I watch with sadness and great consternation the hopes and dreams of millions of Pakistanis being shattered. I watch with great concern the shape of things gradually morphing into disaster. Above all, it gives me grief to no end to realise that the man whom I, and scores of Pakistanis, grew up idolising is being led astray. It is none other than Imran Khan, now the prime minister of this country.
Childhood memories are perhaps the most beautiful possession that inhibits a person’s mind. One of my most abiding and striking memories belongs to the mid-1990s. Fresh off from winning the 1992 World Cup, the great Khan had embarked upon achieving the impossible: building a cancer hospital to honour his late mother. He was touring the whole country to raise funds. One of his stops was Rawalpindi, where he came to our school. Having managed to sell a considerable amount of coupons for raising funds, I was summoned to the Principal’s Office one day. There, the great captain sat with all his grace. Along with a handful of students, we were given a signed copy of his framed picture, which had ‘To a member of my Tiger Team’ written on it. And then that moment! He put his hand on my shoulder, telling me how proud he was of me for my contribution.
The second time I managed to get close to him was in 2015, when I was working as an economic consultant on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPs) growth strategy. He arrived at the KP House without much pomp, little security and only two cars. As bureaucrats kept presenting slides after slides of wishful dreams and numbers and Asad Umar and Jahangir Tareen ran the show by directing where funds should flow, I observed an uninterested Khan looking at numbers as if he was lost. One could feel his awkwardness of having to go through such a tortuous show. At the end, he spoke, but hardly for five minutes.
Acknowledging that he had little interest in numbers, he turned to Pervez Khattak and asked him two questions: did he do something about providing safe shelter for the children who roamed the streets and what was the progress in terms of building a playground in every district and union council of KP? It was quite a sight to see Khattak tactfully dodge Khan’s queries, leading captain with little option but to quietly surrender to that artistic display.
His questions left me little doubt about his tilt towards socio-economic well-being of the masses, and the show put on by his team also left me little doubt that they were taking him for a ride.
It is a sad state of affairs because the same scenario continues even now. Khan assumed the mantle of PM knowing well that all hopes of a genuine turn around were centred on him. About 10 months into assuming power, his government has mostly come up with disappointments. The problem, again, is not Khan himself but the coterie that surrounds him. A few days ago, Khan finally burst out by threatening to raise another institution in place of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) if they did not collect the required revenue.
The anger was not about FBR, whose workings have been known for long, but it came from the realization that stories recounted to him again and again are just stories, not reality!
Start with that illusory figure of $200 billion stashed abroad in Swiss banks. This has been bandied about ruthlessly by Khan during his political career. Who put him up to this? Did he ever care to ask the basis of this magical estimate? By now, as the reality has hit home, the state minister for revenue has come up with $11 billion as that figure. And how many of these supposedly stashed dollars have made their way back to Pakistan? None - which explains why we are scurrying around Arab capitals and Beijing for emergency aid. Imran was also led to believe that as soon as he assumed power, money will start pouring in, the informal economy would voluntarily come into formal sector, tax cheaters would convert to regular tax payers and Pakistanis living abroad would come running to the Islamic Republic.
Oh well, if wishes were horses, then beggars would have rode them with aplomb. You see, the real question was never about the wealth stashed abroad, but why Pakistanis do that. I have yet to see anybody seriously contemplate this issue. If Khan had given it some serious thought, he would have recognised that the trust between people and the state has been severely damaged over the years. If a government can, for example, levy tax on deposits overnight and take away from somebody’s earnings, why would anybody want to keep his investment or earnings in a bank account in Pakistan?
Turn to the most important problem of Pakistan’s existence right now: its economy. In the last 10 months, Khan’s finance minister has managed to shower us with three mini-budgets and a record in taking loans. Yes, a lot has to be paid on loans taken in previous administrations. But more is going to non-development expenditures. Where is the austerity drive? Or has it ended with selling buffaloes and cars? Who put Imran up to the idea that austerity would take care of our pressing financial needs and economic woes?
The trouble is his finance minister, whose disastrous interventions in KP, are well known. He might be good at crunching numbers and talking, but his policy acumen is seriously lacking. Just take his advocacy for reforming state entities through a Malaysia-like intervention. He obviously has little intuition of Pakistan’s administrative workings and its economic history. Otherwise he would have recognised that exercises like the Baig Report of early 1980s on these entities had advocated similar interventions. But all of them proved useless, primarily because the bureaucracy has gamed the system so masterfully that it is impossible to get this thing out of its clutches.
Who is advising Asad Umar - a person for whom a whole ‘reform’ department was created within the finance division? He has been selling ‘reform’ idea to every government since 2007. Additionally, a retired bureaucrat working on budgets has stuck around many years, juggling around budgetary numbers. And of course there is the Economic Advisory Council, which contains leading economists who believe that cheese is the source of economic ills. Did Khan ever ask what their utility is and what good advice has this cabal rendered?
I’ll conclude by addressing our PM: dear captain, you brought us pride and joy in 1992 and after. Millions still believe in you in the hope of a better Pakistan. But you have a lousy team. You cannot win the Pakistan cup with this team, because these are extras and not match winners.
