Budget of the bankrupt

So predictable that it didn’t need a hearing

Lucky Ishaq Dar. The bad news in his budget speech was overshadowed by Altaf Hussain’s arrest in London for alleged money laundering. It’s not a question of two countries, two laws. The difference is that there ‘they’ arrest wrongdoers; here we elect them and place them on the throne. Here we arrest the good doers while ‘they’ place them on the throne. Our political parties are corrupt mafias; their parties work for their country. That’s the real difference.

Making budgets for the bankrupt is wizardry indeed. Coupled with intellectual bankruptcy, it becomes nigh impossible and we get trapped deeper in the debt quagmire. When successive governments can’t even document the economy, what credence do their economic figures have? It’s all pie in the sky. Our real GDP is much higher than the official, thanks to our legal but undocumented ‘unofficial’ economy. Black money increases inflation and expatriate ‘remittances’ by changing black rupees into foreign currency and then recycling them back as whitened dollars. All the direct and indirect taxes combined that Pakistanis pay places them amongst the highest taxpayers in the world. And the amount we pay in bribes to tax collectors alone comes to more than our much-maligned defence budget. If you count all the amount that goes in bribes, kickbacks and commissions to our federal and provincial governments it will make your hair stand on end. If we could reduce corruption by half, the government would have enough revenue to meet its needs and be in surplus. Democracy Pakistani style, thy name is corruption.

I confess I wrote this a few hours before the budget, so predictable was it. I was not wrong. Thus I will not analyse the budget; enough people are doing it. I will only make some observations, ask some questions and underline what should have priority for economic managers. You answer them. From your answers will come the answers you seek. Figures given on the day are usually revised anyway, so don’t take them as gospel truth.

Budgets are an annual ritual. Their relevance comes from the trepidation their coming evokes. What we need are relevant five-year plans to which governments stick assiduously. Sadly, our planning commission is dead, a corpse being borne by incompetent pallbearers with specialist pretentions. With five-year plans budgets are reduced to government’s performance reports and their efforts to stay with the plan. People expect more from ‘democratically elected governments’ than from military ‘dictatorships’. Pity that they always get more from the latter and less from the former.

Budgets are an annual ritual. Their relevance comes from the trepidation their coming evokes. What we need are relevant five-year plans to which governments stick assiduously. Sadly, our planning commission is dead, a corpse being borne by incompetent pallbearers with specialist pretentions.

The first duty of a government is to improve the human condition. But here the poor don’t figure. Dar confesses that half our people live like wild animals below the poverty line, up from 34 per cent in the supposed dictator’s time. People in poverty are much more, around 75 per cent. The real yardstick to judge a budget is the effect it has on people, starting from the poorest. Are they giving importance to human happiness? The pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human right that is the bounden duty of governments to enable and provide the wherewithal for. What importance are they giving to reducing population growth, the biggest volcano we are sitting on? What about reviving non-existent policing and maintaining law and good order? Without security you can forget investment. What is there for improving the dignity of the citizen and his family by assuring cheap food security, housing, clothing, education, health, clean drinking water, utilities, transport and protecting him and his family from libel and defamation? What are they doing to stop the spread of ignorance in the guise of education? What are they doing to protect people from the ignoramus disguised as educated? What are they doing to end open season on religious minorities, women and children? What else can one say when a pregnant woman is stoned to death by her father, brother and other relatives for doing the Islamic thing of marrying by choice, a gruesome event that took place in the precincts of the Lahore High Court with the judges sitting only yards away. In fact, the chief justice of that court is being elevated to the Supreme Court. What is the government doing to end this charade of justice? A photograph of an Islamabad High Court judge kissing the self-confessed killer of Salman Taseer is going viral on social media. The man should be thrown out. Where is the much-vaunted Supreme Judicial Council or is it supreme no more? Is the government doing anything to end slavery and bonded labour? When will it stop this calumny? Does everything I say have anything to do with the budget? Yes, because these and much more are the duties of a state that pompously calls itself Islamic and budgets have everything to do with them.

