When leaders don’t lead

Pakistan has always been a polycrisis state but there was always a dark horse — virgin — political leader, technocrat or dictator we could irrationally pin our hopes on to become our knight in shining armour. As multiple crisis collide — a nose diving economy teetering on the brink, intense political deadlock and polarisation, rising specter of terrorism — and multiply together in Pakistan today, perhaps the scariest emotions don’t come from the crisis themselves but that we’ve tried out all possible permutations and combinations of saviours and realised none of them work.

Imagine a nose-diving plane where the co-pilots and air traffic control are more busy addressing the passengers telling them it’s the other guy’s fault versus actually trying to take charge of the plane and rescue the situation as best as they can. The politicians blame the boys, the boys blame the politicians. The politicians say the boys interfere with our jobs. The boys say the politicians don’t do their jobs. One politician says the every other politician is corrupt. All the other politicians gang up to tell everyone that this one politician is an incompetent playboy who corrupts our youth. What’s fascinating is all of them want leadership positions but no one wants to lead. The real crisis is one of leadership. Let me explain.

If you’re the head of a family or the Prime Minister of a country, it’s fair for you to blame external factors for why you might be struggling. Things happen. Life is tough and the boys are rough. We get it. You’re not wrong. But where you are wrong is that after assigning blame, you don’t make any attempt to make things better. You deflect all responsibility versus taking responsibility. You don’t try to get even the things in your control right. And you don’t struggle to expand your sphere of influence over external factors. And it’s okay if you genuinely don’t have the spine to do it. But then get out of the way and let others lead. Don’t hold the entire country of 220 million people hostage to your cowardice, fear and decision-making paralysis.

So here we are today, with an abundance of leaders and a deficit of leadership. No one wants to be responsible for anything and no one wants to take any decisions. The Prime Minister and Finance Minister don’t want to sign a deal with the IMF because they don’t want to become unpopular before the elections but they also don’t want to call an election so a new government can come in and make unpopular decisions. What they don’t realise or perhaps they do is that not making a decision is also a decision. Not making decisions on the economy means that uncertainty rages and the economy continues to sink.

We are in an absurd position today where a government that overthrew another government midway through their term because they wanted to rescue the economy is now refusing to take any decisions to rescue said economy. They’re instead asking the boys to help them get funding from foreign friends after agitating against the boys interference in civilian domains. That’s because they blame the boys for a hybrid experiment over the last four years which, according to the PDM, ran the economy to the ground. But that doesn’t explain why they collaborated with the boys to overthrow the last government only to now blame the boys again and refuse to take any decisions. This is a hot mess and would actually be a funny game of musical chairs had the consequences not been so serious and devastating for the livelihoods of ordinary Pakistanis.

What Pakistan needs now is for every leader to step up within their sphere of influence and take responsibility. And it starts with us, the Pakistani public. We must demand that our vote count and that we’ll only vote for leaders who take responsibility rather than run away from responsibility and blame others. The road to resolving Pakistan’s polycrisis traverses through leaders actually leading and Pakistani citizens refusing to settle for anything less.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd, 2023.

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