President Pervez Musharraf said on Wednesday that the new government should meet the challenges of terrorism, energy shortage, and rising fuel and food prices through good governance and by keeping “Pakistan first”. “Politicking has to give way to good governance,” he advised. The president said the country had been through “turmoil” in the past few months and the new government must sustain economic growth to meet the difficulties it faced. He said Pakistan’s macro-economic indicators were strong and the recent shortage of energy was caused by rapid industrial growth. He said growth in the energy sector should match the growth in economy.
Well, well, well. It didn’t occur to the president that his advice might have been better received if he had admitted his regime’s failings and offered a mea culpa.
We are faced with terrorism because the state under his military predecessors nurtured the very groups which are committed to terrorism today. Indeed, he was in the saddle for eight long years and made a hash of anti-terrorism policy, often running with the hare and hunting with the hound. A string of corps commanders and governors of the NWFP couldn’t deliver. In fact, the MMA government which his anti-PPP/PMLN policies had foisted upon the hapless province actually facilitated the militant groups.
We are faced with energy shortages, he says, because of rapid industrial growth under his regime. So whose responsibility was it to ensure that energy supply should have risen in step with growth? For eight years the president has been talking about a gas pipeline from Iran to India. And nothing has come of it. At first, he insisted that Pakistan was only in it for the transit fees because it had a surplus of energy while India was faced with a growing deficit. So he linked the pipeline deal with India to a resolution of the Kashmir dispute. But when that failed to impress India and Pakistan’s energy shortages begun to weigh on him, he de-linked it from Kashmir but not from opening up trade with India. So India continued to balk. Now we have a situation in which India is stitching up a nuclear deal with the US which will preclude any gas deal with Iran. A great opportunity has thus been lost by lack of vision on how the region is shaping up and Pakistan’s place in it. Much the same sort of muddle headed thinking was in evidence on the private power policy. For the first few years, NAB was ordered to tighten the screws on the private power producers and sovereign guarantees given to them by the PPP regime from 1993-96 were flouted with impunity. All new projects were banned. Now we are told that a “fast track” policy to set up new power plants in the next two years has been launched. As for the big dams that could provide the most efficient way out of the energy crunch, the less said the better. President Musharraf spent the first few years of his tenure insisting that Kalabagh would be built and the last few denying it was on the cards.
To be sure, the crisis generated by the steep climb in food and fuel prices is exogenous. But his government can be faulted for mismanaging it. About a million tonnes of wheat was exported in the last twelve months to prop up exports so that ex-PM Shaukat Aziz could meet his targets. A similar amount was blithely allowed to be smuggled to Afghanistan for political reasons. Fuel prices should have been raised progressively, in tune with the rising international price of oil, in order to reduce sudden shocks, but this was not done for political reasons too because 2007 was election year. So now the new government has been burdened with the sins of Shaukat Aziz and has to contend with the self-righteous lectures of the president.
The last chapter of President Musharraf’s bestselling autobiography, now remaindered at throw away prices, is titled “Reflections”. “God has always been kind to me”, writes Mr Musharraf. “I wonder why”, he asks innocently, while “reinforcing his belief in his destiny” and his sense of “honesty, truthfulness, contentment and humility” (“being humble in greatness raises one’s stature”). A splendid lecture on leadership follows. It is all about character, decisiveness, boldness and cool temperament. But these are the very qualities that have been in short supply for the last year or so. Significantly, the most revealing aspect of the book, and one which many Pakistanis found most depressing, was the list of things-to-do on his 7-point agenda for the next decade. “We have to consolidate our democracy and ensure the supremacy of the constitution” is way down the line at number 6 in terms of priority.
Significantly, the new parliament and the new coalition government have put this item on the top of their agenda. Therefore President Musharraf would be advised to change his priorities quickly. This is the moment to display “honesty, truthfulness, contentment and humility”. He should bow before the will of the people and let their representatives find a sensible way out of the economic and political crisis that we face today.