‘Healing’ from elite capture

The vast majority of talk around ‘elite capture’ carries a moralistic central implication: if only we had more honest individuals at the helm of key institutions. This is a grave error, because individuals aren’t inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — they simply respond to the incentives presented to them.

If tangible gains can be made via under-the-table dealings, one person’s refusal to partake simply means the opening up of an opportunity to the next in line. If they too choose to forego, a third stands to gain… and so on, until someone has finally capitalised. In this way, there is no net aggregate positive effect of taking an exit from the game. Even at a personal level, it merely amounts to a trivial symbolic victory — frequently at the cost of professional progression due to the lost ground to immediate competitors. An illustrative example is the horse-trading currently taking place to jostle together a government. Attacking the independent candidates’ characters and creating a ruckus about ‘elite-captured assemblies’ misses the more important reality of their having landed in that spot due to factors having little to nothing to do with their ability to govern, pass effective laws, or deliver services — primary responsibilities of democratic representatives, at least on paper. Is that not the more pressing concern?

Secondly, it can be asserted with certainty that in the modern world, access to financial capital is directly correlated with the ability to influence a) who occupies the power corridors, and b) what decisions they make as policy. This is done via several means in both developed and developing countries, such as lobbying, election financing, intermarriages among privileged families, controlling big media houses and setting the ‘parameters’ for their content production, and sponsoring universities and think-tanks to produce ‘research’ justifying myopic objectives. It would be foolish for someone in the position to be involved in the aforementioned domains not to indulge — and indeed, the vast majority do. This is part of the course: not a bug, but a feature. As Marxists have historically pointed out, this is why democracy and capitalism are opposing forces.

There exists a vast spectrum of states with varying degrees of authority captured by elites. The most ‘functional’ countries have managed to strike a balance between state and society and reformed their institutions to ensure merit, efficiency, transparency, and accountability for all personnel that are both employed and affiliated with them. This is done by promoting democratic norms that go beyond simple electoral cycles to ensure free speech and assembly — as well as the functioning of trade/student unions, farmers’ associations, and civil society collectives most broadly conceived whose responsibility is to keep a check on entrenched interests on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis for the vast majority. Other measures could be fostering inclusive urban spaces, curtailing the concentration of land ownership, promoting arts/culture activities, and redistributing income by taxing wealth and non-productive assets such as real estate.

Pakistan’s institutions unfortunately continue to be structured under colonial-era modalities of extraction, with hardly any attention paid to amending their internal managerial dynamics, incentive structures, or organisational cultures for purposes of modernisation and the boosting of efficiency. Worse is that the massively bloated bureaucracy is a central stakeholder in the country’s political ecosystem when its raison d’être is and has always been to simply execute the instructions of the Cabinet. Instead, it has been preoccupied with expanding perks, plots, and privileges for itself while closely working with the khakis.

Elite capture is not an individual level problem. It is not a social, moral, or cultural one either. Instead, it is a governance one. Any genuine ‘healing touch’ must involve much more than empty niceties being exchanged between mainstream parties: it must centre overhauling the colonial state apparatus.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 23^rd, 2024.

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