Partners of convenience band together to push personal interests
Does it ever feel like everything that has happened with PIA has been completely, utterly predictable? From government to IMF and from PIA unions to political parties, no one has gone against the script.
The latest push towards PIA’s privatisation came from IMF. Why? Pakistan is two and a half years into the three-year IMF programme, which was to give Pakistan a total of $6.7 billion. Already there are calls from certain quarters that we’ve received whatever benefit we could from loan programme and it’s now time to kick the IMF out.
The government, however, has shown willingness to bend to IMF’s demands even against popular sentiment. This became apparent when the government imposed Rs40 billion in new taxes to meet IMF requirements for the EFF.
The opposition at the time tried to weave a narrative of the government bending over backwards to please its puppeteers but the movement never gathered momentum as the government was able to create a counter narrative of the new taxes being imposed only on luxury items.
What was at stake was a tranche of about $500 million, so it did not make sense to lose over Rs50 billion because you didn’t want to impose Rs40 billion in taxes.
This time, the numbers do not add up, not from any angle.
First, the government is losing Rs500 billion every year on loss making enterprises. To put it into perspective, that is one Kissan Package and one Metro Bus Project every year. Ask anyone, if they were to choose between a Kissan Package that could benefit millions of people or paying 19,000 PIA employees to do the work that less than 4,000 people should be doing, I don’t think the choice would be very difficult.
But blaming over-employment alone for all that is wrong with PIA would not be fair either. There has been serious financial mismanagement for so long at the PIA that at this point it is more a disaster than an airline. PIA’s losses, right now, stand at more than Rs600 billion. That is almost two Kissan Packages, mind you.
This, however, is not to suggest that the government is actually being swayed by long term national interest. When the PPP went down the same road a few years ago with PIA, it was the PML-N which opposed it tooth and nail and had some extremely bright ideas on how to bring the airline back from ruin. PTI’s election manifesto also called for privatisation of the ‘sick’ units in order to reduce burden on the national exchequer. Both PPP and PTI have now actively hijacked the PIA employees’ protest. Yes, I said hijacked.
But if they governments aren’t swayed by long term interests, the people aren’t either. Maybe, it is unfair for any of us to think that the PIA employees could or even should be rational with their livelihoods at stake.
But what you can count on at the end of the day is that someone always gets screwed at the other end. The best outcome for the PIA employees would be that the airline is not privatised and they get to keep their jobs until they eventually retire. But imagine spending your life working at a place where there are five people to do the job that you should alone be doing. Actually, now that I say it, it does not sound so bad.
You can argue that the people getting screwed in this scenario are the ones who won’t get education or healthcare because the government had to pay 15,000 people to do nothing, and you can argue back that the country loses more money than that to corruption in two weeks, or maybe if you’re Khursheed Shah you can say that let’s not build Orange Line Train and give that money to PIA, to which you can argue that an ant’s limbs are gramme for gramme, or in this case, miligramme for miligramme, more powerful than shock absorbers on a 747, but I’m guessing that’s not very helpful, or even true.
So the IMF is pushing the government to privatise PIA because it doesn’t have a lot to show for the $5 billion that it has given to the government. The government is going along with IMF because it’s economically expedient, but as soon as the political fallout begins to tilt the scales, the government will ask the IMF to shut up or leave.
The employees have their jobs to protect and the opposition parties think that the protesters can be used as a weapon to catapult them into power.
None of the players in this little saga have done anything other than what serves their own interests. Even the agencies with their beatings and their ‘missings’ have been true to tack. It is tempting to say that if one or two of the players rise above the parochial interests (why is everyone looking at the government?), the problem would be solved. But that just won’t happen.
So how will it eventually end? The way things have been going, it is clear that the problem will only be resolved in a backroom deal, maybe years down the road. Two, maybe all three of the political parties, will make a deal. The employees, they will eventually be screwed. They can count on that.
