Mashallah, Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani is a very hard working man, and that is why he requires a large staff to assist him.
Is this excessive, or are people ok with this number of household servants for PM Gilani?
DAWN - Opinion; November 30, 2008
A household of 180 servants
SOME time ago a press reporter asked President Zardari whether Pakistan stood in danger of being declared bankrupt. Mr Zardari’s weary reply was that Pakistan was not a company or a business that it should go bankrupt.
As all of us now see, the nettlesome reporter was justifiably worried but a piqued president was unjustifiably complacent. Any organisation which is unable to pay its debts is bankrupt. So will be a country. It may not be so declared by a court but international agencies do so by their ratings.
When Pakistan’s friends and allies declined to help despite their sympathetic concern, they had obviously determined that Pakistan was on the verge of bankruptcy. The IMF’s loan of $7.6bn is intended to enable Pakistan to pay back its debts as they fall due so that it remains bankable for friends.With external debt now exceeding $50bn and domestic borrowing only a little less, Pakistan can still go bankrupt if embezzlement and the extravagant use of public money were to continue unchecked, as in a recession income will not increase nor all subsidies can be withdrawn.
I am one of those columnists who, in the estimation of some economists, know next to nothing about economics. But that is precisely the reason why I have no doubt that the challenge that Pakistan faces today is not financial. It is moral. The moral values are declining all around, but are declining faster and steeper in politics and public institutions.
How much of the revenue due to the state is not collected remains a wild guess. Some would say more is evaded and misappropriated than is recovered. The public money squandered or embezzled by the politicians, officials, contractors and suppliers is now reckoned to be as high as 40 per cent. Today’s Mr 10 Per Cent could pass for Mr Clean if he were an official whose salary is enough to subsist on. For big guns it is insultingly too little.
Rumours abound and so do anecdotes. One rumour that all tend to believe is that the officials who owe allegiance to one or the other party, which these days many do, get targets for the funds they must raise to sustain the party establishment. The number of such officials, hence the amount, has been increasing as nomination rather than merit has all but become a rule for initial entry and later for assignment to lucrative posts.
Out of the anecdotes that abound, just one, may be recounted here. The nominee of a minister went back to him complaining that though a letter of appointment was given to him he was not being paid as no post in the department was vacant. The minister’s reply was convincingly simple: it is the job and not the salary that matters. On the other hand, the country’s Public Service Commission is carrying hundreds of vacancies in the superior services from year to year as the candidates of the required standard are not forthcoming.
That is quite understandable. The kind of young men the commission looks for get four times as much in the private sector as the best service in government would pay. The son of a CSP officer who had followed in the footsteps of his father resigned to join a private company when the key posts of the cadre — commissioner and district magistrate — were abolished.
The incompetent and corrupt officials in conjunction with the politicians fitting the same description, only more numerous, have lowered Pakistan’s credit rating much more than the flaws in its economic policies. Then, the excess of manpower and extravagance in expenditure is witnessed at all levels but is most bizarre at the top. It can be said in general that the government in Islamabad, as also in the provinces, can work and indeed perform better with one-third of the present strength.
But let the focus for a while be at the top — the president and the prime minister. According to the budget book, the president’s secretariat has a staff of 761 and the expense incurred in a year is Rs306m. The prime minister’s secretariat has a much larger staff —1,005 — but the expense, mercifully, is only Rs13m more, i.e. Rs319m. The number of the PM’s household servants alone is 180. Maybe someone who had seen the households of Liaquat Ali Khan and H.S. Suhrawardy would tell us how many servants they had.
The president and the prime minister having secretariats of their own is, of course, a latter-day innovation which besides extra expense has been a source of delay, duplication, intrigue, conflict and corruption. The secretariat of the government is indeed their secretariat but the present-day incumbents of the high offices do not listen as they must have their own men and many.A year after independence when I was a student in Gujjar Khan, a town in northern Punjab, the school building had no desks, the boys squatted on the floor and the teacher spoke perched on a stool. But then the education minister (the forgotten and not today’s Mr Dasti) came visiting one day riding a tonga. 60 years later schools are still without desks but the ministers have fleets of cars.
13 years after independence when I was a section officer in the West Pakistan secretariat at Lahore only the chief secretary had a government car and that too for official use. For the rest, secretaries and all, there were five cars in the pool. A proposal for the sixth then mooted was turned down by the Finance Secretary A.G.N. Kazi. In today’s four secretariats which have replaced that one, the problem is to find parking space for the government cars.
The press reported some time ago that a Sindh minister had 10 cars in his use. Every other minister had two or more. Only the agriculture minister Ali Nawaz Shah had one. If I get to see Mr Shah one day I must ask him, pray, why? Perhaps it is because of such like men that the country is still a going concern. But with such extravagance and embezzlement all over and the ‘who cares’ attitude above, should we be protesting against the IMF for trying to keep the country a going concern when no one else, not even Saudi Arabia or China, would?