Is all the talk of alternate and renewable energy sources like solar and wind power to end our needless energy tragedy all showcase poppycock? Does the budget enable agriculture, the backbone of our economy? Will it enable direct investment or will growth come largely from services and stock exchange portfolios? Does it enable enough job creation especially in large manufacturing or are we going to get more franchised burgers, fried chicken and pizzas. Is there enough to start much-needed infrastructure upgrading and development without which direct investment becomes difficult. Or are we going to get only showcase projects, bulletproof BMWs and junkets for family and flunkies? Metro buses allegedly costing six times more than they should is hardly infrastructure.

What is being done to lessen dependence on imports and loans or are we consigned forever to being an import-based, credit-based begging, bleating, lying economy? Does the budget enable enhanced investment in small and medium enterprises that are the backbone of large-scale manufacturing, like vendorisation that makes parts for manufacturers? Is there any provision to create machine tool factories – factories that make factories? Considering that textiles are our largest industry, we cannot even make a full textile mill. To add value, are we going to focus on agriculture-based industry, like juice and juice concentrate, milk packaging, dried milk and its products, grading and packaging of fruit and vegetables, value added meat and poultry products and so forth? Are they educating the farmer on how to prevent fruit flies from infesting our fruit crops to increase their export? Will government make it mandatory and easy for farmers to provide filtered drinking water to their cows so that milk production can increase by an average of two liters per animal per day. With some 30 million cows and buffalos giving milk at any one time, our milk production will increase by 60 million liters daily. For the year it goes off the chart and Pakistan could become a major milk-exporting country again. Are we going to encourage beef farms considering that over seven million male calves die in the Punjab alone because they are no longer needed for ploughing and breeding, what with artificial insemination? When I last looked, the global market for halal meat was some $280 billion annually. Pakistan is not a player in it, nor is any other Muslim country amongst the first five, a shame considering that Muslims are the only consumers of halal meat, not to be confused with Jewish kosher over which different prayers are read. What is being done to close the energy gap rapidly, because without adequate and affordable energy you can forget economic growth and human wellbeing.

An economic survey appears a couple of days before the budget and softens us for its hard blows. Its figures should be taken with a pinch of salt given that our economic managers are world champions at fudging and creative accounting.

Will they start appointing competent managers to run our state-owned corporations to take them out of bankruptcy or is the privatisation at any cost mantra going to continue haunting us?

An economic survey appears a couple of days before the budget and softens us for its hard blows. Its figures should be taken with a pinch of salt given that our economic managers are world champions at fudging and creative accounting.

GDP growth at 4.14 per cent missed the target of 4.4 per cent but is the highest in six years though below what we had under Pervez Musharraf’s so-called dictatorship. Beating the Zardari era is nothing much, so don’t blow your deafening trumpet so loud, not until you do better than the Musharraf era. Agriculture growth declined, a disaster. Is there anything in the budget to provide adequate and timely water for farmers, timely seeds, pesticides and fertiliser at affordable prices? The recent strengthening of the rupee is based on lies that will soon be exposed and it will fall lower than from where it rose. The GDP growth figure is likely to be revised down to 3.8 per cent; the higher figure is to blow the trumpet. Next year’s target is one per cent higher. Without luck it is unlikely that our incompetent, alienated gaggle of economic managers can meet this target without fudging galore.

Are they planning to apply income tax on agriculture for those who fall in the tax slabs? Before bleating and defaming us that only nine per cent pay income tax, first properly tax the rulers whose tax payments are so embarrassingly low that don’t explain their expensive lifestyles. Next apply tax on incomes from agriculture falling in the tax slabs. That’s 23 per cent of our economy, the banal constitution and its deliberate misinterpretation be damned. That your tax-GDP ratio is 8.5 per cent underlines your incompetence, not our dishonesty.

At this rate, we seem forever condemned to being an economy dependent on imports and loans, perpetually defamed as tax evaders by our incompetent rulers whereas it is they and their governments that are the biggest defaulters of not just taxes.