EDITORIAL: If anything could have made the fallout of the passage of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) (Amendment) Bill worse than it was for the opposition, it was submitting a dissenting note with the Senate secretariat lamenting how the Bill was a document of “financial surrender” because it “brings Pakistan’s national security and assets under severe strain and scrutiny of international financial imperialists”. And that, Pakistan will now become the “worst example of modern-day colonialism”.
If it was that big of a deal, then why couldn’t the opposition do the simple thing of just getting the math right in a House that it dominates, especially after making so much noise about never allowing “economic slavery” and all that? By beating the same drum after the loss of face, and vote, it will not be able to deflect the obvious question of why so many of its members were missing.
Complaints about the government summoning the session “in the dead of the night” will wash with nobody, since practically everybody knew just when the vote was going to be called. The fact, that some of the opposition’s bigwigs were still absent can only mean that opposition parties and their leaders haven’t worked out their differences yet. And it also takes the wind out of the threat of a no-confidence motion against the PM; at least for the time being. The test case would be the Senate, after all, since they have the numbers to do the trick there, but the simple fact that they have not been able to do it, time and again, proves that they still haven’t learnt how to work together even when the spotlight is theirs for the taking.
The events of late last week ensured the resumption of the Extended Fund Facility (EFF), but they also reset the main political narrative in a lot of ways. And that’s because the opposition has, once again, squandered a game-changing opportunity delivered to it in a basket by fate and circumstance itself. The excuse, being spun around by certain sections of the media, that the opposition let this one through deliberately because the IMF programme was desperately needed, and it will eventually bring more bad news than good news for the government, so might as well let Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) take the ‘credit’ for it, is also a non-starter. Because it is pretty obvious that the dissenting note filed with the secretariat is only meant to mislead the people but it is a non-flyer.
The plain, undeniable fact is that the SBP bill has exposed the opposition’s Achilles heel, and that there is just too much push-and-pull within it, for it to function as a well-oiled unit. The pressure of decades of animosity, which includes squeezing the other whenever one was in power, takes its toll at the end of the day. That’s why it’s still unable to decide whether or not the need to send Imran Khan packing outweighs out-manoeuvring each other.
Perhaps all this will put an end to the prime time TV debate about a premature end of the sitting government. All the opposition may have got together against the ruling party right now, but it still doesn’t have the force to push it over the edge. That means everybody needs to go back to the drawing board. The government needs to realise that simply denying all the problems will not make them go away and ensure a re-election. And the opposition also needs to understand that in such times when you try to fool all the people all the time, you only end up fooling yourself.
The people, on the other hand, cannot be fooled for too long in a working democracy. For, even if you take them for a ride for one electoral cycle, they make sure to deliver a very harsh verdict at the next election.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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