It has been a terrible year for Nawaz Sharif and his family to say the least. From his own disqualification from active politics for life, to his heir apparent Maryam Nawaz facing similar consequences, as she too faces multiple NAB references, and his two sons being declared absconders by the same accountability court after failing to appear for any of their hearings.
In the thick of it was also Ishaq Dar, now ex-finance minister and Samadhi to Nawaz Sharif, who blatantly refused to vacate his post, despite being accused by NAB of amassing assets beyond his known sources of income.
Perhaps the evidence against Dar was too incriminating, which is why he thought it would be best to flee to London due to “medical reasons” after appearing before the NAB court only a few times. Those few times displayed a very different Dar who was practically being carried into the court by his entourage.
Not one to mince his words, or second guess his disastrous decisions directly affecting the economy, 2017 was the undoing of Dar, who until recently, was Nawaz’s front man without whose blessing one could not enter or even hover around that very exclusive group of people that had Nawaz’s ear.
It took some doing to convince Dar, a thoroughly stubborn man, to step aside. Even before he was facing NAB cases and in good health, Dar was an ineffective Finance Minister, so it was ridiculous to assume that he could do the job at all over Whatsapp, email and Skype from London, which was essentially the case for over a month after the sudden yet convenient deterioration of his health.
With Dar out, the rupee is finally free from his tiger grip. Since 2013, Dar made it his singular obsession to keep the Dollar-Rupee parity at an artificially appreciated level between 100 and 104. It is an unsustainable, and dangerous way to manage the currency of a country by indulging in market intervention on almost a daily basis, using its reserves that consist mostly of borrowed dollars.
It is no wonder then that in 2017 the rupee saw two to three incidents of rapid intraday depreciation, sometimes shooting up by 4 or 5 rupees and then coming back to Dar’s ‘acceptable levels’. What has happened as a result of not gradually depreciating the rupee over a period of years, as should have been the case from the start, is that it was done over a matter of weeks, making its effects inflationary.
Dar has now been replaced with an electable from Faisalabad, Rana Afzal Khan, who has little to no experience of running the economy of the country. While technically on extended leave, there seems to be no chance of Dar being able to regain any of his lost glory and the legacy he leaves behind is hardly anything to be proud of.
