Budget 20-21 and bigger horrors | Talat Hussain

Syed Talat Hussain

There are lies, damned lies, and budget. But the Imran government did not have to lie much in this year’s budget. The economy stands naked, stripped of all pretension with zero room for misleading propaganda.

Facts are dreary. Last year’s 1.8 percent GDP growth is now in the negative. In the last 15 months, the country has borrowed itself sick, 18 billion rupees a day, almost double the speed of borrowing of the previous governments.

The country’s production in all sectors has declined, nay, collapsed. Even the agriculture sector’s potential has shrunk to its bare minimum. No one is investing and the government has shown no intention of bringing its non-development expenditure under control, from pensions to supporting a bloated bureaucracy.

Tax collection targets remain delusional. This is partly because of a mind-boggling incapacity to reform the FBR and partly because desperate measures need to be taken to somehow keep the economy breathing, and additional taxation is just not the way to do it.

Moreover, you can’t tax an economy that isn’t producing and where the consumer has no power to buy.

With the population growing at 2.1 percent and rampant unemployment and attendant poverty wreaking havoc, even retired General Asim Bajwa’s team that is now calling all the shots, cannot spin it for the public----who are the first and the only victims of an expanding mess.

And then there is political chaos spearheaded by the government’s visceral vengefulness and its complete destruction of the space to co-exist with the opposition. If the assembly hall where Hammad Azhar delivered a soulless speech announcing the budget represented a fish market, with hooting, banging of the desks and posters inscribed with unflattering slogans, it is because Pakistan’s political landscape has been made murkier than its economic realm. 

As IMF dictates its financial terms through its handpicked economic team, and the army runs most of the national affairs, the Imran government spends most of its ample spare time ramming into the opposition bleeding itself and the target with maddening ferocity. 

Those who think the US under Trump is the world’s most divided country should think again by looking at Pakistan.

What does it mean for the nation? Trouble, trouble, and more trouble---economic hardship, the disappearance of savings, and deterioration of qualify of life. The coming year, there will be poorer in Pakistan than at any time in its recent history. There will be more unemployed in the country than any time in recent memory. There will be a shrinking of social services on a scale that we have not witnessed before.

These projections are not based on conjecture. All international and internal assessments of Pakistan’s next two years agree on them with varying degrees of emphasis. This means that the country will witness such destruction of its economic, social, and political fiber that is unprecedented. That is writing on the wall that no amount of media control is going to scratch off. 

While the Imran government will always blame it all on the Corona pandemic, and there will always be people who would buy the tosh, the fact remains that Pakistan has been unhinged economically and politically because of the hubris of the spectacularly incompetent. 

Here life has always been tough and hard, especially for the resource-less, but never so nightmarish as it has become now. And the most heartbreaking part is that it did not have to be this way.

The dark and gloomy economic scenario is discussed at various platforms by various experts:

1. https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/pakistan/forecast-unemployment-rate
2. https://tribune.com.pk/story/2115274/2-millions-fall-poverty-line/
3. https://tribune.com.pk/story/2189904/2-coronavirus-forecast-render-18-5m-jobless/