State Minister of Finance Hina Rubani Khar, who presented the 2009/10 Budget in June.
When Asif Zardari and Yusaf Gilani head off for dinner with Obama and others to win support for aid for the Pakistani government, usually with son Bilawal in toe, how much do they get to play with while they’re there?
According to Farrukh Saleem, writing for the News, the 2009/10 budget may provide them a whopping 119 million rupees a month for foreign tours. The office of the Prime Minister is granted a whopping 100 million rupees – equivalent to around £745,500 in sterling or 3 million rupees a day. That’s 20 million more than allocated in the previous year’s budget. President Asif Zardari gets 19 million a month, or £141,000.
Altogether the PM and president’s world-wide charm offensive, appearances on The Situation Room, heading to Japan to bleat for “trade not aid”, or meeting Gordon Brown for tea costs the Pakistani government almost 1.6 billion a year.
Gilani could argue that the trips are essential to maintaining the consistent support of the international community. Fine – so why does he need heaps more cash than Asif Zardari to do the same job? Why do they both need to be plane hopping? And what kind of hotel and air fare costs mean him and his team need room to spend 119 million rupees in a month? A quick check of PIA shows a last minute flight from Islamabad to London, leaving on July 18 and returning July 20 by business class, costs 125,000 Pakistani rupees. His budget is enough to pay for 800 tickets on that route alone.
To put this into some context, according to Interface Pakistan’s federal gov allocated 31.6 billion for the education sector in the same budget. Of that, only 2.9 billion rupees went to primary school education – in a country which the CIA World Factbook says has a 49.9 per cent literacy rate. Consider that the government plans to spend almost half that figure on flying Gilani and Zardari around the world. In total all only 2.3 per cent of GDP was allocated to education, according to OneWorld South Asia, while only 0.7 per cent of GDP was planned to be spent on healthcare.
God knows how much longer the Pak government, running a country facing continuing development problems, can expect foreign ministers to keep the purses open when it so openly wastes money.
July 15, 2009 at 02:10
Great blog.
July 15, 2009 at 02:10
In general I meant, not just this post.
July 15, 2009 at 06:25
haha, cheers Ahsan
July 15, 2009 at 08:06
Consider these tours by our Presidents as pre-launch advertising for their memoirs. In the case of Mr. A2Z it will be called:
“0 to 100% and everything in between: The Making of The Kickback King”
July 15, 2009 at 15:47
First of all, fantastic post. The fact that the government has allocated so much money for our leaders’ frivolous activities is ludicrous, to say the least.
I am curious though – has this always been the case with our government? I am guessing so, after reading stories of past leaders’ millions of dollars stowed away in their bank accounts. Being a politician has always been synonymous with fancy cars, fancy houses, and fancy clothes. If this has been the norm in Pakistan, how can we break that cycle?
July 15, 2009 at 21:46
Could help if this story was anything but buried – these figures were hidden in a comment piece on the News’s site and were not widely circulated. Is it that, given the pessimism towards the Pakistani political class, people *expect* this kind of largess and are resigned to it?
Because if they weren’t – and the Pak media was churning this stuff up on a daily basis – then it would become an issue the political establishment would need to deal with at the polls.
July 16, 2009 at 01:21
[...] pretty indecent that, according to the latest budget, Asif Zardari and Yousuf Raza Gillani get half as much money to fly around the world as the allocation for the entire country’s primary education system. Shouldn’t the [...]
July 22, 2009 at 05:02
What an important job it is to get information like this out there for all to see. Do you think that Pakistani politics will ever evolve out of the same top few people being re-elected despite huge controversies past?