No concrete privatisation policy for 30 years: Bengali

Investors pinning their hopes on <br /> new government.

KARACHI: The future of privatisation in Pakistan and whether the government will come up with a concrete policy stirred interest among business students of Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (Szabist) at a seminar on “Privatisation in Pakistan – Myths and Realities” here on Monday.

Renowned economist Dr Kaiser Bengali and International Labour Organisation Director General Dr Zafar Shaheed gave a detailed introduction to privatisation and made it more of a lecture for the students rather than discussing the myths and realities.

Bengali said the previous Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government failed to find serious buyers in its tenure, had it found such investors, it would have privatised many state-owned enterprises and eaten up the proceeds.

Now, Bengali said, investors were pinning their hopes on the current government of PML-N, which had been active in the past as it managed to sell 90 companies in its first tenure from 1990-93. People believed that this massive sell-off drive had helped bring down the country’s budget deficit, but actually the case was not so, he said, adding the deficit fell in the wake of a significant reduction in development  spending by the government.

This clearly showed how miserably both the governments of PPP and PML N had failed to formulate a concrete privatisation policy in the last 20 to 30 years, he remarked.

Calling Pakistan Inter­national Airlines (PIA) and Pakistan Telecommunication Company giants of the corporate sector, Dr Zafar Shaheed stressed that PIA, which is in a sorry state of affairs with losses running into billions of rupees, should have been privatised years ago.

Responding to a question from a student, he pointed out that absence of policies did open up individual responsibilities, but their failure was the reason why privatisation could not kick off. As a result, the country lagged behind.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 1^st, 2013.

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