Pakistan – time for a charter of change

Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif has called for a ‘charter of economy’ and an urgent ‘grand dialogue’ on how to govern the country for the long term. What is the need for this? Decades of bad governance and poor management have created a critical mass of failures that threatens to force a formal economic default on Pakistan a la Sri Lanka. This has included, among others, economic failures, a political impasse on a vision for the national future and dysfunctional governance decentralization that imperils the federation.

 

Enter the proposal of a ‘charter of economy.’ This is a euphemism in Pakistan for a common basic agreements among key stakeholders, including political parties and the security establishment, to end Pakistan’s chronic political instability underpinned by bruising cycles of diametrically opposed economic policies every four or five years, repeated IMF bailouts that focus on emergency management only and prevent socio-economic development, corruption allegations that often fail to be proven in courts but fuel distrust in the State and hurt politicians who are detracted from governance. Additionally, the perennial divide on national priorities between the political classes and the security establishment serves to ensure political and economic instability.

 

A key reason for this menu of failures is the fact that the political parties are operating under rules of the political game that are so last century and which now must change if Pakistan is to become a normative state at peace with both itself and its neighbours. Hence the call for a ‘national dialogue’ to negotiate a national settlement on how to remodel rule-based and governance-based governance for the new times.

Since a ‘charter of politics’ is a harder sell in a fiercely polarized polity, the ‘charter of economy’ can certainly serve as the minimum common agenda not just among political parties but between them and the security establishment to allow new, pragmatic rules of the game in governing the country. The idea is that signatories of the charter will agree to stop ‘politics as usual’ by not undermining governments headed by their political rivals through protests and sieges or paint them as anti-people or anti-state, thereby allowing them to pursue unpopular but critically important economic reforms.

 

If signed by political parties including Sharif’s PML-N, Bilawal Bhutto’s PPP, Maqbool Siddiqui’s MQM-P, Asfandyar Wali’s ANP and Fazlur Rehman’s JUI – these are partners in the current ruling coalition – and endorsed by the security establishment, this would be a game changer in how politics of power can be separated from imperatives of economy in Pakistan. Imran Khan’s PTI refuses to engage in the process but once it is formalized, this too may change to engender a broader consensus.  

 

Among other promises, such a charter of economy would guarantee the following: completion of five years of a government including their chosen prime minister in office to allow for political stability; an end to the business of government being in business through a leaner and meaner federal government structure with fiscal devolution to the provinces to institutionalize economic stability; decentralization of governance; privatisation of subsidy-laden haemorrhaging state-owned enterprises; minimizing or ending the generalized subsidy regime; energy tariff rationalization; enhanced incentivisation of FDI; transition to optimal market-based policies; and expanding the social safety net for those living below the poverty line.  

 

And, of course, the mother of all guarantees: rebooting Pakistan’s foreign policy to premise it on economic imperatives rather than the now-redundant security priorities. This will allow Pakistan to restore long-strained political ties with India that is expected to unleash the artificially locked economic potential of one of the largest markets in the world – South Asia. Under current ‘rules of the political game,’ political rivals in Pakistan are intolerant of suggestions that New Delhi can be an economic friend of Islamabad while remaining a political foe, or that politics of hate can be parked aside to incentivise mutual economic interests to reduce the hate and allow a new socio-economic order for the region.  

 

Pakistan’s precarious economic situation has assumed an existential crisis. A grand dialogue among political parties and the security establishment must be called urgently to help generate the consensus that can pave the way for the proposed charter of economy. The drafted charter should then be tabled before the parliament for endorsement to lend it legitimacy and allow it to deliver upon its guarantees without anyone being called a traitor. This will usher in a new era of development and progress not just in Pakistan but also in the region.

– Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistan-based journalist, researcher and analyst with interests in politics, media, development and science.

Twitter: @adnanrehmat1