Daily Times

It’s good, in a way, that news of the current account deficit doubling to $1b in March has come when the finance minister is in Washington, trying to restart the IMF bailout program; so everything is properly on the table before diving into the details of just how traumatic a possible arrangement is going to be for the government and the people of Pakistan. It also shows two very important things. One, the previous government had realised that the game was up by the time former PM Imran Khan had suddenly cut petrol and electricity prices and then froze the new rates till the budget. Because there’s no way that the budget could be balanced after it and there was nothing better to make the PTI look good in its last days and whoever came next look bad because they would have to remove this subsidy in order to survive.

And two, the opposition of the time had no idea what it was walking into beyond the fact that it wanted Imran Khan’s scalp and didn’t care about what would follow. It had no plans about rescuing the economy; which is basically why it has fallen on Imran Khan’s old line, that the previous administration left things in such a bad shape that it would take a while to get a handle on the situation. And so we go round in circles. But the important thing to note is that all this fuss is partly because we need to be in the good graces of the IMF but also because we desperately need the next $1b worth tranche that has been held back since Imran Khan got the program suspended.

It’s already a shame that we have to bend over backwards for the release of funds equivalent to only one month’s worth of CAD. And this is because the top priority of our entire political elite is to come out on top, for which they need to run the other in the ground, even if doing so ignores the economy and the people that depend on it. Bloated CAD also shows just how wrong PTI’s economic managers were when they thought that they could really keep it in the $2-4b band for the duration of the fiscal year. Unfortunately, politics has been reduced to an automatic victory for whichever person or party can shout the loudest and win ugly badmouthing contests in full view of the public. But things like CAD don’t care about such issues. If only the politicians understood such things.

It seems the people must, once again, tighten their belts to pay for the mistakes of the people they vote into the parliament to represent them. *