The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.

It is hard to poke holes in the PTI’s economic policy which highlights and addresses pressing problems of economics and governance confronting us without telling us that milk and honey will begin to flow the moment the PTI is voted into power. Being the sensible and pragmatic CEO that Asad Umar has been, he has told us that there are no quick fixes to Pakistan’s maladies, but neither are they incurable. Essentially his party will try and enhance our resource pool, curtail state opulence and undesirable expenditure and use the money freed up to reduce budget deficit on the one hand and invest in basic citizen services (health, education and skill development) on the other. What is there to disagree with in any of this?

Yes, the devil is always in the detail. The PTI says it will come up with sector-wise specific policies that will include implementation plans. We should critically review the macro plan and the detailed policies. We should examine if these policies and plans address the problems that are holding Pakistan down. We should scrutinise PTI’s priorities reflected in these policies and determine who will they benefit. We should analyse whether they are pure rhetoric or can actually be implemented. We should compare and contrast them with the policies and performance of the other mainstream parties – the PPP and the PML-N. Why is it that we have seen none of this in the public debates since the release of the PTI’s economic policy?

The media’s perfunctory and cynical response to PTI’s economic policy is worrying. The problem is not that the media didn’t like the policy but that it is not interested. We are interested in the Swiss letter and whether or not the Supreme Court will send another prime minister packing. We are interested in corruption scandals and who all can be named and shamed. We are interested in conspiracy theories of all sorts, in gossip, in violence. We have ample time and energy to be cynical and dismissive, but none to be constructive. We love the blame-game but have no interest or patience to engage with the real issues. If the media sells what people buy, what does its lack of focus on problem-solving say about us as a society?

It is not just that health and education are not sexy and scandal and dirt are. The rationality deficit we are witnessing seems rooted in an entrenched sense of defeatism and doom. In The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of fear, humiliation and hope are reshaping the world Dominique Moisi explains that he has chosen these three emotions as “they are closely linked with the notion of confidence, which is the defining factor in how nations and people address the challenges they face as well as how they relate to one another.” This monograph should be mandatory reading for thought leaders and decision-makers in Pakistan as it invites one to self-examination and the need to quit feeling sorry for oneself.

Moisi explains the three emotions as follows: “Fear is the absence of confidence. If your life is dominated by fear, you are apprehensive about the present and expect the future to become ever more dangerous. Hope, by contrast, is an expression of confidence; it is based on the conviction that today is better than yesterday and that tomorrow will be better than today. And humiliation is the injured confidence of those who have lost hope in the future; your lack of hope is the fault of others, who have treated you badly in the past. When the contrast between your idealised and glorious past and your frustrating present is too great, humiliation prevails.”

Moisi then argues that, “humiliation without hope leads to despair and the nurturing of a yearning for revenge that can easily turn into an impulse toward destruction: if you can’t reach the level of those you feel are humiliating you, at least you can drag them down to your level.” “The weight of memory and resentment,” he contends, “constitutes the most severe obstacle to change.” Moisi’s thesis is that China and India emanate hope that is reflected in Asia’s upward trajectory. Since 9/11, the West has been defined by fear that is making it insular and static. And the Muslim world’s sense of humiliation sans hope is degenerating into hatred and manifesting itself through destructive violence.

Let’s now revisit our response to the PTI’s economic policy. There have been two main criticisms of the policy. The first is that it has produced no novel ideas and is “old wine in new bottles”. Are we really confronted with novel problems that can only be resolved by rocket scientists? Do we not know what our problems are or for that matter even the solutions? We live beyond our means. We don’t pay taxes. We have not invested in the health, education and skill-set of our citizen. We have not invested in maximising and exploiting the potential of our human and material resources. We have not invested in our enforcement and service delivery mechanisms that are now moth eaten and so the writ of the state is in shambles.

The Motorway police is efficient and respected. Nadra is a success story despite being a public-sector enterprise. Hospitals like Shaukat Khanum and Aga Khan inspire confidence. Engro is a Pakistani corporate that competes with multi-nationals and excels. None of these organisations employ rocket science, as none is needed. To turn Pakistan around we don’t need to get too creative. All we need is sincerity of purpose and the discipline to implement common sense solutions. And this brings us to the second major criticism of the PTI’s economic policy: getting everyone to pay taxes or their utility bills will not be easy and thus PTI will not be able to implement its policies.

This is a legitimate concern. Once bitten twice shy, they say. We have been chewed up for the last 65 years. Public office holders have made promises during election campaigns or in post-coup speeches and not kept them. We are reluctant to trust leaders because we have been deceived all too often. While this is true, it is not policy critique. It is a credibility and performance issue. Being critical is one thing, but let us at least ask the right questions. We are just entering an election cycle. If we wish to change the politics of patronage that we so despise, there is little room to be lazy. The onus of making our politics issue-based is as much on us as it is on political parties. Let us force all parties to present and defend their policies and performance and then choose who we wish to vote for.

The content of the PTI’s economic policy is sound. It has a worldly – dare one say, secular – overtone in a sense that it is focused on doing well in political and economic terms in the world that we have, and doing well now instead of in the hereafter. And herein lies the paradox: on crucial social and ideological issues – the protection of individual rights, the treatment of the ‘others’, our place in the comity of nations as well as our purpose as a nation state – that are reflected in debates about human rights, national security and foreign policy, the PTI seems to be standing beside retrogressive religious forces for whom faith is not connected in any positive way with the improvement of daily lives.

