THE US historian Niall Ferguson is a modern Cassandra.

His
utterances are prophecies waiting on the tip of time, begging to be
believed. For example, his book The Ascent of Money: A Financial
History of the World appeared in 2008 and foretold a crash in US
financial markets. Soon afterwards, Lehman Brothers went
bankrupt and Merrill Lynch crashed.

His latest book The Square and Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the
Struggle for Global Power (2018) contrasts the power of hierarchical (ie
vertical) structures with the subsurface (radial) power of networks.

Ferguson’s inspiration came in the wake of his research into the life of Dr
Henry Kissinger. No man in modern political history has perfected the art of
networking as Dr Kissinger did, first as national security adviser and later
secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Kissinger
had scant respect for hierarchies, unless he was at the top of it. He preferred
the personal touch, an unimpeded accessibility to world leaders. He needed a
voice to the name, which explains why the concept of a European Union
unnerved him: “Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?”

Ferguson illustrates his point through an Ego chart which shows world leaders
according to the frequency of their contact with Kissinger. Interestingly,
president Gen Yahya Khan is shown at a par with Soviet premier Alexei
Kosygin.

Ferguson gives examples of less individualised networks — professional

bodies, religious sects, secret societies like the Freemasons, etc. They
succeeded because their survival was based on their success.

We are warned of the power available to IT giants.

He contrasts this with the hierarchies that depend for their success on
obedience to their credo. The religion of the ancient Egyptians or the Mayans
or today’s Roman Catholic Church are the most obvious examples. As are
absolute monarchies and totalitarian states. In fact, any institution that has a
top-down or bottom-up approach to decision-making.

To Ferguson, the most crucial event in our history was the invention of the
printing press in the 15th century. Optimists then saw in its power of
dissemination the Utopian dream of a global community. Knowledge would no
longer be a private perquisite. It would be the great equaliser.
Five centuries later, the invention of network platforms spawned a similar
expectation. Through Facebook, its founder Mark Zuckerberg was sure that
Facebook would give “people the power to build a global community that
works for all of us”.

Evan Williams (co-founder of Twitter) discovered otherwise: “I thought once

everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is
automatically going to be a better place. I was wrong about that.”

Ferguson agrees with Williams. He argues that access to information does not
ipso facto lead to social equality. He has realised that while the population of
social platform users has expanded across the globe, become diffused,
ownership of those platforms is increasingly concentrated in a few hands. He
cites the revenues Facebook and Google raise from advertising revenues. In
2019, Facebook earned $69 billion from such revenues, more than the total
revenues of all traditional forms of advertising. Google earned $135bn. To
Ferguson, personal data pumped out of us is as precious as crude oil pumped
out of the sand.

As Cassandra, Ferguson warns us of the power available to these IT giants. He

contends that 80 per cent of all the news appearing on Google and Facebook is
recycled, not the outcome of investigative reporting. They operate in an
intellectual stratosphere beyond oversight — legislative, moral or self-
regulated. These companies claim they are not publishers, therefore not
obedient to their laws, yet they do nothing if not purvey information.

How are they to be controlled? Ferguson has suggested an international

super-body for surveillance. Citing the precedent of the Congress of Vienna of
1814-15 when Great Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, France allied to rule the
world, and the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 where four countries — the US,
Great Britain, France, and Italy — sought to straddle the post-war world,
Ferguson thinks that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council
should do the job. Except that China has built a Great Wall of technology
around itself. It has the world’s most sophisticated payment system, and it
works. It does not need to collaborate with inferiors.

A crucial test will be the 2020 US presidential election. In 2016, Hilary Clinton

had the support of Silicon Valley moguls. Yet she relied upon traditional
methods of campaigning, spent twice as much as Donald Trump, and lost.
Trump targeted the small voter through social media, and won. This time he
does not need Putin’s hand hidden in his glove.
Will modern networks, asks Ferguson, replace traditional hierarchies?
Unlikely. The animal in man needs hierarchies. The serpent in him prefers the
darkness of networks.

The writer is an author.

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

Published in Dawn, September 3rd, 2020

MUCH has been said about the recent rains that caused
unparalleled damage in Karachi. Precious lives were lost, business
and personal assets destroyed, livelihoods severed, properties and
constructed structures damaged, and miseries inflicted due to
various kinds of infrastructure collapse.