The writer is an economist.
Childhood memories are perhaps the most beautiful possession that inhibits a person’s mind. One of my most abiding and striking memories belongs to the mid-1990s. Fresh off from winning the 1992 World Cup, the great Khan had embarked upon achieving the impossible: building a cancer hospital to honour his late mother. He was touring the whole country to raise funds. One of his stops was Rawalpindi, where he came to our school. Having managed to sell a considerable amount of coupons for raising funds, I was summoned to the Principal’s Office one day. There, the great captain sat with all his grace. Along with a handful of students, we were given a signed copy of his framed picture, which had ‘To a member of my Tiger Team’ written on it. And then that moment! He put his hand on my shoulder, telling me how proud he was of me for my contribution.
The second time I managed to get close to him was in 2015, when I was working as an economic consultant on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPs) growth strategy. He arrived at the KP House without much pomp, little security and only two cars. As bureaucrats kept presenting slides after slides of wishful dreams and numbers and Asad Umar and Jahangir Tareen ran the show by directing where funds should flow, I observed an uninterested Khan looking at numbers as if he was lost. One could feel his awkwardness of having to go through such a tortuous show. At the end, he spoke, but hardly for five minutes.
In the last 10 months, Khan’s finance minister has managed to shower us with three mini-budgets and a record in taking loans
Acknowledging that he had little interest in numbers, he turned to Pervez Khattak and asked him two questions: did he do something about providing safe shelter for the children who roamed the streets and what was the progress in terms of building a playground in every district and union council of KP? It was quite a sight to see Khattak tactfully dodge Khan’s queries, leading captain with little option but to quietly surrender to that artistic display.
His questions left me little doubt about his tilt towards socio-economic well-being of the masses, and the show put on by his team also left me little doubt that they were taking him for a ride.
It is a sad state of affairs because the same scenario continues even now. Khan assumed the mantle of PM knowing well that all hopes of a genuine turn around were centred on him. About 10 months into assuming power, his government has mostly come up with disappointments. The problem, again, is not Khan himself but the coterie that surrounds him. A few days ago, Khan finally burst out by threatening to raise another institution in place of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) if they did not collect the required revenue.
The anger was not about FBR, whose workings have been known for long, but it came from the realization that stories recounted to him again and again are just stories, not reality!
Start with that illusory figure of $200 billion stashed abroad in Swiss banks. This has been bandied about ruthlessly by Khan during his political career. Who put him up to this? Did he ever care to ask the basis of this magical estimate? By now, as the reality has hit home, the state minister for revenue has come up with $11 billion as that figure. And how many of these supposedly stashed dollars have made their way back to Pakistan? None - which explains why we are scurrying around Arab capitals and Beijing for emergency aid. Imran was also led to believe that as soon as he assumed power, money will start pouring in, the informal economy would voluntarily come into formal sector, tax cheaters would convert to regular tax payers and Pakistanis living abroad would come running to the Islamic Republic.
Oh well, if wishes were horses, then beggars would have rode them with aplomb. You see, the real question was never about the wealth stashed abroad, but why Pakistanis do that. I have yet to see anybody seriously contemplate this issue. If Khan had given it some serious thought, he would have recognised that the trust between people and the state has been severely damaged over the years. If a government can, for example, levy tax on deposits overnight and take away from somebody’s earnings, why would anybody want to keep his investment or earnings in a bank account in Pakistan?
Turn to the most important problem of Pakistan’s existence right now: its economy. In the last 10 months, Khan’s finance minister has managed to shower us with three mini-budgets and a record in taking loans. Yes, a lot has to be paid on loans taken in previous administrations. But more is going to non-development expenditures. Where is the austerity drive? Or has it ended with selling buffaloes and cars? Who put Imran up to the idea that austerity would take care of our pressing financial needs and economic woes?
The trouble is his finance minister, whose disastrous interventions in KP, are well known. He might be good at crunching numbers and talking, but his policy acumen is seriously lacking. Just take his advocacy for reforming state entities through a Malaysia-like intervention. He obviously has little intuition of Pakistan’s administrative workings and its economic history. Otherwise he would have recognised that exercises like the Baig Report of early 1980s on these entities had advocated similar interventions. But all of them proved useless, primarily because the bureaucracy has gamed the system so masterfully that it is impossible to get this thing out of its clutches.
Who is advising Asad Umar - a person for whom a whole ‘reform’ department was created within the finance division? He has been selling ‘reform’ idea to every government since 2007. Additionally, a retired bureaucrat working on budgets has stuck around many years, juggling around budgetary numbers. And of course there is the Economic Advisory Council, which contains leading economists who believe that cheese is the source of economic ills. Did Khan ever ask what their utility is and what good advice has this cabal rendered?
I’ll conclude by addressing our PM: dear captain, you brought us pride and joy in 1992 and after. Millions still believe in you in the hope of a better Pakistan. But you have a lousy team. You cannot win the Pakistan cup with this team, because these are extras and not match winners.
The writer is an economist.