Iqbal Latif
This is why I have grown impatient with the constant opposition school of Pakistani commentary. I know journalists who have been in opposition for twenty years. It makes no difference who is in power.
Before I say anything else, let me be clear. Suhail Warraich knows more about the day-to-day machinery of Pakistani politics than I do. He has spent his entire professional life observing it closely; he talks to people from every political faction and every institution, and, in the normal course of his work, he overhears things that I might not have heard by chance. There are some things that I know from my private conversations that I cannot and will not publish. So, this debate is not about who has better information. It is about how to interpret the information that we both have.
I know there are problems. There are problems, of course. I know there are tensions within the system, and I know there are dozens of things that could be done better than they are. But I also see something else happening at the same time, and it is not being reported with as much energy.
Pakistan is once again having a serious conversation with global capital. The people who matter in global finance are willing to sit down and listen. Relationships that were badly damaged are being rebuilt. Doors are opening, and those kinds of doors don’t open because someone gives a good speech in Islamabad. They open when people on the other side of the table start to believe that the country is becoming governable again. That word is the whole point: governable.
Pakistan is not on a better path because someone has finally discovered some magic economic formula. There is no such formula, there never was, and anyone selling such a formula should be shown the door. It is on a better path because too many parts of the machine are being handled at the same time right now. And it will fall off the path the moment they stop handling it.
This is the point that almost everyone misses. Economic stability is not a destination that Pakistan has already reached. It is something that must be built anew every morning. Reserves must be watched. Debt must be rolled over. IMF commitments have to be met and managed. The power sector has to be bailed out. The provinces have to be brought along. The security establishment and the civilian government must be able to sit in the same room. China must know exactly who it is dealing with, the Gulf must maintain confidence in the relationship, Washington must stay engaged, and the global banks and investors must be confident that there will still be someone to pick up the phone six months from now.
Drop three of those balls at once and see what happens to a country of 240 million people. This is why I have grown impatient with the constant opposition school of Pakistani commentary. I know journalists who have been in opposition for twenty years. It makes no difference who is in power. Musharraf comes, oppose him. PPP comes, oppose him. PML-N comes, oppose him. PTI comes, oppose him. Ittehad comes, oppose him. Every morning, Pakistan is seemingly six weeks away from disaster, and every evening, someone or the other has identified the government that should immediately replace the current one.
Criticism is inevitable. If I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t be writing all this. But a permanent opposition is not criticism. It is a system. And running a country is not a system. I have seen governments come and go for so long that I know how tempting it can be to say, “Bring them down.”
Great. Brought them down. So what?
The debt remains. The IPP agreements remain. The provinces remain. The military remains. The IMF remains. The creditors remain. The energy problem remains, the tax problem remains, the water problem remains, the geography remains, and the population remains.
Someone still has to run Pakistan at nine o’clock the next morning, and each of these files will be on the same table, in the same state, waiting to be signed. This is why governance is the most neglected element in the entire Pakistani debate. We talk endlessly about personalities and almost nothing about competence. We talk about legitimacy and almost nothing about implementation. We talk too much about who should go and too little about whether the person coming in can run the machine.
Modern governance is no different from what we call corporate governance. A country is an institution. It has a balance sheet, it has creditors, it has liabilities, it has assets, it has cash flow, and it has shareholders, whom we call the public. And, just like in any institution, everything comes down to whom you put in charge.
You don’t have to go far to find evidence of this. Bring in a person from the Buzdar School of Management and you will find the Punjab of 2018 to 2022. Same province, same resources, same revenue base, same bureaucracy, same land, same population, same canals, same industrial belt. Nothing had changed except who was signing the file.
Put better governance in the same province, and the same province is discussed in Forbes, receives praise from international ranking bodies, and even the cleanliness of its cities is noticed by outside observers. No new canal has been dug. No new river has been discovered. No new oil reserves have been discovered.
Only the administrative capacity has changed.