All this happened at a time when key political stakeholders were wrangling
over what course the disadvantaged metropolis should take. The federal
government was seeking a greater role for itself and federal institutions, the
Sindh government wished to continue with business as usual, and Karachi’s
mayor was bowing out after a luckless tenure. Many from civil society and the
business community wanted radical change in the city’s institutional
arrangements. Ordinary citizens from various neighbourhoods, affluent and
underprivileged, collectively aspired for major change.

Added to these demands are now calls for the immediate repairs of roads and
streets; a dependable drainage system; overhaul of power, telecom and digital
infrastructure; and compensation for losses of life and property. It is obvious
that, with the current institutional arrangements, these goals may be difficult
if not impossible to achieve. But the metropolis can be completely transformed
and regain its lost glory, without radically altering the political status quo, if a
few rational steps are taken.

Karachi needs to be managed with consensus.

Karachi’s realities need to be accepted prior to any rehabilitation and reform
process worth its name. The metropolis accounts for one-third of Sindh’s
population. Going by the 2017 provisional census results, its present
population is over 20 million, though sprawling developments in the outskirts
suggest that this figure could be greater. Karachi has a diverse and upwardly
mobile population, and contributes a sizable proportion of the federal and
provincial revenue.
Karachi’s management is divided between the federal, provincial and local
governments. Yet the issues plaguing management of the city’s affairs remain
highly visible. Divided jurisdictions between land-management agencies,
excessive experimentation in the local governance structure, declining
capacities of local institutions in service delivery and management, ad hoc and
unplanned infrastructure and housing developments, and the political attitude
of competing tiers taking credit for development works have all contributed to
the present impasse.

Karachi’s residents demand appropriate thresholds of services and urban

management. It is no surprise that sharp criticisms of the sinking performance
of the present federal, provincial and local regimes are growing. Certain issues
are starkly apparent — poor quality of human resources, paucity of operational
budgets, weak monitoring mechanisms, absence of effective audit and
accounts procedures, financial dependence on the federal and provincial
governments, lack of control over the police, tutelage exercised by federal and
provincial institutions, and the inability to generate finance for local works.
Karachi struggles with a shortage of funds to strengthen vital services such as
sanitation, water supply, informal settlement upgradation and firefighting.

The city needs consensus more urgently than ever before. A Karachi steering
committee can be notified representing all land management bodies,
infrastructure agencies, elected/appointed heads of municipal bodies, and
representatives of major stakeholders and civil society, chaired by the chief
minister and vice-chaired by the city mayor/administrator.

This committee must be the apex decision-making body on urban

development, management, infrastructure, services, jurisdictional and
functional issues, budgets and finances, and human resources in various
agencies. The committee can draft its own terms of reference once it is set up
through a mutually agreed consultative process. An analysis of the roles,
responsibilities, capacities and available resources must be conducted of all
these institutions, and a rolling programme of periodic upgradation prepared
for each of them.

Besides this, a Karachi Division planning agency must be created through a

legal and administrative arrangement devised by the federal and provincial
governments. The agency should be sufficiently empowered to prescribe
development plans, enforcement mechanisms and growth patterns through a
consultative process. The Karachi Development Plans of 1974-1985 and 1986-
2000 strongly recommended such an institutional arrangement.
Intra-institutional reforms must be initiated in KMC; cantonment boards;
DMCs; SITE; port authorities; KWSB; Karachi, Malir and Lyari development
authorities; Sindh Katchi Abadis Authority; and SBCA and DHA. These bodies
must be advised to undertake a need analysis for capacity building and
upgradation against their responsibilities, as well as to prepare and submit
comprehensive annual reports to the steering committee.

THERE are those among us who think politics is about nothing but
taunting your opponents. These are precisely the sorts of weaklings
who feel strong and emboldened when they are part of a group, but
shrivel up into diminutive creatures when caught out alone. We all
know the type, even if from school days.

For days and days as the city of Karachi grappled with a historic flood and a
crippling power outage that sent consequences cascading in every direction —
from cellular network outages to ATM and fuel pump closures — there was
this lot among us who thought the opportunity demands nothing more from
them than to taunt the provincial government.

