We seem to have become a nation obsessed with a single villain. Pakistan today is gripped by a kind of Orwellian imagination – a fascination with the idea of an omnipotent ‘Big Brother’ pulling every string and orchestrating every failure.
In our context, that Big Brother has a name: the establishment. Every time the economy stumbles, a development plan fails, or a reform falls flat, the popular refrain is predictable – ‘it’s the establishment’s fault’.
Those within the system point fingers upward with near-religious conviction to deflect accountability. Rarely is there any introspection that perhaps the fault lies in the system’s own stupidity or in the vested interests of villains other than the so-called Big Brother. This instinct, while emotionally satisfying, reflects a deeper chronic blip, a kind of intellectual laziness and political reductionism that has infected our national discourse.
Instead of diagnosing institutional, structural or policy failures, we find comfort in a singular narrative that places the burden of blame entirely on one actor. The establishment, to be sure, has had a long and complicated role in Pakistan’s political evolution, but to treat it as the origin of every dysfunction is not just inaccurate; it’s counterproductive.
Take the education sector. Pakistan’s learning crisis – marked by high numbers of out-of-school children, severe learning poverty and outdated curricula – stems from chronic underfunding, bureaucratic inefficiency and weak provincial governance. Public education spending remains far below international benchmarks, while teacher accountability is minimal, with no nationally integrated system of regular psychological or pedagogical licensing tests from primary to higher education.
Since the 18th Amendment, provinces have often treated education as a political trophy (HR honeytrap) rather than a developmental priority. Add to this the higher education sector’s misplaced focus on research paper counts over innovation (knowledge economy). In all this, where exactly is the establishment’s invisible hand? Why would it oppose education reform? One might argue that discussing 1971 is sensitive – fine – but what about other subjects: in IT, AI, economics or engineering?
Or consider the tax system. Pakistan’s chronic revenue shortfall stems from elite capture and bureaucratic inertia. Most parliamentarians belong to the landed elite, ensuring agriculture remains undertaxed despite the so-called National Fiscal Pact under IMF-backed reforms. The tax base is narrow, compliance is weak and digitisation progresses at a snail’s pace. Successive governments have relied on withholding taxes – indirect tax misleadingly classified as direct – instead of pursuing genuine reform, while recurring debates over the NFC Award further complicate fiscal federalism.
These are deep-rooted structural issues, and unless tanks are imagined driving the tax machinery, blaming the establishment alone borders on absurdity. The real problem lies in the lack of trust between provinces, their reluctance to risk political capital by taxing their own elite and the bureaucratic inefficiency and weak rule of law reflected in thousands of pending tax cases – from appellate tribunals to the Supreme Court.
The power sector tells a similar story. Circular debt keeps spiraling – not because of coups, but due to a feeble regulatory regime (as seen when Nepra reversed its own K-Electric tariff decision after media backlash, despite 18 months of rigorous evaluation), poor demand forecasting and inefficiencies in state-owned entities marked by high transmission, distribution and commercial losses. High generation costs, resulting in coercive renegotiations with IPPs and souring the overall investment climate, along with persistent integrated-planning failures, reflect weak policy coordination and parochial thinking.
As renewable technologies like solar PV and battery storage expand, the duck curve effect worsens, while privatisation remains stalled. No shadowy hand is needed to explain this – only the layers of a broken governance’s nervous system.
Then there’s the neglect of urban policy. Pakistan’s cities are expanding without vision, largely because municipal bodies are stripped of power and planning has never been institutionalised. Urbanisation here has occurred without coordination with economic strategy; we neither plan for industrial cities nor integrate transport, housing, and employment policies. The result is urban sprawl and inefficiency. Yet, instead of holding provincial planners and city managers accountable, we somehow end up debating alien corridors of power.
Pakistan’s industrial policy has long suffered from protectionism, limited export diversification, high energy costs, and reliance on tariff walls, leading to deindustrialisation. Sustained GDP growth of at least five per cent is vital to attract FDI, yet external vulnerabilities, profit repatriation limits and foreign reserves below three months’ import cover continue to deter investors.
The LSM index shows a median 10 per cent annual decline in output for over half of tracked products, while the investment-to-GDP ratio remains stuck at 12 per cent, far below regional averages. Complex NOC procedures, skill shortages and poor compliance with global trade and carbon standards further erode competitiveness. Here, the establishment designs neither tariff codes nor a coherent industrial policy.
In the climate sector, where Pakistan faces existential threats, the argument falls flat too. The country ranks among the most climate-affected nations yet contributes little to global emissions. Pakistan is experiencing accelerated glacial melt, recurrent floods (the 2025 floods alone caused trillions in losses and thousands of deaths), prolonged droughts, and rising temperatures. Now the real challenge lies in the $565.7 billion financing gap under the latest NDC – an outcome of weak resilience planning, poor funding, lack of seriousness of legislatures and persistent policy neglect. What does Big Brother have to do with any of this?
In each of these domains, one may trace indirect or historical links to centralization or control, but that’s a far cry from attributing every failure to an omnipotent evil. What has happened is that ‘the establishment’ has become a convenient shorthand, a rhetorical escape hatch that lets everyone else off the hook. Politicians evade accountability, bureaucrats deflect scrutiny and even citizens, fatigued by complexity, prefer a simpler villain.
A mature political culture, however, requires nuance. We must learn to distinguish between systemic governance failures – which are broad, bureaucratic and often technocratic – and external distortions. Of course, there is always a political economy at play, with someone benefiting from this dysfunction, but we must identify it through critical inquiry. Without such distinctions, public debate will remain trapped in vitriolic slogans rather than solutions.
If we are to move forward, our critique must evolve. The question should no longer be ‘who is behind everything?’, but rather ‘why do certain systems keep failing, what causes these failures and who benefits from them?’ Until that shift happens, we will keep shouting at shadows and mistaking our own reflection for the Big Brother we so love to blame.
The writer is a Peshawar-based researcher who works in the financial sector. He can be reached at:alifurqan647@gmail.com
