Salaries and perks of elected representatives

There has been interesting exchange of e-mail between some friends recently on the issue of salary and perks of our National Assembly members. It originated in North America, which shows the interest Pakistani immigrants still take in national politics.
Somebody sent an e-mail to a friend who is a retired civil servant now living in Canada. He forwarded this to friends in Pakistan.
All the figures given by the primary mover of the e-mail were way high than what our representatives are getting. According to this gentleman each MNA gets in terms of salary and perks around Rs 32 million per annum. But MNA Chaudry Aitzaz Ahsan, who is one of the few upright men of the house, hurried to put the record straight.
He explained that all an MNA gets in cash as salary and allowances after deduction is Rs 41,500 per month, which comes to Rs 498,000 per annum and not the fantastic sum of Rs 32 million! He clarified that each MNA has to pay for his accommodation, electricity and phone charges from this package.
However, there are some travelling allowances for the parliamentarians for commuting between their constituency to Islamabad to attend the sessions and the meetings.
What he forgot to mention (I hope inadvertently) was that each parliamentarian also gets Rs 3,750 daily allowance for the days she/he attends the assembly or the Senate session. The same allowance is also admissible for the number of days they attend meetings of various committees.
Now the National Assembly and Senate have to meet for at least 120 and 100 days respectively, in a year. Add to this around 30 days, which can be claimed for travelling. So roughly a member of the parliament gets another Rs 562,000 annually under the head of daily allowance.
This brings the total package to around Rs 1,060,500 per annum and to Rs 88,000 per month. Aitzaz says: "And then you require an MNA to entertain constituents, run a household, bring up and educate kids, meet the costs of his campaign and his office, pay his phone, gas and electricity bills on just this salary" (his figure Rs 41,000). "If I had no income other than the MNA's salary and emoluments which is a total take-home of Rs 41,500 per month... (imagine gas, electricity, fuel, food item bills in at least two establishments of necessity: one at home and one in Islamabad), I would never contest elections to the Assembly. I might have even left politics altogether."
Not surprisingly on salaries and perks both the members of the treasury benches and the opposition share the same view. Media and other members of the civil society consistently lambaste the elected representatives on this issue. In a country where per capita income is just over four grand this criticism is not strange. There was also criticism of US parliamentarians when they raised their salaries to over $163,000 a year, so we are not the only one.
But I think that the political analysts should keep in mind that if we want to build a democratic system, we would have to strengthen its support system also. If we will not pay our members well then they would be more prone to corruption. To get the right perspective I visited the web, the mother of all libraries, and found that most of the legislative members in India and Bangladesh are getting almost similar packages.
So there is not much to grudge about. Compared to legislative members of the countries whose democracy we admire, our members are not getting much.
I know some of my friends feel that our members are not doing their job honestly, so why pay them. And that many among them are making a lot of money unofficially. But to create the institutions one has to create an enabling environment. MQM MNA Kunwar Khalid Younus says: "37 to 40 countries' packages, including that of Azad Kashmir, were studied and it was found that all have some kind of pension and health facilities after retirement for the legislative members, while the parliamentarians in Pakistan have no such facility." He thinks that the parliamentarians should be adequately paid as they "have a 24-hour job."
In many countries the parliamentarians are provided staff for preparing speeches and doing their office work. In Pakistan the Rs 10,000 allowance given to each member, which is included in Rs 41,000 salary package, can only meet the cost of a semi-qualified personal secretary.
The members have the facility of the pool research staff at the National Assembly and the Senate. Some members who have tried to use them feel that most of the people on the staff are inefficient.
Senator Nisar Memon says that very few people use this facility. He thinks that both the libraries of the Senate and National Assembly should be merged. The Senator is also critical of various non-functional committees of the Parliament which are wasting the resources provided by the government.
MNA Kunwar Khalid Younus confided that there is a move to set up a joint library and research facilities for the members with the assistance of USAID. But I am told that most members are not using these research facilities. Former Senator Taj Haider laments that there is no work culture among the members and it is not encouraged.
A simple example he gave in support of his observations is that "the parliamentary lodges have everything for comfort but no office table or computers. When I asked for one," he added, "I was told that it was not in the allocation and then my brother Johar Hussain bought me the office furniture."
The trouble is that we want the democratic institutions to grow in Pakistan and then at the same time grudge the expenses on them. It's almost the same dilemma, which urban the society faces every now and then: when it comes to say eatables, we want them cheap and yet in drawing room discussion we want that the farmers should be compensated adequately.
Many years back a corporate leader told me that if a candidate spends Rs 10 million on elections and most of his time on politics, "he is not doing for the love of the people only? Indeed the world is not that altruistic. The system needs reforms before the 2007 elections.
The problem of funding the election campaigns and paying the people's representatives adequately has been usually ignored in the discussion on democracy. The result is that most of the political parties give tickets to persons who can afford the expensive election campaign.
That keeps the educated middle class out of the race. What we need is a serious discussion and change in laws of electioneering and representatives' emolument. The present election expenditure limits are flouted in all cases and once elected our representatives are found indulging in unethical practices.
True, higher emoluments would not weed out corruption. It is also rampant in other democratic societies like India, UK and US. But then democracy is not built in one day and supplanted from above. We have to be patient as democracy may be noisy and dirty, but that's the child each society has to nourish. The problem in Pakistan is that we are impatient to kill democracy in its infancy in favour of autocracy.