Prime Minister Chaudhry Shujaat has shown time and again that he is a consummate political operator. Part of his armoury is political negotiating skills. Examples of these skills are littered through the last five years since General Pervez Musharraf came to power and Chaudhry Shujaat decided to abandon his former mentor Nawaz Sharif and cast his lot in with the Musharraf regime, taking with him the bulk of the PML(N).
The other day, Shujaat's skills were again on display when he managed to persuade the MMA leadership to attend a briefing on the Wana situation. As a result of that exchange, the MMA shifted its ground and agreed in principle to the registration of foreign militants in the tribal areas.
These are not inconsiderable achievements, particularly managing to nudge the seemingly immovable MMA to accept the government's case for registration of foreign militants as part of a political strategy of dealing with their troubling presence on Pakistani soil, rather than reliance only on military means, which have proved costly in terms of human lives and the concomitant political fallout.
Given this track record, Shujaat may be ideally placed to deal with a few intractable problems that have so far defied solution because of a lack of national consensus. Two issues in particular stand out in this regard. These are the NFC Award and water issues. It may be argued by sceptics that Shujaat's short tenure may not allow him to make much headway on these stubborn problems.
Nevertheless, given that in addition to his demonstrated political negotiating skills, he currently enjoys unprecedented clout as the head of the party leading the ruling coalition as well as the post of prime minister, it would be in the fitness of things that he should initiate the stalled negotiations on these critical issues. The optimal hope would be that he can succeed where so many others have failed in spite of sincere efforts.
Taking the NFC Award first, it is obvious from the statements post-budget of the MMA leadership in NWFP that they realise they have missed the bus in not forging a consensus on the Award. As a result of this failure, the provinces have had to make their budgets for the current fiscal on the basis of the old Award. Their complaints about the inadequacy of funds available under that Award have come back to haunt them in the shape of now having the same financial share as under the old Award, with all its attendant disadvantages. The underlying problem remains acceptance by all stakeholders of a multi-factor formula for distribution of available resources. As far as the division between the Centre and the provinces is concerned, the negotiations before the budget had more or less narrowed the gulf between the two sets of parties to an acceptance, reluctantly or otherwise, of a share of around 47 percent for the provinces. As for distribution amongst the provinces, the bone of contention still unresolved is Sindh's demand that revenue generation form part of the formula.
Sindh had been demanding a weightage of 2 percent for this factor, on which consensus proved elusive, with some of the other provinces rejecting revenue generation as a factor altogether, and others accepting it in principle but disagreeing with the 2 percent demand. The way forward appears to be to generate a consensus on a multi-factor approach (which has already been conceded in principle by all concerned), including revenue generation, so that all the stakeholders, including Sindh, are satisfied to the extent of owning the subsequent Award.
As to the water issue, Chaudhry Shujaat vowed in an election rally in Mithi the other day that the Kalabagh Dam would definitely be built, even if it was named something else. If only such controversies could be resolved by a mere change in nomenclature, it would have been achieved long ago.
The issue is not the name of the Dam, but the objections of NWFP as to the impact on the population affected and the damage due to waterlogging ensuing from the huge lake of the reservoir on its agriculture, plus the lower riparian Sindh's dissent on the basis that the province is already being robbed of its due share of the waters of the Indus River, a complaint likely to be exacerbated by damming its flow at Kalabagh. Shujaat would perhaps be able to initiate a discussion on the Kalabagh Dam, but whether he can overcome these objections from at least two provinces is open to question.
This does not absolve the prime minister from his prime duty to do the doable. This includes lining of canals and water courses, a decision on which has already been made. This project alone could eventually save water equivalent to the storage capacity of three Kalabagh Dams and also help alleviate the serious problem of waterlogging and salinity because of seepage from the canal network. Other dam sites, such as Bhasha, should be brought forward and implemented on a war footing to take advantage of the potential storage there in a non-controversial manner.
If Prime Minister Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain could undertake these two big tasks to the exclusion almost of everything else, he would be likely to leave more than a minor footnote in the country's history.
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