The making of a revolution

• 

By SIDDHARTA THAPA
The Kathmandu Post
Kathmandu, Thursday 21 October 2010

"Politicians have ruined this country,” chides a frustrated government health worker in the middle of an interview.

I had the opportunity to travel to various remote districts in western Nepal where my office runs projects aimed at fostering a habit of consuming nutritious food through sustainable agricultural practices among villagers. A large part of my work involves dealing with government officials and local political actors at the community level. My work takes me to far-flung places in rural Nepal where a chronic food shortage continues to plague human development.

Due to the temporary nature of our projects, the role of the government is crucial to augment what we do; and what we want to see in the long run is for the governmental institutions responsible for meeting people’s basic needs to be prepared to meet these challenges independently.

For this reason we would like to see the government develop institutional capacity to meet the challenge of food insecurity and health problems, two complementary problems. The 10 years of civil war, however, has had a huge negative impact on governance -- which is not to suggest things were dramatically better earlier. The decade-long conflict further weakened, and in most cases destroyed, institutions that were in place. Ironically, four years of peace hasn’t changed much.

Although the Maoist revolution promised great agrarian reforms, the ground reality has been vastly different.

For instance, according to government officers posted in hilly districts 60% of the budget slated for development is used by the Maoist party while the remaining 40% is divided amongst other political parties -- no one really knows what the parties do with this money.

Furthermore, even offices such as the district health office and the district agriculture development office have to donate for political causes despite the fact that the parties earmark a certain portion of the development budget for their own use.

To make matters worse, when ministers or influential politicians visit the district, local offices have to pay for the former’s luxuries such as their lodging, food, and entertainment during the visit.

The fiscal budget presented by the government in July reaches the district five months later in January. This is why local government officers are unable to implement development projects in six months when the actual project implementation time should have been a year.

In this regard, the aforementioned government officer’s cry of anguish ("Politicians have ruined this country") is understandable.

Dor Bahadur Bista in his book Fatalism as Development comes up with the term afno manche to describe our social power structure wherein afno manche are people who are close to you and who you protect and promote at the expense of other people despite the fact that the others are more merited.

In the absence of local elections for over a decade, the local government bodies have been running on an ad hoc basis with civil servants filling in for politicians too.

In such a scenario, civil servants owe their allegiance to political parties and not to the work they do. The basic tenants that characterise a professional bureaucracy revolve around the notion of permanency, consistency and neutrality, but these defining principles of a bureaucracy have been shattered due to politicking within the bureaucracy.

The net result is gross fiscal indiscipline, inability of incompetent bureaucrats to implement development projects, and the complicit participation of bureaucrats in corruption, further diminishing hopes of the common people in governmental institutions to cater to their basic needs.

Politicians for over four years have talked non-stop of making a New Nepal; some even claim we have already entered the era of New Nepal.

But what we have today is not New Nepal. Gagan Thapa once said during the course of an interview on democracy, “Democracy is life values, it cannot guarantee equal opportunity but it can guarantee equal conditions.”

What we need to understand is that the civil war erupted because of the low level of development, or in Gagan Thapa’s words, because the post-1990 politics failed to guarantee “equal conditions” to facilitate human development.

Unfortunately, a New Nepal is proving to be a parade elephant -- an elephant that is decorated beautifully from the outside but from the inside is suffering from a thousand gashes whose bleeding torments the mammal and hampers its progress in the parade.

If that elephant were Nepal, the gashes would be issues such as unemployment, poverty, and inequality while the parade would be comparable to the idea of a New Nepal based on the foundation of lasting peace and a new constitution.

As Nepal half-heartedly moves towards sustainable peace and democracy, core issues that triggered the insurgency such as poverty, inequality, unemployment and malnutrition are still rampant.

The quicker the politicians settle their petty scores and direct their attention towards good governance by addressing development woes, greater the prospect of survival of the promises of the 12 point Agreement and its vision of a New Nepal through the 2008 Contituent Assembly.

If not, drastic changes in the course of Nepali politics are inevitable. As political and constitutional systems continue to fail, it is natural for people to look for alternatives - through a revolutionary route if need be - to secure the promise of New Nepal.

[Siddhartha Thapa is a development practitioner focused on governance and capacity building.]

Asia News Network