The World Bank country director in Nepal, Ken Ohashi, wrote in a local English daily recently that the Managing Director of the World Bank, Shengman Zhang, had an audience with His Majesty the King during which the monarch, sharing "the sense of impatience" (of the World Bank), asked the visiting official to "insist on specific and tight deadlines" (with the government) in implementing reforms.
In the mid-80s, as a joint secretary in the National Planning Commission we had to persuade the World Bank's Structural Adjustment Loan Mission to make user management of forests one of the conditionalities for the loan. They obliged and it worked, paving the way for the vigorous regeneration of forests in our country. I had to resort to the ploy because I was too small a fry in the bureaucracy to successfully prevail over the recalcitrant Ministry of Forest at the time, and there was no other help around.
But not the omnipotent king of Nepal. Zhang probably went away a disappointed man because the king did not tell him that he would direct the government to fulfil its commitments, or else.
This particular episode certainly did not add to the dignity of the monarchy. The monarch should surround himself with advisers not only with demonstrated loyalty but also the know-how to make the state machinery work more efficiently. More than the World Bank, it is the vast multitude of poor and powerless Nepalis who are longing for such royal resolve.
The monarch has an unenviable but historic role to discharge as he presides over the country's current political transition. This challenge is made more complex and paradoxical because after elections the reins of state power have to be handed back to the same genre of politicians whose sustained misuse of popular mandate brought about the catastrophe that the country suffers at present.
The king will not earn laurels from the people if he has to meekly surrender power to them as being demanded at present by the opportunistic coalition of the otherwise highly unlike-minded political parties. As difficult as the proposition might sound, the king has to engineer such changes so that the politicians, once restored to power, will find that they can do no harm to the country.
The issue at stake is the devolution of authority to stakeholders at the grassroots so they are sufficiently and inalienably empowered to plan, implement and manage their own development initiatives. It is this principle that worked in the robust resurgence of our forest wealth, despite chronic bad governance perpetrated by stinkingly corrupt politicians during the last dozen years of democracy.
The priority for the country today is to replicate this experience across all socio-economic arenas that directly affect the peoples' welfare: education, health, agricultural, development and population control among others. While such devolution promises the building of a stronger Nepal, it is frustrating that the international community, interested in Nepal's security, have not found it necessary to advise the country along this line.
Bihari Krishna Shrestha
Kathmandu
