Life before and after FATF greylist

Pakistan was placed on the FATF greylist in 2018 right around the time when it had become obvious that Imran Khan would win the election, which he did. And then the grelisting ended for Pakistan the same year when Imran Khan was removed from power. Pakistan had been placed on the same greylist back in 2012 also and before that in 2008. Each time, the greylisting happened, interestingly it was right around that time in Pakistan when there was either an election or a transition of power had just happened. Quite a fate Pakistan has because globally governments are stable when their economies are stable but in Pakistan when the economy achieves some stability, the government is destabilised. And it doesn’t end there; now we have a rather more extreme version of that: the government has been lent more stability when the economy has long left the stability phase.

Greylisting by the FATF is done when a country is home to terror financing and money laundering. Pakistan was on that list for 4 years. And just as Arya Stark, being the little and weak member of the Stark family in Game of Thrones, eventually becomes the one who kills the biggest and the fiercest enemy of humankind called the White Walkers, the money laundering greylisting for Pakistan ended under the leadership of those whose chief claim to fame is, well, money laundering. Just as Game of Thrones is a work of fiction where the storyteller and the director decided to choose the most unassuming character to kill the threat, the movers and shakers of global politics have done nothing different here. This is just by design.

Because if the FATF greylisting means something, anything, then where are the changes that we can see and feel? Greylisting by the FATF limits a country’s ability to borrow money, which means the country’s inability to keep the prices of commodities in check and prevent inflation from reaching unbearable levels. Pakistan kept the inflation under check during, not after, the greylisting. We have not only seen unbelievable inflation but rather also that the economic troubles of the nation are so severe that the middle class has completely disappeared and nosedived into the poor category. For the vast majority of the people, life is all about survival now. They have cut down on their activities and their expenses. People have changed their lifestyles given the ever decreasing buying power.

Pakistan was removed from the greylist in October 2022 and Shehbaz Sharif, in the quintessential Mr Bean fashion, indulged in self-congratulatory rhetoric. However, we should not forget that life under the FATF greylist was not so tough. The dollar rate was stable enough where people did not have to worry about their next meal. People before may have been paycheck to paycheck but today they have relegated to meal to meal. We might as well be living the hunter gatherer lifestyle. I remember my grandmother had this weird habit of never throwing away stale bread and keeping it wrapped properly. It was because she came from meager means and it had become a habit to save the bread for the next meal, which could have been uncertain. Some of us are old enough to witness our elders do this. Maybe it would serve us to mimic those habits. Time to walk into their footsteps. Pakistan bent over backwards in order to fulfil the demands of the global money laundering and terror financing watchdog. We were all hoping and expecting that when that day comes when Pakistan would no longer be in the greylist, prosperity would start arriving in Pakistan. That there would be economic activity. Well, it all turned out to be like that Microsoft Windows screensaver; once touched, the beautiful wallpaper disappears and our ugly Excel sheet appears with ugly and boring numbers staring right back at us. I encourage all Pakistanis to enjoy this financial freedom no more restricted by the FATF and then smell some coffee.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, August 3^rd, 2023.

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