It may seem too early a verdict on the PML-N government which is only a couple of weeks old, but if the budget is anything to go by, the signs are not comforting. It may well have been the case of trying to do too much too soon, and hence the absence of a political direction that became too obvious in a budget that has all the marks of bureaucracy – sans vision, strategy or empathy.
Budgets, especially in Pakistan, are more of an accounting exercise. There are fixed liabilities and revenues that must be balanced, and that is where an accountant will shut his mind. But this is where the politician should intervene to direct policy in accordance with his vision on how he plans to lift the economy and create fiscal space to provide service to the people. Without political input, the bureaucrat will introduce taxes that will balance his expense needs but do little else. That is why political leaders come to office on the back of a democratic choice of the people that they should now serve.
To serve the people there should be fiscal space; for fiscal space the government should collect taxes; to collect taxes from, the people, the industry, and the corporate world should have money; for them to have money the economy should be on the growth path, where a combination of a supportive business environment and public-private initiatives based on sustainable and dependable policies enable people to prosper with economic growth. No nation is so rich as to meet all the needs of the state, its infrastructure or the path to its economic growth. Nations, in such cases, resort to deficit financing and borrow money needed to spur growth. As long as the priorities of the government are rational and will enable growth, fiscal space will generate itself.
It may sound like a chicken-and-egg argument, but at each of these steps in this self-fuelling cycle of growth politics is meant to intervene at every step of the process with a strategy that bureaucrats can neither conceive nor consider relevant to their paycheck. The budget that Ishaq Dar presented was an accountant’s budget, not a politician’s budget. It only aimed at maintaining the status quo and did not seek growth. It also lacked the necessary triggering mechanisms to spur growth. The budget failed to identify the key triggers of growth from within the industry, agriculture or the services sectors that this government wished to present as its choice elements that will help restore sentiment and the economy.
In other areas too the pace is rather lackadaisical. The energy policy doesn’t seem to be on the anvil. After rejecting any thoughts of an early remedy of a bedeviling energy shortfall, both the ministry and the government seem to have gone into an intellectual pause. May be what is awaited is the creation of the required 500 billion through the financial wizardry of the finance minister to clear the circular debt.
But what about a policy to ensure that such a liability does not recur again? What about making the shortfall good by incentivising investment? How about zeroing duties on solar and windmill technologies to create more avenues of energy and diversify dependence? Why isn’t there an overhaul of the old infrastructure which causes a part of the line losses? How about smart meters that calibrate provision of electricity according to prepaid tariffs? Why not steps to improve governance in the energy sector including restructuring where needed? Why aren’t we hearing anything moving in any of these directions?
The finance minister may have a one-stop solution, the IMF, but will that then be used to pay old debts or create the necessary fiscal space to enable growth. Money spent on needs that do not create more money is essentially money down the drain. If fiscal space is only possible with borrowed money, we may as well borrow more to produce more, rather than increasing debt without strengthening the economy.
A bullet train or fancy airports will not help growth, but roads and rail that will enable quick supply of trading goods will. Infrastructure development too will need to be targeted. There may not be any more flagship projects or grand monuments to celebrate the PML-N’s current rise. Every penny spent should be directed at producing more money. That should be the touchstone of our development strategy.
On law and order, the slate is equally plain. There has been a string of terrorist incidents from Gilgit-Baltistan to Karachi and from Khyber Pakhtunkwa to the federal capital. What has halted the government it in its tracks? Chaudhry Nisar, means well and perhaps has his hands full, but what can a minister of interior give in terms of national security? A portion of it, with respect to an internal security policy – call it at a counterterrorism policy? But then hardly, because even for a counterterrorism policy there is a need for a greater interagency coordination, centre-provincial cooperation and perhaps some extended support from the religious lobbies.
But where are we on this? Awaiting an APC? To what end? All have already agreed on the need to fight the menace through a strategy that the government finds most suitable. It cannot be a one-off affair between the political players. There will be a need for many such coordinated deliberations even while the talk or the talk-fight strategy is in play. But please do start.
We appear more and more like a nation adrift without a helmsman. This may be a brutal assessment and, to the PML-N mind, rather premature. But this is how things appear given the induction of a government that came in with a lot of promise and hope.
The writer is a retired air-vice marshal of the Pakistan Air Force and served as its deputy chief of staff.
Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com

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