Daily Times

“I am the one who starts this ‘fish’ storm. They don’t usually fight back. Most of the time they don’t even realise what we are doing. We have interests in this region, our countries. Corporations who run have interests here. So I show up all nice and friendly, all friendly to get them a loan to buy our services, which we know they can’t afford. Then we build their power plants, water works, freeways, it doesn’t really matter. When they can’t repay us the debt we own them.”

The above extract, painstakingly compiled from the actual movie, by playing, pausing and rewinding multiple times, since the quote, for some reason, probably conspiratorial, had not yet made it to the IMDB website, is from the movie No Escape. The story line is that Owen Wilson and his family — Americans obviously — are caught in the middle of a coup in a South Asian country, which can be deemed to be Thailand, since they are the nation who banned it, and in comes Pierce Brosnan (Hammond), a retired James Bond type who protects the family and kicks rebel backsides in the process. Hollywood seems to be getting obsessed with mocking Asian nations; just last year they ridiculed North Korea and its supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, in the movie The Interview. I wonder who will be next.

Nonetheless, let us get back to the above quote, or rather speech by Hammond, which gives justification behind why Thailand or the undisclosed South Asian country is facing a coup in the first place. For starters, ‘fish’ is a substitution since the editor will not allow the actual word. “They”, who do not usually fight back and do not even realise what is being done to them, are the poor saps that comprise the common men of the nation, which is being marginalised by a corporation whose interests control their own, the latter’s countries. The rest is fairly simple and appears to be a theme copied from the book The Confessions of an Economic Hitman, a book everyone you come across seems to have heard of and claims to have read but perhaps not understood.

Unfortunately, taking loans for power plants, waterworks and freeways that a nation cannot pay back is not the only methodology for being owned. Apparently, having lots of oil reserves and access to petro dollars is not an in thing anymore, especially in a regional war in which no one is sure about which side they are on. A message on Whatsapp attempted to explain why we have wars, when everybody knows that in a war both sides lose: “Because we are ruled by an elite group of psychopaths who own the banks that control the government and media. They fund both sides of war for profit and they manufacture the consent of the public through the propaganda of the media.”

Admittedly, this could all be hogwash. But then there are certain anomalies that can be observed. Pakistan is fighting a war, which most argue is not its own for that matter. And wars cost money, which we don’t have. So, we are borrowing from foreign banks to purchase foreign manufactured weapons to fight a foreign war and, in the end, whenever it does come, win or lose, Pakistan will be left with billions of dollars of debt to repay, which we cannot. And, on top of that, we are also borrowing to build power plants and borrowing for infrastructure. The IMF projects that by the end of fiscal year 2017-2018 Pakistan’s external debt will stand at $ 74.5 billion. For the record, beginning 2008, external debt stood at $ 42.7 billion and beginning 2013 it stood at $ 63.6 billion.

There needs to be a revisiting of a programme that results in increasing debt by two billion dollars every year for five years, after privatisation and huge increase in workers’ remittance. Irrespective of whether anyone does that or not, the above hogwash now has started to look less like hogwash, right? As regards whether or not elections in Pakistan are always rigged or not, and in the case of the former how much noise is justified before it gets irritating and everybody accepts rigging as a fact of life, find your own anomalies. But we are concerned with democracies even if not focusing on rituals such as holding elections.

“In all cases, the core idea is that over time political democracies create an environment within which ‘economic democracy’ can arise in the form of powerful trade unions, social democratic parties, responsive legislatures and other equalising institutions. It follows also that in ‘transition to democracy’ egalitarian outcomes should not be expected until sufficient time has elapsed for those strong equalising institutions to develop. And they may not develop at all; in unstable democracies, those that are threatened say by coup d’état, or are hostage to external creditors,” an extract from James K Galbraith’s book, Inequality and Instability.

On the positive side, the chances of a coup d’état are minimal since everybody believes that these kinds of things are now impossible in Pakistan. But whether we are hostage to external creditors is another story altogether; an educated guess: yes we probably are. But let us be positively optimistic, as all Pakistanis indeed are. Once we have paid off our $ 74 billion debt, right after the economy is transformed by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), let us say in the next 50 years, we can start building those equalising institutions. But how long exactly is over time before economic democracy can arise? To clarify, economic democracy is when income inequality is at its lowest possible levels. So, when do we start building powerful trade unions? Perhaps immediately after we dismantle them for the privatisation programme. Where do we get social democratic parties or a responsive legislature? Perhaps as soon as someone can explain to the common Pakistani what that means in the first place. Unfortunately, Mr Galbraith remains evasive about the timeline, the key to the Tilsim.

When exactly does Pakistan, after following all these political and economic policies, get to the promised land? Predicting the future is a dangerous business, prone to errors, since things are always never the same, or constant. So let us remain jubilantly optimistic and eat chocolate cake or, on the other hand, red velvet is a better choice for some!

The writer is a chartered accountant based in Islamabad. He can be reached at syed.bakhtiyarkazmi@gmail.com and on twitter @leaccountant