WHAT is common to loan defaulters, Imran Khan`s World Cup-winning cricket team, the Danish schools in Lahore, multiple flyovers in Multan and NLC`s loss of millions of rupees? It is the misuse of public money.
In Pakistan, governments at the federal and provincial levels spend public money not in the public interest but in the private interest. As the distinction between public money and private money has been eroding over the years, the former has become an instrument of self-aggrandisement of the powers that be.
Politics is economics in a final sense. It is about the allocation of resources to the middle and working classes, the urban and rural sectors, the army and bureaucracy as well as hospitals, universities, cultivators and traders among many others. In this way, the national exchequer becomes an open field for jockeying around either for well-planned and structural allocation of money — a dwindling pattern — or for arbitrary, eccentric, whimsical and self-serving commitment of financial resources that is the current practice.
Public money, raised through direct and indirect taxes, is used by public representatives in Pakistan, no less than their non-elected predecessors, irresponsibly, recklessly and wastefully. Often, the rhetoric of nationalist interest, consideration of merit and upholding of morality serves the purpose of providing legitimacy to the transfer of money from the underprivileged to the privileged through misconduct and bad planning.
Public corporations have the worst record of abuse of public money. For example, the National Logistics Cell lost Rs1.8bn due to the indulgence of its top leadership — military generals and civilian bureaucrats — through illegal investments in the stock exchange. Those in public office find the law to obstruct the pursuit of their private whims, and discard it as irrelevant. You take decisions about public money, of course in the national interest, with one-tenth of care, attention, caution, consideration and consultation than for your own money.
The Danish schools project in Punjab thrives on public money, ostensibly for promoting talent that eventually makes it an instrument of service to the elite. That entails the transfer of resources from the toiling masses to the middle class. Similarly, while HEC must serve the cause of higher education through encouragement of merit, it has taken away national resources beyond all proportions in recent years. In a cavalier manner, it led to extravagance in terms of siphoning off public money, putting it into private hands through scholarships for the typically — if not universally — middle-class students, ostensibly to serve the national interest.
In Pakistan, politics as policy has been grossly discounted in favour of politics as patronage. One hears about the revival of the yellow cab scheme. This is a crude example of bestowing public money on a few thousands of favourites. The public has no way of stopping this brazen exercise in patronage. The tradition of spending public money on one`s electoral constituency, city or district continues unabated. Prime Minister Gilani showered favours on the roads of Multan, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif on the beautification of Lahore, ex-chief minister Akram Durrani of what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on D.I. Khan and so on.
The `royal visits` are legion, with an overbearing boss, a federal or provincial chief executive or a minister donating a hefty sum of money, a plot of land or an award for a school, a nursery, a residential colony or a playground. It is amazing — indeed surprising — that the audit machinery of the state does not pick on these expressions of imperial behaviour. The holders of public office have attributed to themselves the powers of mediaeval kings and nawabs to patronise party cadres and workers who act as courtiers.
The periodical pay raise of state employees — the civilian bureaucracy, judges and military officers — and public representatives is an example of shifting the scarce resources away from those stricken by acute resourcelessness in the face of a severe price hike at the bottom of a society afflicted by illness, unemployment and loss of assets. The nation`s money is spent without the nation`s control over it. The motto is: you earn public money and we spend it as our own.
Look at awards given to sportsmen, topped by the national cricket team. Public money is disbursed to the match winners, while already a colossal amount of money is spent on players for coaching, training facilities, food, clothing and footwear, accommodation and travel overseas, along with jobs. An award of 25 acres of agricultural land was announced for each member of the Pakistan cricket team in case it won against India (the victory did not materialise) by the cricket-loving family from Raiwind. This is horrendous in an age of modern statehood.
Awards for public service are a different matter, exemplified by the case of policemen killed on duty. After all, this cements a bond between the state and its functionaries, the principal and its agents. But, how much should be the award money, Rs50,000, Rs100,000, Rs500,000, Rs1m or, as announced by the Sindh government in a recent case, Rs2m? Should the compensation award have a rational basis of calculation such as the per capita income of the nation at less than $1,000 per annum, or the incidence of poverty that has trapped one-third of the nation? The public is the best judge of what amount is an adequate expression of its gratitude for the loss of life in the service of the nation
People apply for loan from the bank with the express intention of not returning public money. Borrowing at present is real, but paying back in the grey future is shrouded by uncertainty. Private power extracts public money, and decides to keep it with itself. Pakistan has a long way to go from a feudal sense of money — vague, jumbled, fluid, non-accountable, abstract and `generous` to a bourgeois sense of money — clear, precise, accountable, pragmatic and austere.
The writer is a professor at LUMS.