A Swiss fantasy
Perhaps one of the worst attributes of modern Pakistani political discourse is virtually an absolute lack of a sense of proportion and a cavalier attitude towards accuracy — and plausibility — of numbers. One of the most outrageous numbers being thrown around these days is that the Pakistani elite has somehow stashed $200 billion in illicit money in private banks in Switzerland. This is the sort of outlandish theory that would have made the Russian Tsar’s secret police proud. Let us put this number in context. Pakistan’s GDP last year — the total value of all goods and services produced in Pakistan in that year — was $231 billion. The total amount of tax collection last year was roughly $20 billion. How believable is it that the total amount of ill-gotten wealth stashed in Switzerland alone is nearly equal to the entirety of Pakistan’s economic production and ten times that of its tax collection? Does this at all sound logical?
The Swiss ambassador to Pakistan has politely expressed his puzzlement as to where this number comes from, because the Swiss government is certainly not aware of its origins. The Swiss central bank publishes numbers every year that list how much money in its banking system is owned by foreign citizens and it breaks down the numbers by citizenship. The latest available number for Pakistan is roughly equal to $1.3 billion. How much of that is legal or illegal wealth is not known, but that number does not sound like a lot. To put it in context, that number would not even cover six months of electricity subsidies in Pakistan.
What disturbs us much more than the lunacy of the number is the thinking behind it: that somehow Pakistan’s economic problems can magically vanish if we could just manage to procure an obscenely large sum of money from abroad. This kind of thinking ignores that kind of sclerotic institutions that make wealth generation from within the country so difficult. Pakistan is not poor because rich countries have not given it more aid or because our elite have stashed all the money in Swiss banks. We are poor because we stifle creativity, opportunity and economic freedom through poorly designed institutions. If we can fix those, we will not miss any money that has been siphoned away in banks abroad, no matter how big or small.
Arson in Panjgur
It is a struggle to get an education in Panjgur district of Balochistan. There are 23 private English-medium schools and coaching centres and early this year they began to receive threats from a group calling itself Tanzeem-ul-Islam-al-Furqan. This group wanted the schools to stop teaching English and end co-education. Eventually after bus and taxi drivers and students and school principals and teachers had all been harassed and threatened, the schools closed for three months. In a remarkable push-back against the group that forced their closure the schools opened again on August 7, many with much-reduced number of students as families had migrated to Quetta and Karachi in search of a better education for their children. The threats against the schools continued after they re-opened and have been acted upon, with one school being the target of an arson attack.
Two men entered the school, doused it with petrol and set the principal’s office on fire and also destroyed computers and other classroom equipment. The police have lodged a complaint against ‘unknown assailants’ — but it may well be that they are not as ‘unknown’ as the police would lead us to believe. The group making the threats is well known to local people, who also know where they are based. If local people know, then it is a reasonable assumption that the police, or their informants, know as well. It is also reported that the arson attack was in retaliation for the arrest of ‘close aides’ of those making the threats — which considerably increases the likelihood that the police know exactly who is carrying out the harassment and attacks. Teachers at the schools are displaying considerably more backbone than the police. The teachers are saying that they ‘will not close the schools for a single day’ and they remain open, an act of considerable defiance. Once again there is an instance of the police failing to come up to the mark in terms of protecting the public. They are slow to act for reasons that can only be speculated upon — and none of them are likely to be innocent.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 28th, 2014.