CPEC’s master plan

Yesterday, just hours after local news media revealed what it termed an exclusive coverage of the ‘CPEC master plan,’ Ahsan Iqbal lost his cool on Twitter. He termed the media report as “factually incorrect” and “half cooked.” This from a man who is fond of saying that “CPEC is just like an open book.” Well, if it was really that open Mr. Minister, then why is it that any version of the CPEC plan hasn’t ever been ‘officially released,’ let alone publicly discussed in the parliament. Such state of transparency and openness is reminiscent of the dictators who like to keep the public in the dark.

This episode reminds one of the darkness over CPEC’s financing structure and how would it impact Pakistan’s balance of payments. For a long time, the government withheld the information, which gave birth to controversies, suspicions, and analyses that cautioned a looming balance-of-payment crisis. After the government released the relevant details, those fears subsided as facts eventually replaced suspicions. PML-N’s CPEC managers haven’t learned a bit from that lesson, if not from the fact that 2017 is not the 90s. Citizens at home or abroad now demand more information than governments possess.

As for the master plan leaked yesterday, there is little that is new. Anybody following CPEC close enough knows well about the agri plans, coastal tourism, power projects, Gwadar sea and air ports, SEZs, secure cities, smart cities, mine and mineral projects, and the whole nine yards. These and most other nuggets have been reported and analysed before across the umpteen conferences, chamber moots, study circles, and various sections of Pakistan’s media, including this column.

Instead, the public needs to know the details relating to financial, institutional, and legal aspects, as well as the complementary timelines of various projects and plans. Need one emphasize here that in order to realise the full potential of an economic corridor, the plan must be comprehensive enough to include economic, organizational, institutional, behavioral, political, and planning aspects. And the Planning Commission would do well to disclose the same to the public.

The demand for public transparency is not anything strange. In the case of China’s regional economic integration, an example can be found not very far from here. Increasing Chinese domination of the Mongolian economy has stirred the Parliament in Ulaanbaatar to pass legislation requiring prior legislative approval of foreign investments over $70 million.

Or take the case of European Union whose Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has demanded that “civil society must be assured that it will be able to monitor, assess and implement action planned in connection with OBOR” using an appropriate set of economic, social, and environmental indicators at national, regional, and local level.

“The negotiation process, which in the next few years should produce the potential investment agreement between the EU and China, must guarantee optimum transparency regarding the documents on the table. Throughout this process, the civil society organisations of both parties must be directly involved, promoting cross-sector dialogue and guaranteeing broader social partner involvement,” the EESC said.

The EESC is being so demanding because the EU is unlike China, where the framing and implementation of development policies is very much centrally coordinated. A similar comparison could be made between Pakistan and China. While many areas of the economy lie with the centre in Pakistan, there are many areas that don’t.

This also requires that there are independent bodies in the centre as well as in each province, which have the mandate and capacity to plan, manage, and ensure implementation of projects under the corridor and also drive institutional transformation at all levels of government.

In that vein, the state of Planning Commission is already quite apparent. But that in the provinces are also a matter of concern. One such example is of Sindh. Sources say that until a few years ago, there were people tasked with project evaluation in Sindh’s Planning & Development department who could not even calculate NPV and IRR. Recently, however, Sindh government has undergone some ‘reforms’ by making a Planning and Development Board; we are told the majority of its staff is from the very P&D department that it seeks to replace. And then they say the media is cynical!