On Saturday, many areas of the city were still in the thick of the power outage,
the lucky ones jostling for generator fuel at those few pumps that were open
but mobbed, the rest either suffering through 48 hours without power or
seeking refuge in the houses of those whose power had been restored. That
same night, just 12 minutes shy of the midnight hour, our power minister
tweeted the following line.

“Strongly recommend that PPP Sind Govt and Officers visit Mohenjo Daro and
Harappa to study the drainage & sewerage system used there 4500 years ago.”

There is not much one can say about the mindset which
leads people to hurl taunts, abuse and mockery at those
who are beset by difficulties.
When this tweet was sent, large parts of the country’s largest city, the beating
heart of its economy, had been without power for 60 hours. Think about that
for a moment.

I was one of the lucky ones whose generator had not broken down from such
continuous running, but had spent a good amount of the day rushing from one
pump to the other searching for fuel, while frantically calling loved ones,
including those who are advanced in age and live alone, to check if their power
situation was alright and whether they needed me to pick up fuel for them too.
It was quite obvious to those who were still without power that night that
there was a long way to go before the restoration of supply.

With a prolonged power outage, there were very few functioning ATM
machines in the city, so those without a supply of petty cash at home had a
second round of shuttling to do, running from one ATM to another to see
which one might be working. Prolonged power outages also led to the
breakdown of telecom services, as one by one, the towers ran out of back-up
supply and the inundated streets made it impossible to service them.

So those who had to venture out, either to seek refuge in other people’s homes
or to replenish food and fuel supplies, hugged their own family before leaving
home because while they were out there would be no way of contacting them. I
remember when I came home after one of these errands, the family anxiously
came to the door and asked “was everything alright? How are the streets? Did
you manage to get everything?” This is a glimpse of what it is like to live
through a couple of days during a city-wide disaster.

I’m not sure what possessed the minister that he forgot, so close to the
midnight hour, that he was the power minister of the government and it was
his job to oversee the power system in the entire country. I know he had his
reasons for why he was unable to oversee restoration of supply but then,
wouldn’t those he was taunting have their reasons for why the flooding was
beyond their control?

A few hours earlier he had tweeted this: “Have told KE management

repeatedly that KE must make every effort in restoring power to the affected
areas of Karachi. Govt of Sind should provide all out assistance in clearing the
water logged areas so that power restoration can be expedited.”

And then a minute later came this: “My name is Omar Ayub Khan. I am from
Pakistan and I #SupportGaza”. And there it was, a tweet for the people of
Karachi, and another for the people of Gaza. I wonder what he was doing in
the two hours between his Gaza and Mohenjodaro tweets.

If you’re wondering why I’m reserving my ire for the power minister when
many others were attacking the Sindh government, the answer is that I do not
expect it from ministers of the government in power to taunt their rivals and
opposition members when tens of millions of people are living through an
emergency in precisely the area of responsibility held by the minister.

There is not much one can say about this mindset which leads people to hurl
taunts, abuse and mockery at those who are beset by difficulties. At the time of
writing, the valley of Swat is in the middle of terrible flooding as the Swat river
has overflowed due to heavy rains in the valley. My prayers, and I expect the
prayers and thoughts of all especially those who are in a position of power,
should be with the people who are suffering in the midst of this developing
disaster.

But it is nearly futile to try and point out the basic rules of human decency
anymore. The climate created by the ruling party is one where the most
voluble abuse is considered to have won the day. Where one taunts others
when they are in difficulty but demands decency when one is oneself in
difficulty. Where there is one set of rules for those who refuse to give blind
devotion to the party leader and another for those who do.

Sadly, no newspaper would print my feelings when I saw the tweet

recommending the Sindh government and its officers to visit Mohenjodaro
and Harappa to study their drainage systems. But let me just ask the minister
this question: should they take DHA and Cantonment Board Clifton officers
with them when they make this trip?

MUCH has been said over the past few weeks about wheat shortage
and imports to ensure regular supplies and fair prices but little
attention has been paid to the poor state of agriculture, where the
root of the problem lies, or the plight of the people who depend
upon it.

According to the latest Economic Survey, agriculture recorded a growth rate of

3.2 per cent during the last fiscal year but for several previous years the
farming sector of agriculture had been showing little or negative growth. Its
overall performance rose due to the livestock sector’s performance.

