EDITORIAL: Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal launched the digital flood dashboard on Monday, which is appreciated since now everybody including international institutions, development partners, crucial donors as well as the Pakistani public can get details of relief activities in flood-affected areas of the country.
Yet to be a true success, and serve its real purpose, it will need to provide up-to-the-minute information at all times; which means the dashboard will have to be refreshed and updated constantly. That alone is a Herculean, almost unfair, task, given the government’s limitations and the non-stop nature of the aid effort. It is, however, also necessary; not just because of the need for transparency, but also because there have been plenty of reports about some of the relief goods being actually sold at supermarkets, that too at pretty stiff prices.
This is just one more area where the prime minister’s team has its work cut out for it. On top of constantly reaching out for more aid and more help, and ensuring that relief goods first get to where they are needed the most, while patching up the broken infrastructure everywhere at the same time, it must also spare enough personnel to monitor all the aid that is coming in from everywhere and make real-time updates on the dashboard. The PM is very right that provincial governments will have to step up and offer more help; and that there could not be a more inopportune time to let political differences come in the way of this overriding national duty.
His optimism that the country will pull through is also appreciated. However, the parallels he drew with similar disasters in 2020 and 2012 might be a little off the mark. Because while it is true that the economy has never really found its feet since it became hopelessly addicted to debt starting somewhere in the 1990s, the overall economic/fiscal situation has never really been as brittle as it is now. It’s still too soon to put a final price tag on this year’s devastation, of course, yet the word till a few days ago was that it has already cost the economy somewhere around $30 billion. And nobody in the country should need to be reminded what that means when there are less than $10 billion in reserves and exports are likely to take a big hit because the floods ruined much of the cotton crop that the textile industry feeds on.
At such times, it is all the more important to ensure complete transparency in aid utilisation. This is just the beginning, after all, and once the immediate emergency is taken care of and the displaced are housed and fed, the long and difficult task of rebuilding and reconstruction will require the government to seek aid all over again. That’s when the digital flood dashboard can argue its case for it, saving it a lot of time and effort.
It must, however, be mentioned that there’s been a rather visible effort by one of the leading opposition parties to discredit the government’s aid effort. This is a very serious charge. So if anybody has any evidence of the alleged corruption, it must be brought forward at once. But if this is just about scoring political points at a very fragile moment in the country’s history, then it must be discouraged very strongly because this immaturity will not just interfere with the relief, it will also cast doubts on our ability and intentions in the eyes of other countries that are helping us; that too for no real reason at all.
There are much more important things to do, and we are not going to be able to do them even if we all join forces. We are going to continue needing help from the outside. And it’s best if we don’t muddy the waters ourselves.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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