The spatial awareness deficit

The term ‘spatial awareness’ is unlikely to be much bandied about in the corridors of power in Islamabad, but it is a vital cognitive ability and one our leaders would do well to attend a refresher course on. Simply put, spatial awareness allows us to understand the environment around us and our relationship to it, also to understand the relationship between two objects and to visualise objects from different angles. Humans develop the ability from childhood, some better than others. There has been a lapse of spatial awareness regarding the recently announced ‘radical reform package’ by Prime Minister Abbasi. In devising the package it seems that the PM and his team overlooked the presence of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in the cognitive environment, an elephant in the room whose presence ought to have applied the handbrake to their endeavours regarding taxation.

It is now reported that the FATF has written a letter to the government expressing its alarm about the tax amnesty scheme for the blindingly obvious reason that it offers any number of loopholes for the whitening of dirty money. How is this going to play in the FATF? Poorly, given that Pakistan did not seek permission for such a move from the FATF before the announcement, and the FATF is going to be the body making the recommendation as to whether or not Pakistan should be blacklisted rather than grey-listed as a country doing insufficient to fight terrorism and specifically the financing thereof.

The FATF has termed this a ‘lapse’ on the part of the government — which it has also to be said does not have the support of the Federal Board of Revenue in all of its proposals. All in all, this is weapons-grade bumbling incompetence that points to deficits in a skill-set that is an essential part of macro-governance — an awareness of the environment that surrounds and how the movements of one player affects the movement of others. If Pakistan is blacklisted in future then it has nobody but itself to blame, and the PM needs an urgent rethink on tax proposals that open back doors to terrorist money.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 8^th, 2018.

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