- The videotaped message
On Thursday Prime Minister Imran Khan urged Pakistanis to avail the recently-introduced tax amnesty scheme and declare their assets. Socio-economic problems like tax dodging and hiding wealth can only be resolved through well-thought-out policies based on the understanding of ground realities. Mr Khan must have realised by now that when he said that people did not pay taxes to a corrupt government he was badly misguided as tax collection has gone down further under the PTI administration. He did well to follow his much maligned predecessors by announcing a scheme to whiten black money, thus setting aside his earlier moralistic objections. As before, this would bring some more people under the tax net. There would however be a need for further measures to deal with the big chunk of people who would still prefer to remain unrecorded. He is badly mistaken if he thinks that the holders of illicit wealth will declare their assets through appeals, moralistic harangues or displays of acts of piety on the PM’s part alone.
The holier-than-thou stance has been the undoing of Imran Khan. Many would appreciate it if the PM made a clean breast of the fact the he had little understanding of the economic challenges faced by the country and no plans to deal with them when he fought the elections. After coming to power Mr Khan collected several well-known economic advisers, who were often found disagreeing with one another and advocating contradictory solutions. For instance, the team remained divided over whether to join the IMF programme till the end. Others who were assigned the task of implementing policies, relied more on hopes, expectations and miracles than on ground realities. In January PM’s advisor Razzak Dawood said the PTI government would achieve the target of the “highest exports in the history of the country.” On Wednesday he confessed his earlier projections of $27-28 billion exports were unrealistic and even his present ‘realistic’ figure of $25 billion may not be achievable.
It is time Imran Khan stopped delivering sermons. It is useless on the part of a government leader to state problems, much more so to grieve over them. What people expect from the government are solutions.
