7 megathreats looming over Pakistan

In an age of information overload, with our attention focused on internal and external events – elections, regional squabbles, and the ongoing carnage in Gaza; little time is left to reflect on the many existential threats coming down the rail tracks. Humanity, in general, and Pakistan, in particular, appear tied down on these tracks like a silent movie heroine awaiting her doom.

Nouriel Roubini, an intellectual who has foreseen many earlier economic and societal breakdowns in his recent book, Megathreats, lists nine such threats and warns of "a titanic collision of economic, financial, technological, environmental, geopolitical, and social forces. Any one of these is formidable on its own. If they converge, the consequences will be devastating."

These should be chilling for Pakistan as seven of these megathreats directly impact us and clearly underly many of our existing economic and social fractures.

• Unrepayable debt: We breached that level many decades ago.
• Demographic time bomb: For us, this bomb has exploded with overpopulation and a young, relatively underproductive population.
• A boom-bust economic cycle: In our present abyss of bust, boom-bust volatility is probably a luxury beyond our reach.
• Stagflation: The last two years are an extreme example of how this can devastate a low-growth economy.
• Currency meltdowns: Similar to above.
• End of globalisation: For over 30 years, other countries like China, India and Vietnam have used this global trend to sustain high growth rates, investing in capabilities and capacity. Our rentier economy, however, allowed a narrow elite to let that opportunity slip away. Now, we continue to pin hopes on globalisation's fading investment and economic model to be a saviour.
• AI threat: AI will decimate low-end manufacturing in the retail and service sectors and, in time, impact even middle-income industries. Pakistan, stuck on the lower rungs of the global economic value chain, will lose any existing competitive cost advantage as our low-value added employment sectors will go the way of lift operators and VHS manufacturers in the '70s.
• New Cold War: Already playing out between China and the US. We have little ability to shape its direction, but, as in the proverb of the grass getting trampled as elephants fight, we, the grass, are already being flattened.
• Climate change: A threat barely mentioned 40 years ago now manifests in changing rainfall patterns, melting glaciers and severe heat waves. Pakistan has taken very few mitigating steps in previous decades, and soon, food and water scarcity and rising sea levels will become a reality - the Arabian Sea will neither spare poor fishing communities nor million-dollar homes in Karachi.

Pakistan's inability to effectively manage our country-specific challenges and the megathreats above can be traced back to one common cause: an institutional fragility arising from internal distortions and an elite capture starting in the first decade after independence and repeated and reinforced in the 70 years since.

As a result, a nation of 240 million people with a fragmented, inefficient system of government now sits at the focal point of multiple threats affecting their very existence. Historical blunders and criminal negligence have now come home to roost. The risk matrix facing Pakistan is flashing red and cannot be dealt with on an ad hoc basis.

Going back to our desperate silent movie heroine, no coiffed movie hero is going to miraculously appear to save her in the nick of time; we will have to do it ourselves or be crushed by oncoming events.

So, is all hope lost?

No! As long as realism and humility replace self-delusion and arrogance.

We have been walking on this road since the mid-50s and have reached a tipping point with a population seething in anger, frustration and despair. Unless addressed, these threats will now tip us over the edge.

Roubini is clear, "to delay is to surrender. The snooze button invites catastrophe. Megathreats are careening towards us. Their impact will shake our lives and upend the global order."

A nation can only succeed and take effective action to deal with its challenges if it is built on a foundation of inclusive economic and political institutions. Sustainable policies require all major institutions to demonstrate three key attributes: credibility, capability, and capacity.

Coercive systems don't provide this credibility, and sadly, over time, our institutions have failed with the other two attributes as well. Any thought that Pakistan's complex multiethnic society can be energised and its problems solved with 1980s-style, edict-driven, politico-economic solutions is pure fantasy. This approach has always failed, and with an increasingly disenfranchised youth, it will fail again now, but with far greater consequences.

The starting point must be a realisation that solutions require difficult and selfless decisions, setting aside personal interests, egos, likes and dislikes. Only when all stakeholders, most of all the people, feel their interests are aligned with a state machinery focused wholly and transparently on their economic well-being will a sense of unity and purpose emerge.

Let us revert to the philosophy of the Quaid and let our Constitution speak. Let us identify all key stakeholders, clarify their roles, and remove distortions in the politico-economic system. Once people develop confidence in this process and in their leaders, their elected government will have the credibility and capacity to impose fiscal disciplines, restructure the economy, implement administrative and judicial reforms, and build truly robust institutions that can focus on the future.

Will these steps by themselves be enough to deal with the train coming down the track? Of course not! They will, however, be the first step in building a framework of resources, capabilities, civil society and government institutions that will be needed to plan, execute and fund complex, multi-decade, interconnected strategies.

However unlikely this may appear now, we pray and strive that this direction is the one chosen. For the people of Pakistan, anything less will be an exercise in folly with dire consequences for which history's judgement will be unforgiving.