Dr. Zafar Altaf
The last eight years have been catastrophic for the country as the value system and the honesty systems have taken a heavy battering. Lies have been perpetuated and the inability of the present government is that it is unable to understand how to remove statistical lies. One way of doing this is to have an enquiry commission set up to correct the picture and to find all those demented individuals who were guilty of this intentional error guilty of mass lies. Not only have they violated a sacred code by these lies they have also set up an ability to lie in the future as well. Their crime is worse than that of the Bush administration for the simple reason that in the US there are always members of the civil society that can handle the situation.
Things have gone to such a pass that the Washington Post, in a leading article, has mentioned that Pakistan has not accounted for the $ 2 billion that was given to the country for the al Qaeda fight. The spreadsheets that have been sent to the Government Auditors Office (GAO), USA, have serious flaws and the office thinks that this is done to cover up the real areas where the expenditure took place. Why do we do this and why did the government of Shaukat Aziz provide this kind of information to GAO?
The article is an indication of what we are considered as a nation. Probably what has happened is that in fibbing to the country and its people the feeling came that this kind of work can be put across to other nation as well. Why do governments have to lie, for one lie begets another lie. Over time this becomes a habit. Habits once ordained never go away. The credibility of the government is always in doubt as a result of this continuous story of lying. You see it in the apportionment of water resources between the provinces and you see it in the lately fragmentation of the flour market. Nowhere has the cost been as big as in the case of oxymoron commissioners that are found in the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. Once a new minister takes over they start doing all kinds of servile activities and try and win over his confidence by doing things beyond the normal requirement for that office.
If one were to take the visits of the agricultural personnel to the lands of the minister one would have a fair idea of what can happen to government funds. Time and again, I could see the research and agricultural commissioner going to the lands of the minister. Nothing ever comes out of such use of public funds for personal benefit. It was at one of the international agency seminars that one commissioner managed to boast that he was responsible for the bumper crop of 25 million tonnes single-handedly. They then revise the figure to 23 million tonnes and if the requirement was for 21.4 million tonnes then how do you explain the import of over three million tonnes, some by the private sector and some by the public sector? The actual figure was about 168 million tonnes in 2006-7. When the scam came to light the secretary took the brunt and the real culprit got away with it.
Again in 2007-8, they have projected the production wrongly. Why should the price go up? They have been saying that this was due to the export but I could not find any export figures in the official statistics. Then they started saying that it was smuggled and then they stated that it was smuggled by Arbab Rahim, ex chief minister of Sindh, to India as his constituency was next to the border. Once that lie got caught they started saying that it was Afghanistan that was the real culprit. One commissioner stated that he had seen atta bags as far as Kazakhstan. Did he know that Pakistan actually imported wheat from that area? That country is surplus in wheat and supplies to the entire Soviet Union.
In fact, the financial advisor responsible for the Economic Survey has been doing so with uncalled for impunity. In 2007, they came out with a figure of livestock growth as nine percent when the person concerned was cornered by me he stated that he had given the figure of 1.6 percent. The previous Punjab government was asked not to contradict these figures. No wonder, whereas the growth figures are going up so are the poverty figures. This must be the only country in the world to have this kind of dubious doubles.
This year again they have shown a figure of 3.8 percent growth in livestock to indicate a positive figure of 1.6 percent growth in the agriculture sector. Why then the price of meat and milk is increasing phenomenally? Where quality is not in essence the matter of concern the simple equation holds and if the price rises then the quantity is less and vice versa. That is why the new O-ring theory is now being applied to the developing countries. The theory in essence states that the demented mind of the personnel in pubic office in the developing countries is such that they cannot understand complex matters. These personnel have to be taken to task.
One thing is essential and follows from Engel’s law on bad money driving out good money. Now it is a question of lies driving out truth and taking the country to the brink. There is no substitute for truth, no matter how unpalatable that is. It leads to a correct diagnosis and a correct diagnosis means that the prescription would be in order. If they had accepted advice about the unfortunate development in the wheat sector, then the country would have saved resources. Precious foreign exchange for the rice at which they bought wheat was much above the price at which alarm bells were sounded. The difference was almost $ 300 to a tonne — the loss caused by lies.
Take the new scenario that is emerging in the basmati rice area. The land is going on lease from 30,000 per acre to 36,000 in the Hafizabad, one of the prime areas for basmati rice production. Without any other input but just the cost of the lease money the starting price for Basmati rice would be above Rs 100 per kilogramme. When other inputs are taken into consideration imagine what would happen to the price structure. What would happen to the economy? For tomatoes, you would recall that they had advised to give it up. For lentils, they had suggested that we should buy chicken. And for rice what will they think of?
Poverty, according to Shaukat Aziz, has come down. A professor from LUMS with a serious econometric degree mentioned in a seminar that when the price of atta goes up the biggest beneficiary is Balochistan. Fine! And when he was challenged on this he had no answer. At least he accepted the fact that he was wrong. In Pakistan, power blocs have always roughed up reason. What they say goes and recently in one food security meeting data was shown that was not commensurate with what was actually on the ground. The federation had been messed up. The federation will always be messed up. No one is responsible for these accept us. We take a dozen to the dime and keep on the course for lying.
Wake up Pakistan! You and I did this to former East Pakistan and we kept on telling lies and look where we ended up, on the dung heap for had we been tried for crimes against humanity we would not have been able to pick up the pieces. It was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who took you off the hook and look what you did to him. His legacy lives on while the legacy of the tyrants is not known any more. Veritas (truth) is important and time and history have always proved this. Why be in a transitory phase? The enemies one creates with falsehood always appear where you least expect them. Why has Shaukat Aziz flown away?
The writer is a former federal secretary
courtesy: the POST
