Transdisciplinary Design

Roti, Kapra & Design – the wicked problem of political slogans

Posted on November 4, 2013 | posted by:

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was a thundering politician. A former prime minister of Pakistan, he led a fractured country through the troubled 70s on the popular, socialist slogan of Roti, Kapra aur Makaan (Bread, Clothing and Shelter). The succinct slogan was an instant hit – and so was Bhutto. The slogan was used by his Indian counterpart Indira Gandhi in her election campaign as well, and became the inspiration for an eponymous blockbuster Bollywood movie in the mid-70s.

However, despite blanket nationalization and sweeping land distribution, the average Pakistani did not have substantially more roti, kapra aur makaan by the end of Bhutto’s socialist tenure in 1977.

The world, and Pakistan, changed drastically in three decades that followed his ouster but, surprisingly, the party he had founded contested the 2008 elections on the same slogan, and won. Not surprisingly, the country was worse off in 2013, five years after their rule, and almost 40 years after the slogan was first coined.

Which brings me to the notion of ‘wicked problems’ and politicians’ tendency to simplify them to slogans for mass consumption. For a post-colonial, ideological state, Pakistan has its fair share of ‘wicked problems’ to deal with – governance, security, development, terrorism, poverty, ideology, growth etc. Each of them qualifies for what Rittel and Webber classify as ‘ill-defined’ problems of governmental planning that “rely upon elusive political judgment for resolution.”

I understand the need for political slogans, especially during election campaigns. They’re simple, catchy, and capture the public imagination.

The problem is, though, that they usually represent the entirety of governance principles of Pakistan’s political parties and are woefully incapable of even grasping, to say nothing of resolving, the evolving challenges facing the state, i.e. wicked problems.

Let me illustrate with an example. Pakistan’s large cities were divided roughly into districts and administered under a 1979 system of appointed commissioners and deputies. Musharraf, the military dictator, set up a new local government system that divided the cities into smaller ‘towns,’ each with their town administrations that comprised union councils and their elected office bearers. All town administrations combined to form a city council, topped by a mayor.

For Karachi, a city of 20 million, the latter system made more sense not just on paper, but also in practice. Elected officials strove to resolve long-standing issues, in a bid to be re-elected. The city enjoyed eight years of resurgence under two successive local governments, and saw a reversal of fortunes, largely in infrastructure development. The system, for a host of reasons, did not work equally well for smaller cities in the country.

In 2008, Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) came back to power at the center and in the province with a resounding mandate from rural Pakistan on the slogan of roti, kapra aur makaan. In order to appease its voters, the party swiftly dispensed with the local government system, seen as a legacy of the former dictator and largely unhelpful to rural Pakistan, and restored appointed commissioners.

This was a classic wicked problem – governance structure in a politically, ethnically and demographically diverse country – and the country’s largest political party did not even have the vocabulary to address it. It was trapped into its own slogan by its mandate. The PPP spent the next five years relentlessly arguing with its coalition partner, who had a largely urban mandate from Karachi, over the contours of a local government system. Karachi, meanwhile, swiftly fell back into decay.

Herein lies my beef with political slogans. In their brevity, they’re usually vague enough to attempt to capture a general aspiration, but narrow enough to eventually trap those who coin them.

A three-word slogan could not have possibly captured competing aspirations of a highly unequal, developing country of 200 million people.

So if the PPP were to begin to address the wicked problem of governance systems that work equally well for urban and rural areas, it might be prudent to dispense with, or coin a new, slogan. May I suggest, Roti Kapra aur [Transdisciplinary] Design!