Privatisation questioned

We need to erect a sound legal and prudent decision-making forum to ensure right prize for dwindling assets

The government’s privatisation strategy was floored by the World Bank which has gone on to question its veracity. While expressing its distrust in the process of handing over of State-Owned Entities to the private-cum-foreign sector, the international consortium grilled the adverse impact of judicial activism, political pressure and lethargy on the part of bureaucracy. This means that the current policy of privatisation has run into snags and international investors and financiers have taken a strong exception to its module in vogue. The fact that the World Bank advised public offerings through stock exchanges under the oversight of a special joint committee of the parliament simply underscores the desire for more transparency and involvement of public voices at the helm of affairs.

At a time when Islamabad is eager to sell off its white elephants and bag some big money at a crucial time of cash-crunch, this strongly worded advisory and reservations are a bad omen. Moreover, it was embarrassing that Pakistan’s SOEs are some of the most underrated and loss-minting units with almost zero credibility. This underscores the reality that we have been keeping alive bleeding units for the sake of appeasement of quarters in our national life. Thus, such units being listed as ‘substantial financial risk’ should come as an eye-opener for the authorities that are at a failure in fixing the problem at macroeconomic level, and letting the dead wood stay put in our economic corridors.

Pakistan is in need of a transparent and meritorious privatisation deal. It goes without saying that we ruined our national assets owing to our laxity, corruption and unprofessional sense of ad hocism. Apart from breathing life into some of the vital assets, rather than jumping over the gun to throw them away for peanuts, what needs to be done is to erect a sound legal and prudent decision-making forum for ensuring the right prize for the dwindling assets at hand. The Bank has curiously also questioned the soundness of legal judgments in big-ticket projects that have come to derail the entire inertia and trust. Time to rewrite a new privatisation decorum.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 10^th, 2023.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.