Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [168]
According to Mr Khokar, ‘Things are improving. Not as fast as we would like, but still they are on track.’ One key reason for this is that in 2008 the new PML(N) government in Punjab did not withdraw its support from the project, even though it had been initiated under Musharraf and the PML(Q) government of Punjab. This marks a change from the usual – and disastrous – Pakistani practice, which the PML(N) government has followed in other areas.
Some of Faisalabad’s cotton industry is also truly impressive. The Chenab mill at Nishatabad is the biggest of eight mills in the Chenab group, with 4,000 workers (out of 14,000 in the group as a whole) and an output in 2008 worth $130 million. The mill is capable of turning out 12,000 individual garments a day. The group owns the stylish (and extremely expensive) Chen One chain of clothes shops and shopping malls in Pakistan, and supplies Macy’s, J. C. Penney, Debenhams, Ikea and Laura Ashley, among other international outlets. I am no expert on textile production, but the mill gave a completely modern impression, with apparently well-fed women working on huge, smoothly running machines in giant air-conditioned workshops. One that I visited was producing frilly women’s underwear, and I have never seen so much pink in such a large space at the same time. The headquarters building could have been an unusually stylish office in Singapore or Frankfurt. None of this is the kind of thing one sees in a ‘failed state’.
When I visited Faisalabad last in January 2009, however, boasts of the city’s success were interspersed with bitter complaints about its present economic state (admittedly, a local journalist also warned me that ‘Faisalabad is known as “the city of opposition” because our industrialists are not happy whatever happens’). Local anger and worry focused above all on the electricity shortages which at that time were crippling the city’s industrial production and exports.
Just as even very moderately well-off families in Pakistan pay a fortune for private generators to avoid the constant load-shedding, so the bigger mills and factories have had to develop their own power plants and import the fuel for them privately. The problem is that not only is this extremely expensive, but in Pakistan’s – and even Faisalabad’s – semi-modern economy, the big mills rely for supplies of many of their semi-finished goods on small local mills and even piece-workers, who are completely dependent on the state electricity grid. Chenab’s managing director (and son of its founder, Mian Mohammed Kashif Ashfaq) told me that this is true even of his group.
Above all, though, the problem when I last visited the city was electricity, and the lack of it seemed likely for a while to provoke mass riots that could even have toppled the national government, a conflict in which the industrialists and their workers might have found themselves on the same side. The head of Faisalabad district council, Rana Zahid Tauseef (himself a textile industrialist), complained bitterly:
My customers in the US, UK, Australia need guaranteed commitments that I will keep my contract to supply them. Yes, my firm has a good reputation so they may wait one week or even six but finally they will say, ‘You are not reliable, you live in a shit country, I can’t order from you any more.’ How can we possibly compete with other countries if we can’t rely on our own electricity grid?11
Quite apart from the issue of electricity supply, the working conditions in the smaller workshops – or rather sweat-shops – bear no resemblance to those at Chenab Mills. The contrast is absolutely jarring – as if, while visiting a factory in Lancashire today, you were to be transported by a wicked witch with a taste for education back to a factory in Lancashire in 1849. And for all the modernity of parts of Faisalabad, the ‘old’ centre around the clock-tower is a typical Pakistani inner-city slum, in which the