EDITORIAL: It’s not immediately clear what Information Minister Shibli Faraz intended to accomplish by enlightening everybody about the increase in the country’s exports having just broken a 10-year record. The most logical explanation is that he just wanted to share the good news and make everybody happy about our state of affairs. But in that case the government should have announced it through the commerce ministry. And considering that it is protest season in Pakistan, perhaps his real mission was taking the wind out of the opposition’s protests. Still, neither explains whether he meant that exports are now worth more in foreign exchange terms than they have averaged over the last ten years or that they last peaked a decade ago and now we have broken past that level. Most likely he picked up from Commerce Minister Razzak Dawood’s recent optimism on Twitter that the total quantum of our export earnings should jump to somewhere around $26 billion in a few years. While such an improvement would no doubt be very welcome, nobody should forget that to get there we would not only need to completely overhaul our production and export industry but also hope and pray that the pandemic subsides soon and the emerging situation is to our advantage.
That is not to say that year-on-year earnings haven’t impressed in some recent months. Pakistan did, after all, handle the first wave of the pandemic better than most other countries and was able to capture some export markets whose traditional suppliers were still in lockdown. But the second wave is turning out to be a very different story and even if we are able to keep some of our production houses running there’s no telling how long our target markets would be open for business. European and Gulf airports as well as ports have begun shutting down again. Britain has been effectively red-flagged by everybody following the discovery of a mutated and much more powerful strain of the coronavirus there. And rumours that some infected people could have travelled into mainland Europe before they were able to close borders have sent both British and European markets into a tailspin. Crude oil, too, has been spooked by this sudden, sharp contraction and begun falling. With such a scenario playing out it would take something like a miracle to keep Pakistan’s exports on the kind of uptrend that the information minister can keep celebrating on social media.
To be fair, the information minister’s position in a democracy is a rather unenviable one. Most of the time he finds himself faced with questions that other ministries are meant to answer. So it’s not really unnatural for him to get some things wrong once in a while; or most things should he try to weigh in on matters concerning commerce or finance. But unforced errors, like when you go out of your way and post a completely unnecessary tweet that is also factually incorrect, are still unacceptable. A peculiar problem that whoever heads the information ministry in this government faces is the prospect of very public and very loud disapproval from everybody all the way up to the prime minister himself if he or she does not take the fight to the opposition. Indeed the constant musical chairs even in the Punjab information ministry is often attributed to the PM’s personal disapproval of some of its ministers for just such reasons. It could be that Information Minister Faraz feels forced onto the front foot because he fears that anything less could compromise his place in the captain’s playing team. Yet even in that case he should consider that playing loose shots could get him out a lot quicker than playing fewer shots.
Perhaps the captain ought to change his game plan a little as well. It is true that his administration is under attack by the combined opposition and a good offence is almost always the best defence. But making claims, just to discredit opponents, that can soon reverse very strongly also risks giving the opposition just another stick to beat the government with. In any case, comments like the information minister’s betray a disturbing disregard for responsibility at one of the most sensitive positions in the federal government. If the information ministry’s information cannot be completely trusted, then the government will have many unnecessary problems to deal with.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020
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