Submit your Article

 Six months have passed since KP Sharma Oli took office. From big aspirations and high hopes in the early days of government forma­tion, his image is slowly declining. I have been closely following the prime minister’s statements, speeches, interviews, and the kinds of activities he is engaged in. In doing so, I feel I have developed a love-hate relationship with the man. Sometimes I feel he’s doing what he can in a difficult and complex system. At other times, however, I feel he is a waste altogether. When hating him, I’m asking myself: Am I being too harsh? And when I’m in admiration, I’m thinking: Maybe I’m being too kind.

Truth is, I want to be able to hold on to the aspirations I had during election time, not necessarily for KP Oli, but for a positive and forward-looking new chapter to begin. But I can feel these hopes being dashed as the days pass. I find myself constantly wondering what this ‘two-third majority’ is doing and why it seems incapable of delivering despite the electoral advantage.

Since taking office, Oli has announced so many things: zero tolerance of corruption, good gov­ernance, transparency, prosper­ity, balanced foreign relations with China and India, and more.

The issues of corruption, good governance and transparency took some momentum in the first few months but have since lost steam. In fact, on corruption, there seems to be a selective bias on who should and should not be held accountable, with those close to the PM and other NCP colleagues exempt from trans­parency measures.

In terms of building on relations with China and India, Oli has indeed taken some action to level the play­ing field. However, this obsessive focus on China and India has left other foreign allies in the dark, lead­ing to a feeling of isolation. As the foreign minister Pradeep Gyawali has highlighted, if other foreign allies are feeling isolated, that too is not a positive development.

As a result, what was once an overwhelming support for the administration has declined signifi­cantly. A good number of people still believe in this government and its intentions. However, there is a growing number of naysayers.

Recently, I have closely studied two of PM Oli’s recent statements: a speech delivered at the closing ceremony of the Conference on the Constitution of Nepal 2015 on August 13 in Kathmandu and this week’s interview with him on AP1 Television taken by Tika Ram Yatri.

While addressing the conference, PM Oli expressed his firm commit­ment to implementing the constitu­tion, abiding by its ‘letter and spirit’. Oli said, “Make no mistake. We will do what the constitution requires of the government, and deliver to the people peace, good governance, development, and prosperity”. He added, “Through the Constitution, we have adopted a competitive multi-party system of governance with constitutional supremacy, peri­odic elections, human rights, the rule of law, separation of powers as well as check and balance, and an independent judiciary.” It was probably one of the best speeches delivered—in English!—by PM Oli. It was rich in content and gave a holistic picture of our constitution.

The second instance, his inter­view on the Tamasoma Jyotirgamaya talk show, made an emotional appeal to the public. He said, “I don’t know how long I will live but I know I will try, as much as I can, to put Nepal on the path of prosper­ity”. He insisted, “I have nothing to gain at the personal level from this position. My life is for this country and the people”.

In both instances, there is a gen­eral commitment to progress and development. But there is little articulation—and thus action—on how that would materialize. As such, there is a lurking fear that all these promises will be relegated to speeches and interviews, with very little delivery as the months turn into years

No matter what the proponents of federalism argue, Nepal does not seem to benefit at all from it. Further, one important point is deliberately omitted from any debate on federalism in Nepal, i.e., the political parties, espe­cially the former CPN-UML and Nepali Congress. Instead of doing away with the Maoist agendas that were defeated in the second Constituent assembly elections in 2013, these two parties came to carry these agendas themselves, resulting in a perpetual political and economic mess. They had half-heartedly raised the issue and their success in the second CA was not because they too advocated federalism, but the people were less fearful of the former guerillas and actually didn’t care about federalism. NC and UML could have reversed their position on federalism and saved the country a fortune.