The PTI’s simple and sensible economic policy rightly requires Pakistanis to undergo behavioural change. But our problem is as much cultural and ethical as it is political and economic. For the PTI to be a force for positive change it will need to be as progressive and bold in approaching social issues as it is in the realm of governance and economics.

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The PTI’s economic vision is based on five national emergencies that have to be declared to deal with the core structural problems of Pakistan’s economy. The first is energy reform. The key elements of resolving the energy crises include changing the fuel mix, revamping the rundown low-efficiency generation and distribution system, fast-tracking new generation capacity and gas imports, incentivising exploration activity, developing the local coal reserves, harnessing the hydroelectric potential of the country, utilising its renewable energy potential and getting the regulatory and incentive structure right for the whole energy sector. Detailed work on most of these aspects has been done, and is underway in a couple of areas. Just the conversion of furnace-oil based capacity to coal would save approximately four billion dollars a year and we would be able to get rid of the circular debt crises by reducing the cost of power generation, instead of increasing tariffs. Recognising the importance of fixing the energy crises we have included 20 billion dollars of government investment in this sector in the five-year period. Private investment will be in addition to this.

The second emergency is the need for raising revenues. Everyone knows that a modern economy cannot be run in a manner that meets the expectations of its citizens, and is globally competitive, with a tax-to-GDP ratio of less then 10 percent. The three broad thrusts of the revenue improvement strategy are administrative reform which professionalises the FBR and insulates it from political and bureaucratic influences, deployment of technology for improving the tax collection effort and minimising leakages, and direct tax measures on those who have successfully evaded being a part of the tax net so far. The basic principle to be used for the tax policy is “taxation regardless of source of income.” The blatant double standards of the current tax policies of the federal and provincial governments will be done away with. Minimum assets tax which is adjustable against income tax paid, tax on agricultural income, which brings it effectively at par with other sources of income, the law of pre-eminent domain for property taxation, etc., are some examples of the taxation measures which are proposed. Given that the system is rotten to the core, some time will provided to people to come clean and pay their due taxes at the normal tax rates. After that full force of the law will be applied to bring to justice those who are cheating on taxes.

The third emergency is on expenditure reform. The key elements of expenditure reform include eliminating the losses of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The single biggest chunk of this saving, almost 400 billion rupees per annum, will come from the energy-sector reforms explained above. In addition, by taking the SOEs outside the purview of the ministries and insulating them from political interference, placing them in control of professionals, we will achieve significant improvement in their performance. The second major element is reduction in the ministries from 37 to 17. The third part deals with across-the-board cuts in the least value adding expenses in all civilian and defence expenditure to bring them in line with our fiscal reality. In order to create transparency and accountability of government expenditure a key reform measure will be to effectively operationalised the access to information laws and empower citizens to get engaged in ensuring that their taxes are being used for their welfare, and not for lining the pockets of corrupt elements. The fiscal improvements as a result of the revenue increases and expenditure reduction will bring debt servicing expenses as a proportion of the economy down by about one percent of the GDP.

The combination of the expenditure curtailment and revenue measures outlined above release total resources equal to nine percent of the GDP or in terms of absolute numbers with the size of the current economy about 2,000 billion rupees per annum. About one-third of this will be used to bring the deficit down to a sustainable level. The rest will all be spent on the fourth emergency...human capital development. No nation can compete in the global economy today, nor can there be sustainable poverty reduction, without investing in its people’s health, education and skills as a priority. The PTI economic vision makes a commitment to a quantum leap in this area. The expenditure on education will be increased from approximately two percent of GDP to five percent. In absolute terms, with the growth of the economy this would be an approximately fivefold increase. Similarly, in health the commitment is to increase the total expenditure from the current less then 0.9 percent to 2.5 percent. Again, in absolute terms, this would be equal to a six-fold increase.

Which leads us to the issue everyone is rightly interested in: implementation. We believe that without deep institutionalised reform we cannot achieve the creation of a welfare state which we, and tens of millions of Pakistanis, desire. Hence, institutional reform is the fifth emergency in our five-pillar reform programme. The key elements of this reform include unprecedented devolution of power, all the way down to the villages, so that we empower the citizens of Pakistan themselves to take decisions, rather than a small elite sitting hundreds of miles away doing that. This is the essence of real democracy...power to the people. The second part deals with reforming the civil service and insulating it from political influence, strengthening the regulatory agencies and increasing their professionalism, dramatically reducing the powers of the political elites and insulating the service delivery and governance system from political influence in execution of policies, creating a system which has transparency and makes the ruling elite accountable to the citizens.

The above is a synopsis of a detailed integrated strategy to lay the foundation to make Pakistan a just, peaceful and prosperous country. Detailed strategies on energy and local-governance have already been issued, and in the next couple of months detailed policies for health, education (including skills training, industrial and trade policy, agriculture and governance reforms) will be issued. It’s time we start a national debate on what needs to be done to make Pakistan a country which meets the desires and aspirations of its citizens and gets the place in the comity of nations which it deserves.

The writer is senior vice president of the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf.