AT PENPOINT
The current floods are said to be the worst in decades, and where previous floods have been said to have been caused by the monsoon causing the Indus and its tributaries to overflow their banks, the present floods are the result of rain. One of the first dimensions that has been raised, is that it is punishment from the Almighty.
While it is true that all, good or bad, comes from the Almighty, causes should be looked at. This intensity of the present flooding is a symptom of global warming and climate change, and must be seen in that context. If this flood is to be seen as punishment from the Almighty, it needs to be asked what the punishment is for. There can be a myriad answers, ranging from the go-to response of laxity in morals to the more political failure to bring back the PTI. Somewhere in between would be the proliferation of video games.
It is perhaps more appropriate to examine one’s response. Was a person able to help? Did he or she? If caught in the flood, losing one’s animals, house, loved ones even, did one display patience? These questions will be asked on the Day of Judgement. What answers will be rewarded and what excuses accepted, the Almighty knows best. Even if the current floods are not because of the wrath of the Almighty, they are not that far off.
Divine punishment is indiscriminate, with the guilty and innocent falling victim alike. It is relatively sudden. The only thing making the present floods different is that there used to be no survivors. Perhaps most poignant, this was an expected disaster. Its intensity might have reached scriptural proportions, but it hardly occurring unseasonally.
One of the most striking features of these floods is the apparent absence of government. Despite the indefatigable efforts of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the media is not getting much of the annual counter-narrative of Army and Navy personnel rescuing people. Apart from those who are rescued, there is the problem of the survivors. There is apparently little or nothing to eat, and the administration does not seem to have moved up food supplies.
Is there some unifying power that can bring this about? Will mankind accept the challenge, and seek leadership away from the West and the BRICS states? No existing state can provide the leadership necessary. Is a new state waiting to be born?
Would the PTI have done better if Imran had been in office? It is interesting that that question has noy been asked, which perhaps indicate that the PTI does not want that question asked. PTI chief Imran Khan has not allowed the floods to interrupt his rally programme, which is very tightly packed before the September 29 by-elections. There is a clear sense of all parties looking to get political capital out of the floods, but not really getting a handle on them.
KP Finance Minister Taimur Jhagra’s letter to the federal government telling it KP would not be able to meet the IMF targets does seem to be politics as usual, not to forget the Tarin-Lehari-Jhagra audio leak, but Jhagra (perhaps for partisan reasons) has raised a pertinent point: how can a country undergoing such widespread devastation hope to stick to an IMF programme, not to mention the multilateral and bilateral agreements that will accompany it?. This is so particularly as the predictions are that the monsoons are not yet over, and there will be more rain in Sindh this month.
This is perhaps not the time to show politics is going on as usual. However, Jhagra has a point, to which all finance ministers, including the federal, Dr Miftah Ismail, with whom he was in touch, should devote attention to. COAS Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa has said that the worst of the floods is over, and after rescue, the phase of rehabilitation now begins.
It is not just a matter of keeping homeless refugees alive, but also relatively disease-free. That is the task for which the government is raising funds abroad. It is doing so with a certain sense of entitlement, because the excessive rains are blamed on the climate change taking place, with Pakistan the 10th most affected country by it. It could even be argued that no country of comparative size or population, except Bangladesh, is as vulnerable.
Because it is likely to face repeated weather emergencies, and because it is likely to lose coastal areas to flooding (including its largest city, Karachi), Pakistan should regard these floods as the first in a series, rather than a one-off. Apart from houses and lives, crops and livestock have also been lost. Not only will farm incomes shrink, but cities will face shortages, which will lead to inflation being added to that already occurring, which is the highest in years.
There is a huge debate in the West, especially the USA, about whether climate change is taking place. The division seems to be along a right-left line. Luckily, in Pakistan, no party seems to be a denier, but the problem is somehow seen as something which the Western countries should pay for. True, it is they who developed themselves by destroying the entire world’s climate, but the ex-colonies do not want the problem not only fixed, but in a way that will allow them to follow that same polluting method of development. Nobody seems to ask what is wrong with that model of development, what makes it unsustainable.
Pakistan’s vulnerability is because it has reduced its forest cover from 33 percent at Partition to four percent today. The billion-tree tsunami in KP was succeeded by a ten-billion-tree tsunami when the PTI came to office in 2018, but remains incomplete. Planting trees, and thus increasing our oxygen emissions, as well as our carbon dioxide absorption, will not be enough. Pakistan must work out how it will cut carbon emissions, and move to a non-carbon-based development model.
That implies either getting people to accept a different, less frenetic, pace of life, or working out new technologies, particularly ones involving non-carbon-based electricity generation. That implies the use of renewable energy sources, such as solar, hydel or wind.
The call for more hydel power is likely to cause bad blood among the provinces. There have already been voices raised in favour of building the Kalabagh Dam, extolling the power it would have generated and the water it would have stored. This has immediately been met by opposing voices. It may be interesting to see how the PTI reacts, for it controls one anti-Dam provincial government (KP), one pro–Dam (Punjab), while its head sits for a constituency which contains the Dam site, and a very strong pro-Dam lobby (which looks forward to the enhanced economic activity construction would bring).
The problem seems to be that Pakistan cannot solve the problems posed by the floods on its own. It certainly cannot solve the problem of climate change on its own (it won’t go away even if Pakistan was to achieve 100 percent forest cover), and for both it is dependent on Western countries, even as the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) press for more pollution and who deny climate change so that they can pursue the existing high-carbon development model to become superpowers.
Is there some unifying power that can bring this about? The UN. with its COPs (Conferences of Parties) is trying to fill the gap, but it only achieves something like the Paris Agreement, which was thrown out the window by US President Trump. He is a climate change denier, who says the idea has been invented by China to stop the USA becoming great again. Will mankind accept the challenge, and seek leadership away from the West and the BRICS states? No existing state can provide the leadership necessary. Is a new state waiting to be born?
