EDITORIAL: Prime Minister Imran Khan is taking a fair bit of flak for his candid though completely unnecessary admission that he and his team came to power unprepared, but the fact is that almost all governments in Pakistan, whether military or civilian, have had this thing in common. Yet Imran’s position is made worse than others for two reasons. For one thing, why on earth would he say such a thing now, half way through the cycle, when nobody’s forgotten how he used to promise that his vision as well as his team would be better than everything before them? And for another, while he might have won some points for personal honesty, he clearly lost a lot more for bad timing. For here we have a government, which faces a combined opposition drive to unseat it on grounds that it is running the country into the ground, openly admitting that it came to power without doing its homework and more or less groped in the dark for most of the first two years. All this has quite naturally put the ruling party’s media team in a very awkward position, especially since the prime minister also very recently admitted that his government wasted a lot of time in going to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the bailout.
That was of course the time of the rupee collapse, the jobs market collapse and the beginning of a very pronounced slowdown in the growth rate, so that statement also gave the opposition a lot to play with for no reason at all. But it’s not as if the parties out protesting right now came to power any better prepared in their own time. In fact, students of history will tell you that Pakistan’s initial progress was the result of strong policy-making in the first 11 years of the republic, from 1947 to 1958, when leaders developed policies and gave them to the bureaucracy for implementation. And the Ayub regime is wrongly given credit for an economic boom while his only contribution was letting the civil service do its job of translating the vision of earlier leaders into reality. But that was about as far as it went. Soon enough came the breakup of Pakistan, followed by the nationalism of the Bhutto era, then Zia’s iron grip, the decade of democracy, and so on. Some governments forced their way to power while some found themselves thrust into power by other powers, but none of them really came prepared for the job.
Over time therefore, as this paper has so often lamented, the bureaucracy’s role shifted from policy-takers to policy-makers. And since civil servants are creatures of the status quo, it’s no surprise that their dominance of certain important decision making processes resulted in a general slowdown of the entire system over time. Political governments can solve this problem by first working out what they really want, then getting the bureaucracy to provide the mechanism of achieving their goals, and then having the good sense to see if everything is being implemented in the right manner. But for that parties would have to have clear plans before they come to power.
And it is now pretty clear that Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) did not have much of a plan, just like its predecessors, before winning the 2018 election, especially regarding the economy. No wonder, then, that the finance ministry is juggling loans and debt payments most of the time. Still, the prime minister has pointed out a very serious problem. Politics is just not something that you learn on the job after coming to power. Such tendencies can prove destructive not just for politicians but, far more importantly, also for the people. Parties must, therefore, be required to present clear plans of action, something that goes far beyond the usual election manifesto, before contesting elections. This is one of those lessons where homework must be done before class work. PTI has only half a term left. It will have to work extra hard to make up for the lost time.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020