Pakistan’s broken office of Prime Minister
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If and when Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan leads the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf into another election, the contest will almost certainly be dominated by his handling of the “corrupt mafia” which his previous election campaign or perhaps his entire political career revolved around. For Imran Khan’s critics, he has failed in sorting out the corrupt elements because of his eccentric personality and double-approach to purveying corruption.
Khan’s managerial skill at the office has not been easy to defend. Nevertheless, one line of defense is the narrative that the problem is not that Khan has performed poorly, but that the job of the prime minister, even in normal circumstances, has become too malfunctioned for anyone to fulfil.
One of the most severe problems Pakistani leaders face is working autonomously. Every prime minister since 1973, when the third Constitution of Pakistan was accepted with consensus, has succumbed to a self-defeating compulsion to be on the establishment’s page. The revolving politics of the 1990s, until Musharraf struck down the constitution and imposed military reign for another eight years in 1998, is the story of an opposition knocking at GHQ doors. Politicians merely set the country up for disappointment. Nationalist rhetoric formed a significant part of the narrative that convinced most voters that elections were rigged and those who assumed office used taxpayers’ money to advance personal benefits.
In large part, the Pakistani prime ministers’ inability to exercise more than a modicum of control over their decision is a consequence of division among the political parties.
Durdana Najam
Even level-headed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto fell victim to this type of nationalism, which contributed to her inability to set aside political parties’ resolve to take back control from the military junta when she agreed to return from self-exile through a National Reconciliation Ordinance. Since then, the so-called NRO has become a signpost to describe the corrupt laden political culture that Pakistan’s two largest parties, the PML-N and PPP, had resurrected during their respective reigns.
In large part, the Pakistani prime ministers’ inability to exercise more than a modicum of control over their decision is a consequence of division among the political parties. In the scheme of things, a weak and unpredictable governance structure that led to the ruination of institutions, especially that of police, judiciary and accountability, reduced the relative power of the incumbents. Consequently, the formation of the polity went outside the political domain.
Prime ministers such as Benazir Bhutto and later Nawaz Sharif, tried to make Pakistan relevant and responded to the country’s economic disasters by promoting regional integration and looking beyond the superpower syndrome. However, their efforts were not appreciated, not even by their voters, who had been taught that India was the enemy, that the US wanted to disempower us of our nuclear achievements, that Afghanistan was in collusion with India and wanted to sever the country’s Pashtun belt, and that the whole world, except China, was conspiring to dismantle Pakistan. This flawed narrative of living in a vulnerable state made kosher the resurrection of non-state actors.
When Khan took office, he promised to work independently, unlike his predecessors. However, his insistence on sticking to the mantra of blaming the opposition to all that rots the country inspired an attack on the state’s competence and contributed to its deterioration and ultimately left it incapable of meeting challenges like the rehabilitation of institutions. People are waiting to see police and judicial reforms. They are waiting for action on the hoarders identified in the sugar commission report. Having convinced himself that Pakistan’s politicians, other than those in his party, were complicit in corrupt practices and had compounded the country’s decline, he identified unelected advisers as the easiest surrogates for reform. Over time, this recipe has backfired. These so-called special and spin-doctors, which are paid from the public purse, have become unquestioning enforcers of the party’s whims that cannot function independently. In the process, civil servants with relevant knowledge have become redundant. One has to just look at Punjab.
The only beneficiaries of this process are the unelected power yielders.
This system is bound to collapse sooner rather than later. The only lesson learnt from controversy after controversy, is that corruption is not a function of political parties but of a system that allows for the unchecked use of authority in the garb of sometimes incompetent police, a complicit judiciary or an election commission that works on independent mode only when it suits it.
Instead of hunting for new leaders, the power yielder must instead fix the flaws inherent in the prime minister’s office.
- Durdana Najam is an oped writer based in Lahore. She writes on security and policy issues. She can be reached at [email protected]
