Reshuffle

It was a culling of the PTI’s poster boys. A fresh start after a difficult eight months in power. Some call it tough decision-making, others call it indecisiveness. I guess it all depends on whether you see your glass of tabdeeli half empty or half full. But even the most stubborn PTI supporter would feel a tinge of sadness at the way Asad Umar was forced to leave.

For years we have heard that Asad Umar was the PTI’s economic messiah. A man with credentials rather than the nepotism fuelled appointments made by previous governments. Umar knew how to fix the economy, the people had to just hand over the controls to him. This was one of the reasons people voted for the PTI. They wanted to see Asad Umar as the Minister for Finance. His ouster hits the PTI’s optimistic voters hard. Now, instead of a man who was elected running the economy, we have the unelected Dr Hafeez Shaikh running the show. For the PTI voter, this must feel like the equivalent of being kicked while you’re down. The good doctor has been here before, during the infamous reign of the PPP. The same government that Imran Khan partially blames for the gradual descent into chaos of the economy. What message does this lateral hire send to the PTI faithful? Asad Umar has been part of the PTI for more than seven years by my count. Rather than appointing someone from within his party, Imran Khan has dragged out a man who should be bearing some of the blame for the PPP’s economic failure.

And that’s why this reshuffle is problematic. It shows that Imran Khan has some serious trust issues. He has dispensed with the PTI’s core team to replace them with an old guard known for having been a part of the government of a dictator. For all his cricketing analogies, Imran Khan has picked a strange cohort of players. It’s like replacing an untried, yet promising fresh team with a group of players who got knocked out of the group stage without securing a point. What does this do for the PTI’s image? How can it be seen to be different, its hallmark of electability, if it is made up of the same people that called the shots during the very past governments that the PTI blames for the mess we are in?

Umar’s abrupt departure doesn’t just send a message of gloom to the PTI’s supporters, it also sends a message of instability regarding Pakistan’s economy. Umar inherited an economy that was plummeting towards rock bottom. For that the PTI needed a concrete long-term plan. That plan proved elusive from the start, but to borrow from the PTI’s own defensive repertoire: it’s only been eight months.

I agree, to some extent, with that. Asad Umar deserved more time. He didn’t even get to present the PTI’s first annual budget in Parliament. He was sacked smack in the middle of IMF negotiations. Either Imran Khan has become a slave of his own rhetoric — where he also believes that transformational change can happen in a few months — or he doesn’t understand how big a project it is going to be to get out of this economic mess for anyone.

Cabinets get reshuffled all the time in democracies. Imran Khan has not done anything illegal, but the way this reshuffle has been executed makes it seem like a knee-jerk reaction to tabdeeli not happening fast enough. Some of the decisions just fail to make sense. Fawad Chaudhry has been moved to head Science and Technology, because of his mastery of the sciences I assume? We don’t know, no reasons have been given to us for this move by the Prime Minister. Ghulam Sarwar loses his ministry because of flubbing LNG orders and sudden rises in domestic gas prices. Sounds reasonable. The baffling part is then why is he now running the aviation ministry? If he couldn’t perform, why is he being given another important ministry?

Of course, we can’t forget Ijaz Shah’s appointment. This one is even more interesting. The Prime Minister was holding on to the Interior Ministry, apparently to show just how seriously he took it. Whoever he was going to give it to was always going to indicate the way Imran Khan wanted things to be run. What does Ijaz Shah’s appointment say? Only more people on the ECL, more curtailment of certain basic rights, and more threats towards opposition members.

Perhaps the saddest part of the cabinet reshuffle is how democratically elected individuals have been tossed aside in favour of unelected technocrats. It shows Imran Khan’s shift towards a more centralised model of power. Imran Khan currently has thirteen unelected special assistants holding important government ministries and divisions. Perhaps this watering down of democracy could be excused if these were people that were brimming with credentials for these jobs. They aren’t. According to some sources, the only reason Firdous Ashiq Awan seems to have gotten the Ministry of Information is because she has been more aggressive towards Imran Khan’s critics.

If Imran Khan wants to retain the trust of his supporters, he must be open about why this reshuffle was deemed necessary. That doesn’t mean tweeting out cricketing analogies regarding batting orders. He owes the people better. People voted for Asad Umar; they deserve to hear from the Prime Minister himself why unelected individuals are now calling the shots over their daily lives. Imran Khan promised us a more transparent decision-making process on his part, we need to see it. The PTI’s supporters deserve to know why loyalists from the PPP and the PML-Q are being awarded key positions in government.

The people need to know the Prime Minister has a plan.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 23^rd, 2019.

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