Daily Times

Our penchant for evading responsibility has become exceedingly clear to anyone observing Pakistan closely these last few months. Far from being transparent with the public, our finance minister continues to claim that the government has no part to play in the derailment of a $6.7bn bailout program that has the potential to twist the wheels of Pakistan’s fate and pull us out of the brink.

But without a functioning foreign-exchange market, it is highly unlikely that the loan will ever come through. What’s worse is that without the IMF’s vote of confidence, we have seen nearly $900 million worth of financing held up from adjacent multilateral lenders like the World Bank and Asian Infrastructure Bank, whose wariness to commit to more loans comes from fears that Pakistan will neglect its fiscal responsibilities once again.

While the rupee’s relative stability in the interbank market these last few months is a promising development, we are not done just yet. With around $22bn of external debt service for the next fiscal year alone, five times the size of Pakistan’s current reserves, we are swimming in murky waters. Debt default, once a remote nightmarish possibility is now on the table. The IMF’s concerns about the exchange rate suggest that another devaluation might still be in the cards for us, a hard-to-swallow pill both for the government and a public that is already crouching in the face of backbreaking inflation and unmanageable costs of living.

Our fall from grace shouldn’t surprise our politicians. After all, Pakistan’s troubles have been in the making for decades, largely on account of their negligence and inability to take things head-on. With each successive loan Pakistan accepted, it pulled itself further into a vicious cycle of dependence, entrapping it in a cage of its making. But tensions are especially high right now-political polarisation has never been worse, the country is essentially split into two halves, and our civilian institutions are weaker than they’ve ever been in the past. Indeed, no amount of support from international institutions can help us until we are prepared to come out of our comfort zone to formulate long-term adaptation strategies at home. *