Perpetual emergency

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif addressed the nation this week with a familiar script that fuel prices are rising, hard times demand sacrifice, and austerity is unavoidable — but don't worry, he'll absorb the pain wherever he can. Cabinet salaries suspended. Foreign trips banned. Iftar parties cancelled. Government vehicles off the road. Seminars moved from hotels to official venues. Read through the list and a rueful recognition sets in. This country has heard all of it before.

Cast your mind back no further than three years. In 2022, a similar national address accompanied a fuel and electricity crisis so severe that the government of the day shuttered markets early and dimmed streetlights to conserve energy. In 2023, a currency collapse and near-sovereign default forced emergency IMF negotiations, spending freezes, and solemn pledges of fiscal discipline that evaporated the moment the programme's first tranche arrived. Each successive government has stood before cameras and asked Pakistanis to bear a little more in the name of stability just around the corner. The corner never arrives. What arrives instead is the next crisis and the next set of austerity measures — announced with urgency, implemented selectively, and quietly abandoned once the immediate pressure lifts.

Monday's measures, whatever their sincerity, cannot be evaluated in isolation. Last Friday's Rs55 per litre fuel price hike - the largest single increase on record — added insult to injury by generating surplus revenue for the government while the public absorbed the shock. Now comes the promise of relief through austerity on the state side. But a state that cannot discipline its own expenditure in calm times cannot credibly summon that discipline in turbulent ones. Ordinary Pakistanis have run out of buffers to absorb the next emergency, whenever it arrives.