EDITORIAL: Prime Minister Imran Khan while giving an interview to Hamza Yusuf, President, Zaytuna College, established in Berkeley in 2009 the mission to ground students in the Islamic scholarly traditions as well as in the cultural currents and critical ideas shaping modern society, reiterated his thesis on what ails Pakistan: Elite capture of Pakistan’s resources and the absence of the rule of law that has deprived the people of basic amenities and the country of achieving its potential. There is no doubt about the accuracy of this thesis.
In the agriculture sector, for example, the capture is not only by: (i) the rich landlords with significant representation in the country’s national and provincial assemblies as also in the civilian and military establishment that has enabled them to not only successfully resist all attempts to amend the constitution that would allow the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to tax their income at par with other groups including the salaried, but they have also ensured that taxes on their incomes and produce imposed by the provincial governments are much lower than those paid by other groups with the same income; and (ii) aarthis with generational relations with the poor farmers, who constitute 90 percent of farmers owning around 48 percent of land with a size of or less than 12.5 acres, and who are known to manipulate supply to reap their own windfall profits.
In value-added industry, manufacturers have formed associations (for example cement manufacturers, the sugar manufacturers, the textile manufacturers, petrol dealers) that dictated, and continue to dictate, policies to governments that pertain to their operations. Any policy considered detrimental is vigorously opposed through exerting influence on the cabinet and/or through violent street protests. This accounts for export rebates that create domestic shortages, leading to higher prices for the general public. And while the PTI administration initiated an inquiry into the wheat, sugar, petrol and LNG crises and made these reports public yet corrective measures have not been put in place to ensure that there is no recurrence of these issues. True that the present government has relied on imports to minimize the windfall profits of the elite but this too has had limited success.
And to make matters worse, the general perception is that the government is going to dismiss all genuine demands of any sector or subsector, professional group or otherwise, unless they come out on the streets in violent protests and needless to add examples abound, including lawyers and doctors. However, for the Prime Minister to rue absence of the rule of law is unfortunate for the simple reason that as the chief executive of the country he controls many law enforcement civilian agencies whose strength in numbers is in hundreds of thousands while most protests consist of no more than ten thousand at most and a couple of thousand at least. Punjab police alone employed 180,000, Sindh over 128,000, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 35,500 – or enough to tackle even the most recalcitrant protesters without any need to request support from the paramilitary rangers or armed forces. The prime minister’s lament that the powerful in the country escape punishment for their crimes is regrettably true. However, the government of the time cannot deny its responsibility for this state of affairs. If PTI was successful in instituting effective police reform in the KPK then why it has shied away from replicating it in the Punjab is for the prime minister to answer. What is patently evident today, three and quarter years into the PTI administration, is that the status quo pre-dating its inception does not only persist but sadly has been allowed to worsen. On the economic front, the situation remains extremely challenging with people fearing that the worst is yet to come in terms of financial stringency and inflation driven by a drastic increase in administered prices of various items, particularly those of power and POL products.
Two major components of current expenditure, therefore, need an urgent revisit. First, civilian administration outlay and defence expenditure require major sacrifices for the next two to three years — decisions that would dramatically reduce if not end the upfront harsh International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditions, including those relating to raising taxes/ending exemptions that nine times out of ten are passed onto the consumers due mainly to the elite capture. Second, pensions are increasingly becoming a source of concern and no action has been taken in spite of a study on the subject tasked and delivered last year with appropriate recommendations.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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