All is for the best
I AM neither invoking Leibniz, nor being Panglossian, I simply begin today’s adventure in writing with the epilogue, rather than the prologue. And to digress a bit, writing is always an adventure into those recesses of the mind which host imagination and creative fluids, fiction or non-fiction. So every writer, while apologising to those he could not convince, for a variety of reasons albeit wasting their time perhaps being the foremost, will always simultaneously request continued indulgence till the next time, since always, all is for the best.
A fair warning: today’s article, if not already evident from the title, is for the optimist and the faithful.
Having spent all my life till today, more than five decades, in Pakistan, and rather proud of it, I have, nonetheless, stumbled upon the latest, but extremely critical from our context, variation of the Murphy’s law: if anything can go wrong at the macro level — including social, political, economic — it will go wrong in Pakistan.
In 70 years of independence, we have tried most everything when it comes to governance — governors general, monarchy in disguise, feudalism, police state, military dictatorship, democracy, presidents, parliaments, local governments, governor rule, and perhaps a few that I am missing — and got each and every form of governance wrong. As proof of concept: our dictators have acted like politicians and the politicians are more than dictatorial. At least get the roles right! We centralise when we should devolve and vice versa; we believe accountability is for the other guy only and feel that being in opposition is disrespectful.
One can’t help but think that everyone is confused about their roles.
Even worse is that in 70 years, our institutions not only have not figured out their respective roles in the government machinery, they keep changing and evolving into roles which are nowhere to be seen in text and history books. When did bureaucrats have to serve anybody else but the nation? Except that one treads carefully when offering the proof of concept in this case because our institutions not only get things wrong, they are downright touchy about the matter.
Those knowingly snickering and thinking that this observation is directed towards the establishment only; think again, I include the politicians and the media herein. Looking at the quality of electoral campaigning by political parties this time around and the media circus, you can’t help but conclude that everyone is confused about their roles; half an hour of prime time news talk shows and you start pulling your hair out.
As far as the economy goes, in 70 years, once again, we have tried everything — socialism, capitalism, free markets, free trade, nationalisation, privatisation, state capitalism, aid, war economy, Washington Consensus, and remain always ready to experiment with new ideas propagated by the IMF. Proof of concept: after trying everything, we still have not managed to balance the budget and our debt and twin deficits are at records levels on almost all counts.
And it is not that we have not had great opportunities to put our economic house in order. One is just around the corner again. If Pakistanis do have $200 billion of assets stashed around the globe, the OECD Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, will provide most of the information about these assets to Pakistan tax authorities on a platter come September 2018; let’s hope this time we are different!
I would rather not comment on our nation’s societal achievements over the last 70 years, since most people tend to get rudely touchy over this debate; worse than as a result of political partisanship. From a nation who was taught and believed in unity, faith and discipline, we are the reason for breaking news across the globe for all the wrong reasons.
And finally, our track record at the international level is nothing to write home about. We are still confused about who are our friends. When push has come to shove, and we have looked over our shoulders, we have always been alone; except we still haven’t learnt. We actually believe that other countries are investing billions of dollars in our infrastructure, because they are our friends — that is the height of gullibility. Even the Trojans were more suspicious of the gift horse. Frankly, we probably also hold the world record for most conspiracies against a nation, domestic and international.
Paucity of space precludes one at this point from twisting the plot into a classic climax where one proves that despite all of the above, we are better than a great majority of countries of the world, and potentially amongst the top 10 countries of the world today. Hence, we quickly jump to the conclusion: if all has been for the best always then let’s stay honest and work hard and things will work out; except, one simply can’t help asking; how and why?
The writer is a chartered accountant based in Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2018