The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and also teaches at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He holds an LL M. from New York University where he was a Hauser Global Scholar. He tweets @HNiaziii
Twenty-eighteen was a year in which the rhetoric of transformational change gripped Pakistan. Imran Khan’s vision of Naya Pakistan is built around the idea of obliterating the old order to inaugurate a new and exciting era of rapid change. A Pakistan where income inequality isn’t quite so stark, the rule of law is applicable to all and justice isn’t a privilege of the rich. The same rhetoric took hold of our judiciary, where the incumbent chief justice made people believe, amongst other things, that judicial intervention could fix our country’s water woes. Transformational change got Imran Khan votes and the chief justice mass support.
Sadly, idealism without a little realism doesn’t achieve much. Incremental change is how countries achieve long-term goals. Not by constantly using sledgehammers to crack every nut.
Historically, transformational change has never been good for Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto thought he could integrate socialism into the country’s economic system with all the subtlety of a nuclear warhead. Nationalisation was supposed to transform the economy, instead, it killed it. Foreign investors ran for cover while small businesses were left scrambling. Bhutto’s bureaucracy was unable to cope with the sudden transition, resulting in what Roger D Long describes as a situation in which: “Inefficiency, malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance were the order of the day.” It would take decades for the economy to recover.
Iftikhar Chaudhry was another individual who thought he could transform Pakistan — this time through judicial activism. He tried to hammer the country into shape. It didn’t work. The PPP government, trying to make democracy work after nearly a decade of dictatorship, found their every move questioned by the judiciary, stalling many initiatives. Even after he retired, Iftikhar Chaudhry thought transformative change was what Pakistan needed. He penned a rather infamous open letter stating that Pakistan should adopt a presidential system because parliamentary democracy wasn’t working. But such solutions never seem to describe why a totally new system would give results any different from the ones we currently cannot achieve.
No nation should try to solve its problems by waiting for messiah figures. Transformative change just isn’t how we are going to get anywhere. Imran Khan is finding this out. It sounds fantastic when someone says we would never need the IMF again, that Pakistan would be self-sufficient, but we are finding out that reality doesn’t care for such promises.
Imran Khan isn’t the first one who was hit with the reality of how futile an agenda of transformative change can be, especially in a democratic system. Barack Obama campaigned on an agenda of transformative change, but as soon as he took office, he saw how that model would never work. The reason Obama was actually able to achieve some of his main goals was by being open to compromise. So, health reform was achieved while most of the power still lay with the private sector. Similarly, Franklin Roosevelt, in the midst of the Great Depression, could have thought about blowing up the system to replace it with something new — but he didn’t. As Paul Krugman writes, most of FDR’s major reforms were ‘add-ons’ not replacements of institutions. History shows us that these were the right choices.
We have yet to come around as a country to the mindset that change comes slow. By polishing and tweaking things one at a time. When things go wrong, we still scream for new legislation and new institutions, but only a few hushed voices talk about slowly fine-tuning the existing system to achieve big goals.
Pakistan needs to discover the virtue of slow, boring, incremental change. The change that actually works. We have, perhaps because of successive periods of strongman rulers, come to believe that one day we will find a leader who will wave his hand and make our problems magically disappear. We need to wake up from this lassi-induced dream and understand that our change agenda must be smarter than dreaming about heroes. Even Jinnah, our paragon of great change, didn’t get to create Pakistan at breakneck speed. The creation of Pakistan was achieved through a series of long and arduous incremental steps towards a larger goal.
The change we need to believe in is the one that produces results: the slow kind.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 8th, 2019.
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