God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time.”
Our elite’s bankruptcy God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time.t obligations deepen
, its elitist policymakers, both past and present, are inclined to believe that the country got into
this mess because of a host of recent external factors — the post-pandemic super cycle in commodities
, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US Federal Reserve’s change of tack, biblical floods at home.
The entrenched conventional wisdom also appears to be that managing the mounting
payment difficulties and debt distress (or, in this case, a near-certain default on the current path)
is Pakistan’s only challenge, and that averting the inevitable in the short run by kicking the
can down the road will be ‘mission accomplished’ for the incumbent political set-up and its architects.
For a country that is experiencing its 13th balance-of-payments crisis since 1988,
and is in its 23rd Fund programmed since 1958, this argument can only wash with the cognitively inert.
Placing the two figures quoted above in context (13 and 23),
gives some perspective of how deep-rooted and protracted the country’s economic malaise has been.
Pakistan
is one of the foremost protracted users of IMF resources globally, spending,
by my estimate, a cumulative of 34 years in various IMF programmed since independence.
This suggests that it has slipped into a new Fund programmed once in less tha
n every three years of its existence on average.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sri Lanka comes close, with a total of 16 IMF programmes under
its belt since its independence in 1948. (Argentina, a serial defaulter on its sovereign debt, has approached the IMF 22 times since 1956).
It will also be illustrative to see a breakdown of the number of IMF programmed undertaken by
each political party by its tenure in government since 1988. PML-N has four IMF programmed under its belt, PPP six, two under Gen Musharraf, and one by PTI.
Power elites have their heads in the sand regarding the country’s frequent and multiple crises.
This should put paid to any politics that each of these political parties has played at various
times with regard to seeking a bailout from the Fund, especially in 2018 and 2019 when the then PTI
government was dithering on signing off on a loan arrangement with the IMF and the very same PPP and PML/
-N that are in power today were hauling it over the coals for petty political mileage.
While Pakistani elites believe
that everyone and everything except their own poor policies and
choices over the past 75 years may be the root cause of the problem,
the fact is that as the data indicates
, there is one constant that predates all recent events: a lifelong history of poor political as well as economic governance.
This is a textbook example of what psychologists call an external locus of control
, referring to the belief in some individuals and societies that they do not have agency over what happens to them
, and that their life outcomes are determined by external factors beyond their control.
The plethora of deep-seated and widely believed
conspiracy theories bandied about in Pakistan is a prime demonstration of this phenomenon.
Where have things gone wrong for Pakistan? Is the country a victim of bad luck, bad policy, bad governance, or an international conspiracy? The exploration of this question over the years is well documented,
and while various commentators differ as to the exact root of the malaise
, the consensus appears to be that the fault lies in our own choices and constructs
— and not just on the economics side.
Whatever impulse our external environment may or may not have given to our growing
challenges, it is clear that the entropy caused by the ‘establishment’s’
governance of the country’s internal affairs has played a large role in bringing things to this pass.
Unique factors and circumstances following the country’s birth that handed the reins of power,
decision and policymaking to a small elite consisting of the army, politicians and bureaucracy
laid the basis for a system of governance run on wider co-option (and coercion). The judiciary and industrialists were next to be co-opted, followed eventually by the media and other business segments.
As a result, with so many ‘insiders’ enjoying the benefits of the status quo,
it is no surprise that there is no organized reform constituency in the country.
Business segments that are affected only want policies that hurt their interests to be tweaked
, while retaining the rest of the edifice that provides them ‘rents’. The disaffected middle class appears to have rallied behind PTI, but it is largely unorganized and lacks a