EDITORIAL: If the government is serious about reforms this time, it will have to prove it in deeds, not diagnostics. The finance minister’s insistence in the senate, speaking about the IMF’s Governance and Corruption Diagnostic Assessment report, that “we initiated this report, and we facilitated this discussion” may sound confident, but it does not change the basic question; what happens after the report is tabled, debated and filed away. Pakistan has lived through enough exercises in self-assessment to know that the problem is not the absence of findings; it is the absence of follow through.
The IMF’s assessment is not a hostile document imposed from the outside. By the minister’s own account, it was requested by the government, almost 100 meetings were held, more than 30 organisations participated, and seven topics were covered. He described it as a technical report designed to identify structural deficiencies that go back to the country’s inception, and he stressed that the Fund has acknowledged progress over the last 18 months. None of this is trivial. It suggests a willingness to open the system to scrutiny and to assemble an action plan that he has promised to share with “everyone”.
The difficulty is that the country has heard this language before. Successive administrations have commissioned reviews, held consultations, briefed parliament and spoken of structural reform. The outcomes have rarely matched the ambition. When the senate is told that corruption remains a persistent challenge, with serious implications for development, it is not being informed of a new discovery. It is being reminded of what has been on record for years while governments have rotated and programmes have come and gone. The danger now is that this diagnostic becomes one more addition to a long shelf of reports that confirmed what everybody already knew.
The IMF does not escape responsibility in this pattern. Pakistan has spent decades moving in and out of its programmes. Each cycle has come with commitments to reform, timelines for implementation and assurances that this time will be different. Yet the same structural weaknesses have survived, strong enough for the latest report to describe them as deficiencies stretching back over decades. That is not only a reflection on domestic politics. It also raises questions about a lending institution that has repeatedly endorsed arrangements, which did not deliver the promised changes.
If the Fund now chooses to invest in a detailed governance and corruption assessment, it has an obligation to treat its own findings as more than an academic exercise. It cannot praise progress in selected areas and then allow the core recommendations to be diluted or deferred when they collide with entrenched interests. The leverage it holds is precisely the ability to link further support to measurable improvements in the areas it has itself identified as deficient. If that leverage is not used, the cycle of diagnosis without cure will continue, and both the government and the IMF will share responsibility for the result.
For the government, the test is even more direct. Having told parliament that it initiated the process and facilitated the discussion, it can no longer claim that reform is being forced upon it from the outside. Ownership of the report comes with ownership of the response. An action plan that remains on paper, or that is reduced to minor procedural adjustments, will simply confirm that the exercise was another way to manage optics rather than change outcomes. The public has seen too many announcements, press conferences and briefings to mistake process for progress.
What is required now is a clear shift from description to implementation. The structural deficiencies the minister referred to are not abstractions. They are the rules, incentives, and practices that have allowed corruption to remain embedded in the state for generations. Tackling them demands specific legal changes, enforcement capacity, and protection for institutions that confront vested interests. It also requires a level of transparency that allows parliament and the public to monitor whether the promised action plan is being executed or quietly set aside.
Until there is visible movement on these fronts, the rhetoric will carry little credibility. Another report, no matter how technical or comprehensive, will not by itself alter the trajectory. The government has chosen to present this assessment as a step towards reform, and the IMF has framed it as part of a broader engagement. Both will now be judged by what happens next. Only sustained, on ground results can turn this from yet another exercise in diagnosis into the beginning of a cure.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025