positioning as a Nation State.
The relevance of a bench mark is crucial when one wants to opt for change. In our case what is fundamental to change is leaning on our founding ideology. That is what will provide the benchmark and the hallmark for structures and policies. It must be understood that the religion of Islam is not a cult based setup divided between the clerics of sundry brands. This message has brought a revolution in social management, has articulated laws and defined the permissive limits for social and material justice paradigms. It is way above the myopic and contained secular economic vested interest of clerics. To refer a few noteworthy points it is averse to the Nation State concepts marketed by colonist; It is averse to the medium of exchange called money having intrinsic value like a commodity denying pseudo colonialism; It is averse to interest as in Riba curtailing economic growth; It is dynamically evolving with human civilization as in Ijtehad; It is equitable for subsistence levels as in Masavat; It denies absentee landlord ism as in the captivity of land; It believes in ultra democracy and the rule of law. There is no end to our very humane and radical difference to the world order that we idiotically follow. It believes above all in universal brotherhood in denial of wars and oppression. This is a writ that warrants clear answers from those sitting in the corridors of power in this Islamic Republic. What are you doing to live like you ought to, in place of being plagued with a ‘monkey syndrome’, alienating you to the core.
The hold of the rulers is suffocating to a point that they do not want any changes because their salaries and perks are in place and in an escalating order! It is us the people that need a change not quite them! That is of course understandably common sense! It is we the people who want to live and die for the ideology we opted and fought for at the outset. We are trapped with governance that is committed to subservience in place of independence. This must change and now. This is the prudent course to take and this is our defence should one reason.
— The writer is an entrepreneur and author based in Karachi.
