Daily Times

Pakistanis still don’t know what to make of the decision of the Competition Commission of Pakistan (CCP) to impose the “highest ever” penalty of Rs44 billion on the sugar industry for “cartelisation, price fixing, and market manipulation.” And it seems that the government of Pakistan, of which the CCP is a very relevant and important arm, is just as unsure about what to make of all this. The Pakistan Sugar Mills Association (PSMA) is already up in arms because, it turns out, that two members of the CCP did not agree with the point of view of the chairman of the committee and actually voted in favour of the sugar mills that were eventually slapped with fines as well as the PSMA.

And now that it has come to light that the matter became controversial right at the outset of the investigation, and a decision was passed nonetheless, you can be sure that it will get tangled in all sorts of legal complications, which means that it will simply get lost in the honourable courts for at last the foreseeable future. So government officials should at least spare people their premature celebratory tweets because this matter seems far from over.

There’ also the small point that despite all such things that come to the headlines every few weeks, people have yet to notice any price rationalisation in the market; and that includes sugar and other items of essential daily use. So they can be forgiven for wondering about the purpose of all such investigations and verdicts when the end price of the products being investigated cannot be reduced. This is a very serious matter because despite all the good thing that are happening to some of our economic indicators, the quality of most people’s lives is not improving because the prices of the things they need to live are now beyond their reach. People have been shouting at the top of their voices about their own relevance in this country when its prime minister identifies mafias and special interest groups as responsible for artificial inflation in food prices and yet the state machinery cannot do enough about it to arrest that inflation. It seems there is nobody to answer their cries. Even the SBP governor, in his recent press conference, was all praise for the IMF and went on about how Pakistan was in desperate need of foreign exchange, but he didn’t say a word about the declining value of the rupee and how that is stoking inflation; or how he plans to fix it.

People have heard far too many promises from far too many administrations in this country. It’s time for them to see a real difference in their lives. Until then, they are not going to be impressed by things that sound fancy but achieve nothing. *