The World Bank rushes in

A new voice supporting revising the NFC Award split

Now the World Bank has plunged into the debate about the NFC Award and the constitutional protection it has, showing that the protection given to the provincial share by the Eighteenth Amendment is bothering Pakistan’s creditors. The World Bank is even more of an instrument of US economic imperialism that the IMF, what with the USA appointing its President as an exercise in patronage , and obedience to the USA’s political agenda even more of a precondition of its loans than the IMF. It is aligned with the IMF in that its does not engage in budgetary lending unless a country has got approval from the IMF. Pakistan has so actively sought IMF programmes because, among other things, they unlock loans from the World Bank for budgetary support. Thus the World Bank is also interested in seeing its loans serviced, which means that it sees it as appropriate to examine the NFC Award in terms of what it does for Pakistani financial viability.

The latest report on fiscal federalism does unearth a disturbing pattern, where the extra resources have not resulted in improved outcomes in education, while the extra funds seems to have gone in salaries and pensions. In short, even with the Seventh NFC Award, the money needed for devolved subjects was not made available. Now that a new NFC is contemplating a new Award, the inevitable question arises: will the funds become available now? Without going into actual figures, it is noteworthy that the country is poor, and thus it seems probable that neither the federal nor provincial governments are sitting on top of any hidden treasure. The task is to share poverty equitably.

The main reason for revisiting the Award is that it is now out of date. It was made in 2009, and was meant to last for five years. That means the current Award is now extended into the second year of the second award after it. It reflects the financial realities of a federation in which the frontier districts had not been merged into the settled areas, in which the war on terror had not taken the direction it had. However, the attack on the Award does not recognize that the provincial share is protected by the Eighteenth Amendment, that any change would require a constitutional amendment, for which the political will does not exist, as there is no popular movement pressing for it.