Perpetuating patronage

A few days ago, I attended a roundtable discussion in Islamabad on issues that Pakistan faces and some proposed solutions for these. The veteran and senior politician Asghar Khan sb also spoke on the occasion. One of the points he made was that as long as the people of Pakistan continued to elect ‘ahmaks’ (fools) to assemblies, nothing would change.

The refrain, as to why the people keep electing corrupt, self-interested, and self-centred and/or incompetent people to assemblies, is not an uncommon one. And a lot of commentators attribute election results to factors such as lack of education and political awareness in the polity, biraderi system, and so on. Implying that the voters are under strong information asymmetries (lack of relevant information), do not know their own interests (lack of rationality at one level), or are embedded in systems/networks (biraderi) that do not allow free choice in terms of both lack of real choices and the freedom to choose.

Since we are coming close to elections, it is important to explore this issue. If the above explanations are true, we are in a lot of trouble. We will need medium to long term planning to address the shortcomings listed above, if they can be addressed at all. But there is another explanation.

Let us start with the assumption that politicians want to be elected as they get some benefits from being in power. So, they are, first and foremost, interested in being re-elected. Institutions and the state are weak in Pakistan. Even basic rights of citizens, whatever they might be, are not guaranteed or protected by the institutions of the state. Furthermore, resources are fairly constrained in Pakistan.

Given the above, people, at all levels, especially the economically and socially more challenged ones, are more or less vulnerable to various kinds of everyday as well as uncertain events. For the poor even meeting basic needs is a challenge. What in more developed states would be considered basic rights of individuals are quite often out of reach of the poor: access to clean drinking water, sewerage system, roads, quality education for children, quality health services. And of course low probability events are going to be literal killers – we have seen the example of floods over the last two years.

Even for the better off, there are challenges in Pakistan. Where they might have no worries about food and clean drinking water, and they might be able to afford and access better quality privately provided education and health services, they are still insecure about law and order and security issues – abductions, robberies, extortion, targeted killings, police capriciousness, and kidnappings. For those who doubt the importance of this, do not forget what has been happening in Karachi and Quetta and cases such as Shahbaz Taseer’s or General Tariq Majeed’s son-in-law.

But this too is not the main issue. Everyone in this society needs a ‘patron’. For the poor, a patron is needed to even access basic necessities and to intermediate with the police and some of the other organs of the state. The rich need them to keep themselves safe and continue to enjoy the riches. It does not matter who a person is, a patron is important. Sometimes the patrons are individuals who are rich or powerful, others might have some institution such as the army standing behind them – look at the difference between Musharraf in uniform and out of it.

So, in our democracy people do not elect their ‘representatives’, they elect ‘patrons’. The strength of the patron is that he (and it is mostly he) can break the law himself and sometimes for the benefit of his clients. He provides benefits to his clients and in turn is a client of a higher level patron. The clients want the patron to protect them and to provide some private benefits as the state and its institutions are not delivering basic rights to all as a matter of right. So, it is an equilibrium situation where patrons and clients are in a symbiotic relationship strengthening each other and feeding off each other.

During a field survey in central Punjab that we were doing some years back we came across a village where a local ‘chaudhry’ was a murderer and a thug who had the entire village under his reign of terror. He extracted all sorts of rents from the villagers. His landholding was almost negligible but he drew his power from the fact that he had the local MPA at his back. He was the MPA’s enforcer and delivered the village to the MPA in the election and in return he was the local king in the village, but for the MPA. The MPA had a brother who was a senior police officer. Every time the Chaudhry did something illegal the MPA and his connections got him out. Clearly here the state, which should have protected people and enforced their rights against extortionists, was actually making the extortionist more powerful. Would the people in the village not vote as they are told? And would some people not join the Chaudhry and gain from the system – it is a vicious example of how the patron client network is entrenched in Pakistan.

How do we break such a vicious and well entrenched patron-client network? Is it possible to do so with repeated elections when elections happen once every 5 years? We wouldn’t know because we have not had free elections every five years what with regular military dictatorships and interventions. But we do need much stronger institutions and a state that can protect and enforce the rights of all citizens and not just the clients of various patrons or people in the winner’s coalition. So how can the people achieve this?

It is interesting that from within political parties some are talking of changes in status quo. There is more assertiveness coming from the judiciary and the electronic media is also bringing more information to people. Will the army leadership also understand that their acting as a patron, for army officers and connected networks, is a big part of the problem too? Can a combination of these work? We might know in the run up to the next election.

The writer is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS (currently on leave) and a Senior Advisor at Open Society Foundation (OSF). He can be reached at [email protected]