What we are seeing is a ‘loot sale’ of the assets of the people of Pakistan.
BELMONT, CALIFORNIA, USA: This is with reference to the article by Curtis S Chin titled “East Africa or South Asia: entrepreneurship key to growing jobs, fighting poverty” (February 11). What is being pushed in Pakistan these days is not entrepreneurship from the bottom-up by people who build enterprises with hard work and effort. On the contrary, what we are seeing is a ‘loot sale’ of the assets of the people of Pakistan. State-owned entities are only being managed so that they can be sold at the cheapest possible prices to cronies of influential people. Many state-owned entities have not even been given competent leadership in recent months. One only needs to look at what happened to nearly 150 state-owned enterprises that were sold off in the 1990s and during the rule of General (retd) Pervez Musharraf.
If privately-owned entities are really the answer to all the problems that we face, then why did the government of Punjab not ask some business group to set up the Metrobus project in Lahore instead of investing the government’s money in it? At the same time, state-owned entities are ready to be sold off to private business groups. One cannot have it both ways.
Shahid Jamil
Published in The Express Tribune, February 12th, 2014.
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