Pakistan’s aversion to crisis response

The nation’s a disaster at managing disaster

In light of the recent flood fiasco it’s safe to say that Pakistan has no idea what crisis response or disaster management is. The floods are just a bullet point in a long list of failures when it comes to responding to crisis or disaster in the country. In the case of water crisis it seems like Pakistan either has very little water, or can’t handle the amount it’s blasted with by Mother Nature. And both situations are cause for concerns – if not rectified in the coming years it can lead to bigger problems than what the country is facing right now.

If you look at the official state of things then Pakistan’s response to crisis mirrors an ostrich that has its head stuck in the sand. The head is safe but the rest is up for grabs for whatever it was that chased the ostrich in the first place. Whether it’s untrained and ill-equipped law enforcement personnel tackling the Taliban and failing miserably or the dissemination of polio vaccinations, our response to any form of crisis reeks of shock, neglect and malfunction. For every crisis the nation faces we have a much larger failure to report time and time again. When the 2005 earthquake devastated the region, not much could be said because there’s no way to predict earthquakes. The 2008 earthquake that left 120,000 homeless and another 30,000 dead was the same. However, floods can be predicted, and floods can be controlled.

Inept, ignorant or unmoved

Disaster management authorities have been circulating relief in the present situation. However, no one has yet stopped to ask why we’re looking at the aftermath and why there were no preventive measures. Floods in Pakistan are not a once-in-a-blue-moon phenomenon. We’ve failed to put a preventive policy in place even after the 2010 floods, called the worst calamity in the history of the country with over 20 million displaced people, it left Pakistan rattled. Even with the Flood Forecasting Division, the Federal Flood Commission and the National Disaster Management Authority at play there was no way to curtail the impact of the floods. This is a country that survives on agriculture so being able to handle water from rains and dams is something it should know like the back of its hand. The current flood had totaled over 80,000 acres of land while major crops such as wheat, rice, cotton and maize have been laid to waste. Countries such as Canada, the United States and Bangladesh have dealt with floods successfully and the FFD, FFC and NDMA should be pushed to take a leaf from their books on preventive measures which range from watersheds to floodplain mapping.

Long before the 2010 flood problem Pakistan had floods. It’s always had floods. Each year we lose a good number of people to the same gamut of problems including torrential rains, collapsed homes, electrocutions, infectious diseases borne from water and displacement. There are families that have been hurt by the same kind of disaster multiple times over the course of the last few years. It’s déjà vu of the most terrible form possible. Last year the NDMA announced over 100 deaths and countless others injured. The number of houses and shops that were destroyed ranked in thousands. This year the rain is drumming to the same beat with even a metropolis like Karachi mimicking the plight that Atlantis must’ve faced at some point. Who the Prime Minister’s Emergency Relief Fund helped last year is unknown because provincial authorities never asked for release of said funds and they weren’t sent back either. For a country that marks the arrival of floods as a regular thing, not being able to establish some preventive measures is absurd. The official websites for authorities have documents upon documents outlining lessons learned from past flood experiences; however, in a more practical perspective we seem to have learned nothing.

Bleak prospects

It isn’t just the government that’s failing to act. No community level preparedness exists when it comes to the national level. Civilians have no training or knowledge of what to do in case of a crisis situation, even though floods and other disaster elements are common. On the level of the masses any form of natural or manmade disaster in Pakistan is seen as an act of god. Asking people to prepare for disaster brought on by a divine entity is not going to be an easy task. And on an authoritative level there’s no real training handed out to any official departments either. Like last year, this year the leadership is spending it’s time wooing leaders of other countries instead of looking into crisis response. Each time a crisis situation props up the first thing that happens is the military showing up, subsequent to which a variety of NGO’s pop-up (not all of them legitimate) and proceed to take control of the situation. Where the NDMA exists on this scale is unknown because their efforts either do not exist or aren’t highlighted properly. For a country to be able to state that people from their business hub i.e., Karachi, are displaced because nature turned it into a water park is abysmal at best.

In terms of international response, if the 2010 floods were any indication of things to come then Pakistan needs to quickly sober up on its response to crisis. The 2010 disaster went largely ignored in the international media. Calls for aid were met with disinterest – and for good reason. In the time that it’s existed as an independent state Pakistan has proved to be a bottomless pit when it comes to receiving aid, with most of the funds being misappropriated and funneled elsewhere instead of being used for the objectives they were meant for. Foreign organisations working for the betterment of the locals have had to put up with conspiracy theorists, political adversities and even murderers. WHO had to suspend its activities because local workers were being murdered one by one (the drive is thought by some to be a ploy by western agents to curb the excessively swelling population of Pakistan). Last year the Red Cross decided to exit the country completely after a doctor working with the organisation was kidnapped for ransom and later decapitated. With such a response to aid workers it’s hard to expect any real help.

Expecting the international community to help us when we repeatedly fail to help ourselves can only work for so long. And there’s only so much the international community can do to clean up the mess we didn’t manage to avoid. In the grand scheme of things our inability to control the flood problem is only going to cost us and our people dearly. We cannot be submerged because of floods at one point and then have crops dying out because of a water crisis at another. For this particular disaster and the other ones it brings to the fore: prevention truly is better than the cure.

The writer is a journalist based in Lahore. She can be emailed at [email protected]. She tweets @luavut