MIRZA SHAHNAWAZ AGHA
OUR ‘geopolitical location’ and the ‘economic liberty within’ are two op tions each placed cross-purposes in a dichotomy. To catapult the economy into a bloom a crucial decision was and remains a needtowards strategic planning.Willit be ‘liberty within’ or will it be banking on our ‘geopolitical location’ for economic validity. Leaning only on the ‘geopolitical location’ to benefit the priming of the economic engine was a myopic decision because it kept the country pegged to dependence of alien economic plans. Whilst the CPEC and BRI are there from the East to lean upon on the one hand, the West is using our location as a front line state in the region for their own political and economic objectives on the other hand. In both cases we arelike a shuttlecock being tossed around without a plan of our own to uplift the economy. As it meets the eye this is so because the private sector and the people can be kept out of any progressive economic agenda of the state. Kept out of effectivelylarge capital hubs. The economic and therefore political power should and does remain concentrated in the hands of one segment of the state as rulers. Certain industrial openings are allowed time and again for the political fronting jockeys like sugar plants, cement plants, spinning mills, and now the latest energy generation units. This is the evil of the economic canvas in the country and it is deplorable and rudimentary. Today we are seeing the effects of this absurdity with investments, exports and industrialisation all having vanished from the country. The budgets are a fiddle to portray a fake growth rate and this is indeed challenging for anybody to address. The second option was, of course, the ‘economic liberty within’. Both options cannot be worked upon in tandem as they would churn out parallel economies within the state and that again would be counterproductive. The public-private partnership has been tried earlier in the country and it died because it got equated to what may be referred to a master-servant relationship more so than any partnership! There is a tenacious predetermination as it seems in wanting to hold national wealth by those who are hired to serve the tax paying population. They cannot seem to let go for fear of controls over the tax purse. The consequent disaster that has ensued is that the taxable community migrated to greener pastures leaving this short sighted bunch called rulers in the cold to simply keep borrowing. This borrowing is the real security risk to Pakistan and if it does not stop we will be sold out for all factors of production. Land labour and capital will all be alien owned. The ‘economic liberty within’ is the only real option available and this must be invoked without batting an eye. The West and the East are of no significance in our battle of finding a globally acknowledged economic validity, without a worry in the least of appeasing anybody except ourselves. The first law of economics is being secular! The ‘economic liberty within implies that the wealth of the nation based on the factors of production be liberated from the bureaucratic hold of the politicians, civil, judicial and military bureaucracy. An economic destination has to be identified with a clear non-alterable road map to it. The revenue stream that supports governmental expensewill not come donor plantedlaws, rules and conditionalities nor by economic managers they send to us. This is a given and we have flirted with this nonsense for decades to only take us deeper to our ruins. Governmental revenues come from the protection of wealth for the populace who produce wealth from enterprise and lean on the laws that protect their labour input. I rest my case. —Thewriteris an entrepreneur and author of the bookCurrentChroniclesbasedinKarachi.
