White elephants

The Pakistan Peoples Party’s (PPP) threat to mobilise protests against the privatisation of the state-owned Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM) defies all logic. Apparently, it was not enough for the PPP to run a near-disastrous economic policy while in office. It seems that the opposition will be spending its time trying to obstruct the government’s good ideas. And, perhaps more distressingly, the government does not appear to have the backbone to stand up to it and backed down from going ahead with its preferred plan. There are three possible options for the PSM: liquidate it entirely, continue bailing it out, or privatising it. Of those three options, the first is irrational, the second is insane, and the third is the only reasonable course of action available. The PPP’s own Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, the former federal finance minister, is on record as having acknowledged the need to privatise the PSM. So, what does the PPP seek to gain from protesting this?

The current leadership of the party seems bent on flogging dead ideas to an electorate that is quite clearly tired of them and yet even an electoral drubbing in May does not seem to have woken up the anachronistic and out-of-touch leaders of what was once Pakistan’s leading fount of political thought and intellectual activity. But while the PPP’s intellectual stagnation is deplorable, the Nawaz Administration’s refusal to stand up to such craven populism is equally inexcusable. The PPP government had five years to fix the PSM and failed miserably. It has no credibility on this issue. Why is the PML-N, the party practically built on privatisation, scared of standing up for what it believes in?

Mercifully, Pakistan has a parliamentary system of democracy, which means that the party in power can afford to make tough decisions while disregarding opposition disapproval. This is not a power we would encourage the prime minister to use often, but on this occasion, perhaps it would be wise to remind the PPP that he has the option of ignoring them.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 28^th, 2013.

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