The Lost Opportunity

The government has yet to commemorate ‘one year after’ the devastating floods that swept the country in July 2010. It has still not marked it by undertaking a comprehensive public review of its flood rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts. Nor has it outlined what remains to be done including steps to meet continuing humanitarian needs and restoring livelihoods. An estimated 800,000 flood affectees are still living in temporary shelters.

Official word is also awaited on prevention measures that have been taken to mitigate the impact of any future disaster. There has been no government response to criticism from some aid agencies that it has failed to invest in adequate flood defences.

Meanwhile the UN has published a report, ‘One Year On’, which details the efforts its various agencies have mounted and describes what is still a work in progress in recovery, rehabilitation and rebuilding community infrastructures. International humanitarian organisations such as Oxfam and Save the Children have also issued reports focusing on specific aspects of the continuing challenge.

The scale of last summer’s devastation wrought by the fury of the Indus River was enormous and unprecedented. It was apparent that the gigantic task of recovery, rehabilitation of the mass of displaced people and repair of infrastructure would take years of sustained effort – and resources.

The catastrophe dwarfed every natural disaster the world had seen in recent memory and affected more people than the 2004 tsunami and earthquakes in Pakistan and Haiti put together. Nearly two thousand people died and more than eighteen million people were affected across the country. A fifth of Pakistan’s land was deluged by floodwaters while millions lost their homes.

The UN report appropriately paid tribute to the people hit by the tragedy for the spirit of endurance that enabled them to confront the crisis with “a humbling determination to overcome”. “Those affected by the floods” says the report “demonstrated striking courage and strength to survive and rebuild their lives in the face of extraordinary adversity”. And it recalls that the first responders to the disaster were the people themselves, who helped each other to overcome the country’s worst natural disaster. “Communities”, it says, “supported each other as they could, providing shelter, water, and food, regardless of their own difficulties and challenges”.

This underscores what has been central to Pakistan’s story through its many crises and challenges: the extraordinary resilience of the people. Coming in the midst of daunting security and economic problems several foreign observers saw the 2010 disaster as one crisis too many that would tip Pakistan over the edge. But the country defied this doomsday prognosis as it had similar ones made so often before.

In every national tragedy is also embedded an opportunity. And so it was with the floods of 2010. The dire situation held out the possibility of being a game changer in a number of ways. The most important way was to act as a spur for critical socio-economic reform. Given the colossal scale of the challenge and a chance to ‘build better’, there could not have been a more compelling case or imperative to mobilise domestic resources and galvanise public support for reform.

Policy actions to meet this objective in the face of a nation-wide tragedy would have been hard to resist by privileged groups that have long blocked and thwarted such reform. This would have helped to create a culture of self-help. It would also have served as a foundation for sustained official efforts to raise national resources and frontally address the fiscal problem that lies at the heart of the country’s chronic crisis in public finance.

But instead of taking this path, the country’s governing elite preferred to shift the onus of raising resources to the international community. Of course the magnitude of the disaster required a global response and extraordinary help from abroad. But this help should have been aimed to supplement not supplant national efforts. The government showed more interest in dispatching ministers overseas to drum up foreign assistance than deploy them at home to make the case to expand the tax net and raise domestic resources.

The lack of official interest in marshalling resources at home and using the opportunity to launch much needed fiscal reform was epitomised by a modest one-time flood tax that was imposed in March 2011, eight months after the disaster.

The floods also laid bare enduring fault lines and unaddressed issues that lie at the heart of the dual society the country has increasingly become. That the very poor are the most vulnerable in a natural disaster is an ineluctable reality. But what the floods also exposed was the abject poverty and sub-human conditions in which millions of people had been condemned to live by an oppressive social order and neglect of successive governments – people whose destiny had been forfeited to the crushing burden of their daily lives.

Before the floodwaters washed away all that they had their life was a daily struggle against poverty and adversity – a silent emergency that seemed not to shake the conscience of the country’s privileged elite and those elected in their name. Their extreme state of deprivation and misery was grim testimony to the profound failure of the state under various managements to provide for their basic needs.

It is not as if the grim state in which the rural poor lived was some new discovery. But what had not happened before was the prolonged and unprecedented spotlight shone on their conditions by television coverage. This evoked wide public concern, at least at the time.

The wages of longstanding official indifference were poignantly reflected in the multiple deprivations suffered by the poor in rural Sindh and southern Punjab where vestiges of an anachronistic feudal order still survive – as well as social practices that should have no place in 21st century Pakistan: bonded labour, private jails and inhumane treatment and exploitation of landless tillers. The images on TV screens last summer showed impoverished flood victims battered as much by the raging waters as the rigours of their meagre and oppressive lives.

Many journalists, relief workers and officials who toured these flood hit areas said at the time that the extraordinary public focus on these inequities would help generate efforts to transform these conditions and end such injustices. Local philanthropic organisations and even politicians vowed to spearhead such change. This sentiment was reflected in an MQM-sponsored resolution that was unanimously adopted by the National Assembly on September 3, 2010 calling for land reform to eradicate the ‘feudal system’ and its unjust practices.

But these promises of reform and stirrings of concern dissipated as soon as the floodwaters receded. Those expected to use this opportunity to effect social change – local and national leaders – were the very members of a privilegentsia that see the continuance of the status quo to be in their economic and political interest. But that the rest of society acquiesced and found this acceptable is telling commentary on the nation’s collective conscience, priorities and values.

As the nation marks ‘one year after the floods’ this should be a moment not just to recapitulate and assess what needs to be done in terms of reconstruction and rehabilitation – important as that is – but to direct attention to the urgent need for reform that can mitigate the suffering of the ‘other half’ on an enduring basis. This is not just a demand of justice but part of the state’s fundamental obligation to its citizens.