The evolving scenario
Despite severe constraints, the opening up of the economy by the Nawaz Sharif Government has ensured that the enduring pain of galloping inflation and economic recession has been relatively mitigated. In a world beset by economic problems requiring extremely severe measures as in the former COMECON countries, the far-reaching reforms of the Nawaz Sharif Government has sorely tested the capacity of the common man but has remained within bearable limits. In the dismantling of established bureaucratic hurdles, Nawaz Sharif has done himself proud, both in having the courage to carry out the necessary changes and then managing to avoid bureaucratic backlash. In this he may have been helped by the situation that we find ourselves in, bereft of US economic and chastened by the 20 months of PPP rule, the all-powerful bureaucracy lost the urge to continue to guide the economy according to its own dictates. In the emerging solutionless economic morass, they probably decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
By circumstances rather than genuine design, the opening of new commercial banks has preceded the overall dismantling of the State public sector financial institutions. Keeping in view the fact that in Third World countries socio-economic compulsions must supersede purely economic factors, a modicum of public sector interest in financial institutions must continue for the good of the masses. We must balance economic emancipation with the ignorance and illiteracy endemic among the vast mass of the population, to attempt a purely economic amelioration of our problems will mean unmitigated disaster for their socio-economic aspirations. Looking at the poor economic straits of the Republics of the former Soviet Union and their last ditch resort to painful measures like removing price controls to get post-haste to a market oriented economy, we should count ourselves lucky that we have muddled through a mixed economy for many years, the aberrations were mainly because of bureaucracy’s manipulations rather than any concerted State philosophy.
The time has come to make a clear statement of economic intention. We may give lip-service arguments for a market-oriented economy but we know that it is in the mass interest to have to maintain State control in certain key areas of industry and commerce. While the capitalist economies provide for tempting reasons to emulate, as a third world country our role model should be mixed economies with weightage in favour of free enterprise. In this respect we must turn to the model of mixed economies such as in Europe, like Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Finland, where the public sector and the private sector control combine to share in the many enterprises that are critical to the national requirements while commercial enterprises are generally free to operate without restrictions or control or bureaucratic transgress.
Our problem is that vested interest soon attempts to turn each process to its own pecuniary advantage. Take the case for privatisation, by not making the negotiations a very public one, enough rumours have been set loose so as to put the while process into disrepute. At the same time, while the denationalisation of the two commercial banks may have escaped widespread public vituperation, some of the enormous credit advanced after the changeover of management has lifted the eyebrows of some among financially knowledgeable circles. One must point out here that the newly privatised banks may have been caused to part with these huge loans at short notice reluctantly, unfortunately it smacks very much like quid pro quo, a perception of cronyism that is best avoided. These lead to the assumption that the deals were manipulated to suit either known or hidden beneficiaries lurking in the shadows.
Given the fact that most of our leaders have marked dual personalities, their attitude changing when in power and when without, their perceived image helped no doubt by the support or the opposition of the official media as the case may be, the holier-than-thou mantle adopted by whichever is the Government in power still cannot hide the machinations of outright rascals behind the scenes whose prime responsibility is to make money for themselves and their cronies. Oscar Wilde stated that “all saints have a past while all sinners have a future”, most of these evergreen characters survive in every government and are a genuine mix of a saint and a sinner, making sure that their futures become bright while successfully obliterating their pasts. In Pakistan, these characters have no political leanings except that which brings them financial benefit, a clout that allows for re-creating history to their advantage.
Caught up in the present wave of disinvesting everything in sight, GOP needs to do its homework and annunciate a sound economic policy incorporating the socio-economic needs of the masses. The fundamental aspect of every existing ideology of the world is a relatively equitable share of the available wealth, yet even when the most extreme forms of communism in Eastern Europe produced a privileged segment of party elite. The concept of equality was religiously followed in the early days of Islam, which embodied socialism as a basic facet of religion seen with religion as a way of life rather than only as a theoretical ideology. A present tendency of Islamists to return to conservative practices is feared in the west as fundamentalism.
One of the great tragedies of democracy is that it produces demagogues who profess to ideals that they preach high and low but do not practice what they preach except for cosmetic effect. The net result is that the masses are mesmerised by spell-binding oration but end up getting a short end of the stick. While the rhetoric of the Nawaz Sharif regime has been quite strident proclaiming their own sincerity and honesty for the past year, the Coop scam has made some of their claim about integrity seem rather hollow. Before Nawaz Sharif, Ms Benazir Bhutto had similarly lost her claim to credibility because of the rumoured financial indiscretions of her husband, Asif Zardari. So now we have a political situation where two very potent national leaders and political personalities have severe credibility problems. However, as Mrs Imelda Marcos has shown in the Philippines, mesmeric charm and careful distribution of largesse can invariably get you past accusations of graft and corruption in the Third World. Mrs Marcos left 3,000 pairs of shoes behind in the Presidential palace when she fled Manila with her late husband, the former President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, one could never imagine that this personification of corruption could return to adulation among her nation’s impoverished poor. That is the tragedy of the Third World, while ideals are usually overwhelmed by greed among leaders, the mass psyche is invariably swayed by demagoguery. In such circumstances, one searches for justice from some referee provided he or she is not partisan, wherein one tends to look farther afield.
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