During the insurgency the Mao­ists had promised the people ethnicity-based federalism. The party won the first CA election in 2008 using all means possible, but the first CA failed. It contest­ed the second CA on the same premise but then it was relegat­ed to third position, which in a functioning democracy would be interpreted as people’s rejection of the Maoist agenda including the ethnicity-based or whatev­er-based federalism. If UML and Congress had taken a firm and united stand against it, today we wouldn’t be paying more taxes to support another political exper­iment that’s doomed to fail. But what then led the parties that emerged first and second in the CA election to adopt federalism—ignorance, foreign pressure, their disregard of public opinion or a combination of it all? We would probably never know.

But what we know is that we have embarked on a costly exper­iment that makes no sense.

Instead, we could have spent $3-$5 billion over five years on infrastructure with the help of our taxes, foreign loans and grants. That would have created jobs and boosted industrialization and led to more foreign direct investment as well. We could have spent money on agriculture/agricultural modernization to become self-sufficient in food and to reduce our heavy dependence on remittance. Think about it. We could have spent the money doing so many things to develop our economy and enhance our international standing.

If that were the case, we would have no problem paying more taxes. But when you find that your tax money is spent on expensive vehicles and laptops for the lead­ers, and on hefty salaries for pro­vincial ministers and legislature members, you have reasons to be angry. And yes, we are angry. We are paying more than what we were paying before, and yet the government is cash-strapped. It’s so short of money that a Chinese company had to spon­sor the uniforms/wears for our athletes attending the Asian Games in Indonesia.

Chinese government is rebuild­ing Nepal’s first public school, the Durbar high school. Other coun­tries are handing out an ambu­lance or two to our military and police. Almost all infrastructure projects are being built by foreign­ers. Yet we are being made to pay more taxes.

You can argue that it is for the betterment of the country and when federalism is institution­alized everything will be great. Or you can be philosophical and argue that for the country’s pros­perity, one generation has to sac­rifice and that generation is ours. But why should we be the ones to sacrifice and pay for silly experi­mentation? For the past 68 years, we have been sacrificing for revo­lutions and democracy but we are yet to see any results. Admit it, as always, this time too we have put the cart before the horse.

The half-yearly ‘progress report’ of KP Sharma Oli government is far from sat­isfactory. Some of the progress­es enlisted by the prime minis­ter can at best be described as incomplete. Take for instance the credit for dismantling the ‘syndicates’ in public transport. Suspicions are rife. Have the syn­dicates been replaced with some­thing better? Or has his Minister of Transport quietly allowed the status quo to remain? In the past few weeks, we have also seen public anger across the country over higher local taxes. There have been pro­tests, sit-ins and relay hunger rallies opposing higher taxation without corresponding improve­ment in services.

If you listen to people close to the government, they will tell you that they are under attack from the opposition, civil society, international community and the media. They see a similar narra­tive emerging from all fronts and suspect there is concerted effort to discredit the government.

When you raise the question of delivery, they will tell you that they have done more in six months compared to what the previous governments achieved in the same period; and they blame the ailing system of governance for slow progress on other fronts. I don’t think you can disagree on the last two points, yet the fact remains—unlike previous govern­ments, this one enjoys a two-third majority in the parliament and that people are thus entitled to expect more.

Structural problem

The problem lies in the inability or unwillingness, or both, to fine-tune government structures and processes—even six months after assuming the office. Clearly the existing executive structure and processes aren’t serving the twin government purpose of imple­menting the constitution and delivering prosperity.

The current civil service system, put in place in 1950s, has seen very little revision. While over 50 different committees have been formed to recommend reforms in the intervening years, many of those recommendations were never implemented. Compared to 1950s, the government today has a larger role in the society; the nature of public policy problems as well as modes of interventions are constantly undergoing chang­es; and the rapid technological innovations have added complex­ities to governance processes—often requiring instant actions. Add to this the new federal con­text of Nepal.

For these reasons, the feder­al government needs to go back to drawing boards and rearticu­late its mission and vision before thinking about the workforce, structure and processes.

Agenda for reform

Reform must be performance driven and it must begin at the top. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) appears to be overstaffed and underworked. Sure it needs party officials and loyalists, but it also needs professionals who can bring to bear their exposure from elsewhere to raise the standards. The first step is to clearly delegate roles and responsibilities of the teams at the PMO—dividing them into economic, foreign policy and national security, legislative, pub­lic relations and political manage­ment (including Center-Province relations) teams.

