Hope against hopelessness

Time and again Pakistan has been bashed and criticised for widespread corruption, terrorism, mismanagement, bad governance, poor economy and many other problems which have been ailing the country since long. The international community has been many times on its verge to declare Pakistan as a failed state which seemed unable to tackle its myriad problems. Most of the times there is widespread hopelessness surrounding the conditions from which Pakistan is going through. Even from the inner circles of the country, very less hopeful voices are heard which are not willing to applaud the somewhat minimal positivity going on. This general trend that nothing good is going to happen should be reversed with more hope and with highlighting the sectors and areas where Pakistan is actually performing better.

Recently Pakistan Stock Exchange (KSE-100 Index) was ranked as the fifth best performing stock market in the whole world in the year 2016 according to Bloomberg and still our stock exchange continues to grow in an upward trend. Although decades of internal political disputes and low levels of foreign investment have led to a slow growth in Pakistan, the embattled country has managed to succeed in attracting very positive reviews from numerous Western media houses, the World Bank and many globally-acclaimed credit rating agencies. Pakistan has beaten major Asian economies in stock market performance as our country’s benchmark equity index, the KSE 100, has been the fifth best performing throughout the world. It comes out that the improving political and financial stability is helping to revive Pakistan’s stock markets.

Corruption in Pakistan has always been like a widespread plague from the very moment it came into existence and it has been ranked among the highly corrupt countries of the world. But since the last few years Pakistan has been gradually improving on the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) by the Transparency International. Recently there has been a growing need and demand by the masses to reform accountability and anti-corruption policies at higher levels within the state government. According to the recent CPI 2016, Pakistan’s CPI score has improved by two points from 30 to 32 out of 100. The country’s rank in the CPI 2016 improved by nine spots to 61, in the list of most corrupt countries among 176 countries. For the first time since 1996 Pakistan climbed up from the lowest one third corrupt countries to the middle one third countries in 2016. Pakistan fared better than most of its South Asian counterparts coming in second after China in reducing corruption.

Though it is a minimal improvement but it is quite significant given the terrible situation of a corruption riddled state machinery. Still there is a lot to be done to reduce corrupt practices, but the silver lining in the grim scenario is that there is much awareness among the masses and the state institutions to strive for a corrupt free environment. Instead of lamenting on the dark side, if we start focusing on the minor improvements, the situation can go from worse to much better.

Another moment of pride for Pakistan came when according to The Economist magazine; the financial indicators suggested that Pakistan is the fastest growing Muslim economy of the world in 2017 ahead of Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey and Egypt. Pakistan’s estimated GDP growth is also ahead of four per cent GDP growth of Israel. This makes Pakistan world’s fifth fastest growing economy in the world, only behind India and China. This indicates that Pakistan has great potential to be one of the Asian tigers as the economy grows gradually. With the CPEC project, Pakistan’s economy will be able to jump ahead of many countries in the region.

The improvements are all indicated and acknowledged by international organisations which have appreciated the country’s efforts to stand on its feet and grow economically despite facing lethal internal and external problems. But still the image of Pakistan is negatively propagated in the international community and being Pakistanis it is our sole responsibility to project the less celebrated improvements in our country. It is not only the burden of diplomats to highlight the best image of Pakistan, but we as citizens of our beloved country, from all walks of life, are responsible. Where there are multiple negativities going out as news from Pakistan, let us all make a pact to at least project the best things happening to our country among the many worst. In all this hopelessness, let us create some hope.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 1^st, 2017.

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