Selling the state silver

We need to objectively appraise the privatisation experience to date.

We need to objectively appraise the privatisation experience to date. PHOTO: FILE.

It has been almost a week since the Cabinet Committee on Privatisation announced the government’s intention to sell 31 state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Yet, there is no sign of a debate about the wisdom of such a sweeping privatisation initiative. There are numerous issues at stake here, including the manner in which international financial institutions (IFIs) continue to dictate policy to our ostensibly sovereign governments and the potential impacts of privatisation on various segments of society.

Part of the reason for the relative silence is the weakness of the labour movement. Workers of the SOEs slated for privatisation are arguably as big a stakeholder as any other in decisions regarding the future of their organisations. In the past, even the mention of privatisation was met with fierce resistance by organised labour. While trade unions continue to take up such issues from time to time, they no longer constitute a countervailing power to the nexus of government, IFIs and private business that champions the privatisation agenda.

Indeed, there is now hardly any organised force in Pakistan that can influence economic policy in favour of the working classes. The situation is similar in most other countries of the world. When the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1991, the academic and policymaking elite coined the term ‘There is No Alternative’ to indicate that all of the world’s people would have to accede to the logic of free market capitalism. More than two decades later, only a handful of countries have been able to break with the global trend, even though uninhibited ‘neo-liberalism’ has produced spectacular failures, none more so than the global financial crisis of 2007-08.


We, in Pakistan, are very far from being able to move beyond this. At the very least, we should recognise the imperative of initiating a debate on crucial policy issues such as privatisation. We need to objectively appraise the privatisation experience to date and then make bold policy decisions in the interests of the working majority rather than catering to every IMF demand.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 8th, 2013.

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