Public priorities for Pakistan in 2021
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A new year has arrived and with it a new opportunity for Pakistan to claw back on a course that helps it get past the futility of misplaced priorities that have brought it to a sorry pass.
Prime Minister Imran Khan has been making feel-good promises since before being entrusted with the power to deliver them – ten million jobs, five million houses, a billion trees and good governance. Well into the third year of his government and Pakistan is several-fold worse than it was when he assumed power given the economic and political situation today. He himself admitted in an interview last month that for one year he was unprepared to manage the country given its complex challenges.
Pakistanis have had enough of being talked to about what they need. It is time the powers-that-be stopped talking and started listening to what the people want and adjust their promises to people’s priorities rather than their consuming their own propaganda.
So, what few critical goals can deliver hope and progress for most people in 2021? From an ordinary citizen’s perspective, the following priorities will make all the difference.
Growth economy: We’ve had enough talk about alleged corruption of previous rulers although the economic growth rate when they left office was 5.8 percent. Khan brought it down to around 2 percent in his first year and by the end of 2020 to negative figures. Who wants a self-propagated ‘clean’ government when the economy hits rock bottom and gives the people nothing?
Ten million jobs have been lost, energy prices are up 60 percent, inflation is in the double figures and defense spending and debt accumulation are ballooning. Pakistanis want an end to amateur steerage of the economy and to unproductive propaganda as a substitute for jobs, industrial growth and decent wages.
It is time to end the primacy of security state that Pakistan has become, which has come at the steep cost of social development – poor literacy and health indicators, rampant gender inequality and outdated legal and governance codes.
Adnan Rehmat
Productive governance: Pakistan’s centralized governance has become redundant and expensive. The prime minister’s job should not be running the country but facilitating the federation of provinces. It is the provinces that should manage themselves and their local economies. Currently there is not just duplication, but a triplication of governance in the shape of federal, provincial and district tiers of administration.
A decade after the landmark 18th constitutional amendment empowered the provinces to be masters of their fates, the federal government continues to insist what curriculum the provinces should teach their students, which taxes they should impose, which high officials they must appoint and the projects they should undertake.
Why have provincial governments at all, when the federal government and prime minister insist on micromanaging them? The provinces should also devolve most of their powers and resources to the districts to cut the governance fat and drastically reduce non-productive expenditure.
Political reforms: Acute polarization is contributing to not just political, but economic instability. Ordinary Pakistanis have had enough of the game of thrones that hijack energies of the state toward abstract and hackneyed over-politicking. The tenures of federal and provincial governments – and legislatures – should be reduced to four years to allow for quicker renewals of public mandates, the tenure of prime ministers and chief ministers should be limited to a maximum of two terms although with immunity to protect their tenures to allow for an end to authoritarian leaderships and delivery on promises; and greater democracy should be enforced within political parties – fixed leadership terms and frequent meetings of party executive councils – to promote new ideas, talent and sharper assignment-driven leadership. Comprehensive reforms to allow fairer elections are also overdue.
Social development: It is time to end the primacy of security state that Pakistan has become, which has come at the steep cost of social development – poor literacy and health indicators, rampant gender inequality and outdated legal and governance codes that militate against social justice.
It is time to sell peace and progress, not war, to become an economic and socio-cultural power by investing productively in people instead of feeding imagined threats and artificial enmities with neighbors that has ended up creating a runaway population that is unskilled, unproductive and conspiratorial minded.
What Pakistan needs are productive endeavours, not imaginary prestige projects that gobble up scarce resources. Pakistanis need facilitation with productivity and happiness to translate them into wealth that fuel economic and social progress. All other methods have failed. Military power is an illusion when half the population is hungry. Hungry people are angry people. Social power through human development will offer a better triumph.
In 2021 Pakistan my not solve all its problems but it can course correct itself toward a better future.
*Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistan-based journalist, researcher and analyst with interests in politics, media, development and science.
Twitter: @adnanrehmat1
