No official concern either
Little surprise, in hindsight, that the $600 million obtained from ADB over the last three years to streamline Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs) has gone waste. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SECP) was quick in formulating the Corporate Governance Rules 2016, and some private sector individuals were apparently put on public sector boards, but that is about as far as the project went. They were never granted any working powers and the bureaucracy maintained its iron grip on PSEs as they continued to hemorrhage hundreds of billions of rupees every year. It seems critics questioning the exercise at the time of going to the ADB, whom the government criticised as enemies of progress, etc, now stand vindicated.
It’s not just that yet another attempt at doing something about PSEs has gone waste. It is also that the $600m could not just have gone to money heaven. There should be some sort of an investigation about the fate of the funds. If they were properly directed and the project still collapsed then incompetence as well as corruption should be looked into. And if not all the money that came to Pakistan was routed to the project, then parts of the official machinery responsible for this corruption should be found, exposed and punished.
PSEs, it seems, have been a drag on the economy since forever. The concept of them providing service delivery to the people and earning revenue for the government crashed a long time ago. Ever since our so called decade of democracy, especially, they have been bloated with incompetent political appointees. Talk of privatisation never ever took off because they were never in a position to be put up for grabs. And no government, whether democratic or dictatorial, with foreign funds or local ideas, has been able to turn them around. Once again, after another failed attempt, they will be put on the backburner.