Each team will work with rele­vant ministry, department or tier of government to push through government agenda. Each team as well as each individual in these teams would be assessed on their performance on a peri­odic basis. As I argued in this space (July 20-26 edition) before, a designated Chief of Staff should ideally oversee their perfor­mance. This sort of set-up would be immensely helpful for the gov­ernment to deliver on its promises in a timely manner.

The government is currently behind on drafting several laws required to implement the consti­tution. If there were a functioning legislative team at the PMO, it would have been its responsibil­ity to work with Ministry of Law to ensure a timely submission of draft laws to the parliament. The economic team for its part would have already facilitated the formation of natural resourc­es and fiscal commission—there­by clarifying much of confusion and anger surrounding excessive taxes. In a functioning system, each team would have their daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly agendas cut out—offering a tangible basis for success.

Under the current system, it is more misses than hits. It could stay that way for the remainder of the government’s tenure, if they do not get to work on mod­ernizing its structure and pro­cesses immediately. And if NCP officials don’t want anti-incum­bency and underperformance to mar their chances of another term, they better get down to the business of modernizing the gov­ernment with urgency.

‘There is no such thing as a free lunch’. It’s a saying that means you do not get any­thing for free in this world. But recently I, my mother, and some of her friends, got a free dinner.After watching a wonderful perfor­mance by Andre Rieu in Maastricht, The Netherlands, broadcast live into a local cinema in Scotland, we had booked a table at a nearby, middle of the road but well respected, restau­rant called The Bothy (Scottish name for a small hut used for refuge in a storm on a mountain). At the end we wanted to pay our bills separately. Normally in Kathmandu the waiter would then get a calculator out and start asking what we each had, tick­ing it off the bill as he went.

But not so in this paperless restau­rant! Aside from the very off-hand manager who said he was ‘too busy’ to do this (and who really got our heckles up), it seemed impos­sible to simply tick items off the bill without involving the com­puterised till. A special code from employee X was required. Then it seemed the card reader required another authorization code from employee Y. By this time 15 min­utes had passed and we were no closer to paying the bill. Finally, the card reader simply refused to work. We could almost see the smoke coming out of the machine as it scratched its electronic head!

At this point the owner, who had somehow become involved, said the computerized system was not built to cope with changes once the orig­inal information was fed in. In exas­peration she gave herself authority to write off our meal. A free dinner! We were quite relieved the matter was now resolved as we had things to do that evening. But we were also concerned that the restaurant lost out on quite a bit of money because the paperless system was inflexible.

This incident brought to mind a picture of Nepali politicians sitting in a meeting with their brand new Macbook Pro laptops. Presumably because the Nepal Government is set to go paperless. There are a lot of things that can be said here such as: are all politicians computer lit­erate (after using a laptop for about 15 years my skills are still pretty near zero), can they type in Nepali (which I believe is a skill in itself), or are they working in English (a second language in which few will be fluent)? But mainly my thoughts go out to those who are trying to move their case (landpapers/mar­riages/ passports/ citizenships/birth registration, etc) around the many government departments.

Do we all need to have access to computers now? What about those who either cannot afford a com­puter, lack the skills, or live in an area which does not have access to such things or even access to inter­net or electricity? What happens when remote area (ex VDC office—and what is a local government office called these days anyway?) meets central government?

Currently if you want to find a file in a government office that you filed some time back, there is a helpful peon who knows exactly what room and what pile of folders your file is in. What happens when this is on some equivalent of the Cloud? Taxes have been submitted on-line for quite some time now. But of course, in the end, taxpayers end up in the tax office in person any way. How are they going to avoid similar sce­narios in every department?

Remember the breathalysers that were handed out to the police some time back? What happened to them? (And don’t even think about the health risks involved in breathing into the officer’s face.) Will those lovely Macbook Pros go the same way as the breathalysers?

Yes, going paperless could well result in a lot of free dinners!