In 2018, government launched a Rs277 billion Prime Minister’s Agriculture

Emergency programme. The 10-point programme ranges from enhancement
of productivity of wheat, rice, sugarcane and oilseeds and water conservation
to backyard poultry farms. We are almost in the middle of the five-year
programme and it should be worthwhile to find out how many of the
objectives have been achieved and how much of the programme will survive
post-pandemic planning. Earlier too, agriculture development packages
including credit, price support and marketing facilities, were offered. While
these measures did have a positive impact on the economy they did not touch
the iniquitous land ownership pattern that is a major cause of the sluggish
performance of agriculture.
Agriculture is important on three counts. First, it offers the means of
guaranteeing food security. Secondly, it remains a significant contributor to
the GDP. And thirdly, it accounts for a little over 33pc of the national labour
force. A holistic approach to agricultural development will concentrate as
much, if not more, on the well-being of the cultivators as on the promotion of
state interest. It is essential to look at the hardship of petty landholders.

The life of owners of tiny pieces of land is unmitigated

misery.
According to the latest agriculture census, farms less than an acre constitute
19pc of the total number of farms but the area covered is 1pc of the total; farms
under five acres constitute 64pc of the total but the area under their command
is only 19pc of the total farm area. On the other hand, farms of 25 acres to over
150 acres constitute only 5pc of the total number of farms but they constitute
35pc of the total area. There have been suggestions that land in the possession
of bigger landlords has increased since the last land reform of more than 40
years ago.

The life of owners of tiny pieces of land is unmitigated misery. They cannot
afford the essential inputs, nor can they use the machines. They have little
access to credit. They are too poor to make any progress in social life and their
use of educational facilities is limited.

The solution lies in serious and genuine land reform. Some well-meaning
economists argue that the time for land reform has passed. Perhaps the world
has fallen in love with corporate farming. However, the case for land reform
was not based on the need for efficient farming alone; a more compelling
reason was the urgency of reducing the peasantry’s land hunger and that
reason has not disappeared.

The genuine land reform that was promised before independence, at least to
the people of Punjab, has never been carried out. There is little doubt in
informed quarters that the land reforms of 1959 and 1970s benefited the
landlords more than the deprived peasantry. If the land reform of 1977
touched some privileged landlords it was not implemented.

These days most people have stopped talking of land reform because of the
fear of transgressing religious injunctions. This is so because in a judgement
that has never ceased to confound students and practitioners of law, the
Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court declared land reform un-
Islamic in the 1980s. Now land reform can mean many things beside obliging
landlords to part with land in excess of the prescribed limit but everything
about land tenure has been given up. A petition questioning the bar on land
reforms filed in the Supreme Court by senior lawyer Abid Hasan Minto in 2011
is still pending.

We are referring to land reform in the most comprehensive meaning of the

term. It does include rationalisation of the anomalies in the fixation of upper
ceiling of holdings. But the land reform being advocated here includes, besides
fixation of ceiling on ownership, a host of other matters —from equitable
division of output between landlord and tenant and standard agreements
between landlords and commercial farmers (mustajirs), to guarantees against
damage to soil fertility caused by unscrupulous and wanton exploitation of
land, and minimum wages for farm labour. And of course the state’s duty to
ensure all farmers’ access to credit and extension services, if such facilities
have survived anywhere, is also included.

Without comprehensive land reform you may have development that will
leave the bulk of peasantry as badly off as ever but if development that
includes the uplift of the cultivators is intended then land reforms must be
carried out sooner rather than later. Talking of agriculture’s rejuvenation
without land reform will be like entering a race with a cart that has no horse
before it.

Tailpiece: Because of a flaw in the law, the NAB chairman has been granted
powers to make rules for the bureau’s functioning with the approval of the
president, that is, the government. For a long time, the NAB chairman did not
want the rules to interfere with his whim and caprice. Obliged by the Supreme
Court, he has submitted a draft of rules to the court. One does not know
whether the government has been consulted. Media reports suggest that the
rules have been designed to increase the chairman’s powers beyond what is
contemplated under the NAB Ordinance. If these reports are true, NAB will
become a more horrible instrument of tyranny than it already is. Meanwhile,
here are two recent headlines: ‘Pakistan’s problem is [lack of?] good
governance’ is attributed to Punjab governor Mohammad Sarwar, and
‘Provinces cannot be administered by average leaders’ to Federal Minister
Fawad Chaudhry.