Black elephants

Who would have thought that the majestic pachyderm will end up being associated with rather pinching, if not downright derogatory, metaphors!
I am sure everyone in Pakistan has seen white elephants; a possession that is useless or troublesome, especially one that is expensive to maintain or difficult to dispose of. We definitely have a penchant for collecting white elephants; most projects we get into, unequivocally, fail the cost benefit test. And now this passion for collecting elephants seems to have grown to include black elephants as well.
Thomas Friedman, in his book "Thank you for Being Late", mentions how a black elephant was explained to him. It is a cross between a "Black Swan" and the "Elephant in the Room". And to jog everyone's memory, Black Swan is a metaphor that describes an unforeseen event which has an impact, normally always adverse, of game changing proportion. Elephant in the room, on the other hand, is a phrase which refers to obvious and difficult situations which everybody wants to ignore and is therefore not discussed.
And like I said after collecting herds, not herd, of White Elephants, we are now the proud owners of herds of Black Elephants. The allocated space for a newspaper column is insufficient for even the briefest introduction of our collection of black elephants, but I will try to at least cover the Mammoth one.
Black elephant No 1: Looming water shedding and H2O wars. Load shedding, a perennial, and for inexplicable reasons, unsolvable problem, will seem like a picnic compared with water shedding. I, and am sure that by now everyone, received a humorous message on social media that Kalabagh Dam should be the only agenda for the forthcoming elections. In spite of 10 years of democracy, we have not learned! The election campaign will be only about maligning the opponents, building fiction about past achievements and making fantastic future promises. The media obviously will lap it all up, simply because the media can only thrive under a democracy and hence has to in entirety support the charade to fool the masses; or give up their expensive cars and perquisites. Let me put it more bluntly; even if the entire middle class voted for Kalabagh Dam, they will still lose!
Black elephant No 2: protection of property rights. Notwithstanding that we completely failed at land reforms, 70 years down we still have not figured out who owns which property. I am sure everyone has heard the horror stories about people being evicted out of their houses by land mafia and years of suffering trying to get back an ancestral home; which in any case is impossible if you belong to the poor and downtrodden classes. And then there is China cutting, which phrase I continue to struggle with, and destroying of agricultural land in the name of development. Unless property cases are resolved within a mandatory short term, say within a year, and property rights of every Pakistani is given protection, and land usage is optimised, the country will not achieve its potential for economic growth ever.
Black Elephant No 3: Industrialisation. For some astonishing and mysterious reason, in less than a decade, we have become a speculative and trading economy. Our policies are designed to support traders and honour speculators; stock market has become the symbol of our success. This particular Black Elephant will poke us where it will hurt; employment. I have always maintained, policies supporting and protecting export-oriented and import substitution manufacturing will result in honest employment invariably creating a robust market for support services. Minus the first, absence of industrialization, the service sector will remain a white elephant. We love our elephants!
Black Elephant No 4: Trade deficit. Perhaps an offspring of the elephants described above, but it can be safely said that this black elephant has reached mammoth proportions in its own right. We simply cannot give up our branded clothes, shoes, bags, food, smart phones and cars. We want to just privatize PIA so we can bask in luxury flying Emirates; notwithstanding that the nation cannot afford any of these luxuries. This Black elephant, and No 5, have an exceptional quality; they are recently both being discussed but beyond discussions no one seems to know what to do with them. To venture a guess, these very two Black elephants (4 and 5) also have the highest probability of converting into black swans in the shortest period of time.
Black Elephant No 5: National debt and liabilities, including external. This is perhaps the blackest of them all; and will be the blackest swan too. It is remarkable how a nation can be run entirely on debt and still claim to have a growing economy. Whoever dreamt up capitalism should be way on top in the Top 10 list of mad scientists in history. Notwithstanding, to venture another guess, pretty soon mammoth will be an understatement for this particular elephant; by end of May 2018, total debt might have exceeded Rs 29,000 billion.
Before moving on I must clarify, I am only focusing on Black elephants which have the economy stamped on them; perhaps the more dangerous types of black elephants are the societal kind which can be better described by social workers and philanthropists.
Black Elephant No 6: know it all.
(The writer is a chartered accountant based in Islamabad. Email: [email protected])