Here’s a scenario. The president doubles down on his deadline for the election, the supreme court agrees that it was indeed the prerogative of the ceremonial head of state to give the date, and lawyer bodies and political parties that petitioned the apex court to make ECP stick to the 90-day deadline feel they’ve helped pull the nation back from the abyss as it goes to vote on 6 November 2023.
They vote in a strong government and sit back and wait for all the prophecies about a “government with a heavy public mandate” solving all their problems to come true; just like all the senior analysts on TV programs and lead editorial in newspapers have been saying all along.
But then what?
The euphoria from the election won’t take the economy off life support. And all the dogs in the race have formed government before and faced rejection from the IMF, only recently, every time any of them tried to toggle taxes and subsidies to provide relief for the people. They also know that blaming previous governments for all the problems while making promises of better times works better on the campaign trail than after the election.
So, the popular government with a clear majority – in the best-case scenario – either goes back on its promises and succumbs to IMF’s conditions, raising taxes and cutting subsidies in times of unprecedented inflation and unemployment, exactly like the administrations it attacked when it asked for votes. Or it tells the Fund what it told its supporters before the election and promptly loses the bailout program along with all the friendly-country aid, pushes the economy into default and subjects the people that gave it the mandate to much worse macroeconomic indicators.
Either way, the same people that took its word before the election will eventually call for its scalp amid the inevitable we-told-you-so chorus of opposition parties. That’s when no political party in government, in a democratic setup, would ever entertain the idea of taxing the big fish who’ve always conveniently avoided the FBR out of fear of compromising their “campaign funds” on top of losing popular support.
And if it isn’t removed by a foreign conspiracy or no-confidence motion or even direct intervention, it will most likely lose the next election and then the same cycle will repeat itself with another party in power.
And what if the first or the second election delivers a hung parliament? You can hold the election on time and feel good about your democratic credentials, but how will your votes get tried, tested and failed leaders who can do no more than fall all over each other – whether in coalition or in opposition – to solve extremely serious, existential problems when they couldn’t keep the country or the economy together in much better times? In fact, they – all of them – ran it into the ground and now they’re asking the people that are paying for their sins to vote them back to power.
Maybe our thought leaders have it wrong. Elections are a good thing, no doubt, but are they being honest in telling us and the world that the exercise alone would restore political stability, and that is all that is needed to put the country (read economy) back on track? Perhaps they need to finally entertain the idea that Pakistan needs the kind of painful reforms that no elected government can deliver, especially in a five-year cycle.
The hard truth is that Pakistan has come to the point where the institution of representative government cannot save it any longer. If the economy (read country) is to be saved, then authorities will have to enforce the kind of structural adjustment that will squeeze taxes out of the agri, real estate and trading elite, who’ve played a big part in creating this mess, and also compromise a lot of the poorest, most vulnerable segments of society, who have already suffered for years and decades for no fault of their own.
Like some countries have faced lost decades due to their economic mismanagement, Pakistan faces a lost generation, at best. It needs an environment of extremely tight fiscal and monetary policies for a very long time, to comply with IMF diktat, while being able to do nothing about high inflation, high unemployment and low growth – textbook stagflation in a country with the world’s 5th largest population and in the top 10 in poverty.
It needs to smash politically connected mafias and erect an export-oriented industry from the ground up. That will require taxing honest complying citizens to the eyeballs while hunting down evaders.
And none of this can be done if the government will have to go back to the people for votes every five years, especially when there’s an opposition cheering every time the government’s efforts come up short, and then too deliver the same old faces as our leaders.
To say that only and only elections can set the country on the path to recovery amounts to lying to the people. Pakistan’s economic body is littered with tumors, in layman’s terms, and the surgery needed to keep it alive will require some parts of it to be cut off and thrown away. It’s cruel, but it’s a very natural outcome of letting clowns masquerading as democrats rip it off, repeatedly, for more than half a century.
All the energy spent on getting frustrated about the election is put to better use trying to figure out what kind of setup can deliver on-ground, quantifiable results; do very complicated economic and political surgery with cold precision and then let the people vote on what to do with the parts of the body that are still functioning.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023