There are very serious lessons in the Senate election result for Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) and Prime Minister Imran Khan. Buying and selling of candidates is just one side of the story, although a very serious one that must be thoroughly investigated, but other decisions, most of which have come right from the very top, have played no small part as well. The most significant among them is that the selection of the candidate, Finance Minister Hafeez Sheikh, was not from within PTI and, when push came to shove, party members simply didn’t accept the so-called “parachuter”. For not only was Hafeez Sheikh not from the original PTI team, or even the new PTI team that contested the election, he was just someone people had got used to seeing in almost all administrations and PTI turned out to be no different. There’s also the fact that Sheikh has been perhaps the most aloof of all senior members of the federal government. He has never cared to mingle with his colleagues, nor has he ever had much time to listen to people’s complaints or do anything to address any of them. All this eventually led to the upset in the Senate vote. That party voters remained loyal to the party itself can be seen from the fact that their woman candidate, Fozia Arshad, won her seat from the capital. The PTI vote bank, then, is intact, it’s just the selection of the candidate that was wrong. Then there’s the general economic slowdown. Things have been going downhill for quite a while now and people’s desperation, which reaches MNAs and MPAs whenever they visit their constituencies, seems to have contributed to the decision of some PTI members to vote against the man who was supposed to put the economy on the right track. And last, but not least, is the indefensible habit of giving ministries to people whose blunders never stop embarrassing and even humiliating the ruling party. Shehryar Afridi, for example, who first made the headlines for all the wrong reasons by swearing under oath that he had proof of Rana Sanaullah’s drug smuggling, etc, when none was forthcoming, has now wasted his precious vote for no reason whatsoever. If you are going to elevate such people to the cabinet, then such results are precisely what you are going to get. People have long said that PTI needs to build leaders and smart politicians from within its ranks instead of importing all sorts of non-elected people from other parties and other countries. Prime Minister Imran Khan must now take a deep inward look and find ways to improve the makeup of his cabinet and also put the economy on the right track, otherwise more unpleasant surprises await him. *