The utter disaster of Pakistan’s disaster response
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It is the middle of monsoon rains in Pakistan and for once no one has romance-- culturally associated with this time of year-- on their minds. The reason: long-standing rainfall records have been broken since the monsoon began six weeks ago, triggering savage floods that have killed over 800 people and 70,000 livestock so far, washed away over 80,000 homes and displaced a staggering 10 million people.
This is easily one of Pakistan’s worst flood seasons in memory, dwarfing the 1992 and 2010 deluges that devastated large swathes of area and population and crippled the economy. And yet, there is a depressing lack of appropriate official alarm and response in proportion to the calamity at hand today.
Neither the federal nor provincial governments have declared a formal state of emergency. If you go to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), mandated with responding to natural calamities, there is an inexplicable lack of updates on the floods and its devastation.
Even the more than 50 legacy TV channels are not starting off their news bulletins or their over 150 daily talk shows with news and views about the floods. It is just the print media and social media that are extensively covering the trails of utter devastation the raging muddy waters are leaving in their wake.
Social media especially, is inundated with horrifying video clips of people and livestock drowning, vehicles with people in them being washed away, bodies buried in mud, homes in the countryside giving way to nightmarish torrents and drowning the dreams and lives of hapless millions.
If you go to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), mandated with responding to natural calamities, there is an inexplicable lack of updates on the floods.
Adnan Rehmat
Both the parties of Khan and Sharif are in power in the provinces and at the Centre respectively, but media reports of cabinet meetings indicate they are more devoted to routine political matters rather than dealing with disaster response. Sharif prefers a more personalized style of humanitarian response – he has been visiting far off Balochistan, meeting victims and ordering assistance but has conspicuously avoided worst affected areas in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ruled by Khan’s party.
Khan has been a more frequent visitor of all provinces except Balochistan to address large groups of people, but solely focused on conveying to them his personal grievances. The chief ministers of provinces ruled by his party have also not been conspicuous visiting disaster victims.
All this grossly inadequate focus in helping the millions of flood victims by all these sides is inexcusable. It is criminal for the federal government run by Sharif not to suspend its politics-as-usual default posture and declare a national emergency and commit all its state resources to disaster relief. It is equally criminal for opposition leader Khan to not put a pause on his sob story, however true it may be, to allow his party in the provinces to stop aiding his political campaign trail and attend instead to the 140 million people it governs.
And, considering that the state structure is characterized by domination of the military over the country’s policy direction and resource allocations to it, it is also criminal for the powerful establishment to have systematically stunted Pakistan’s development beyond repair for its institutional interests.
The world’s can’t, but Pakistanis can save Pakistan from the increasing climate-related calamities underwritten by gross mis-governance, corruption and failure to put people’s welfare at the centre of state enterprise. For this, the state will have to give up its self-serving non-productive elite prestige projects such as enmity with neighbours and meddling in the region that forces Pakistan to remain a security state instead of a welfare state.
And Pakistan’s centre-dominated three-tier governance structure will have to be reformed by shifting resources away from the centre to the four provinces and other territories, to the 160 districts of the provinces where over 200 million real Pakistanis live and for whom the state has gone missing while floods of biblical proportions drown them in misery.
Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistan-based journalist, researcher and analyst with interests in politics, media, development and science.
Twitter: @adnanrehmat1
