Can the PTI bell the cat?

For decades, governments in Pakistan have ensured the status quo by postponing and avoiding difficult decisions. The default no-action, no-change option is a huge choice in itself. While going down the same route, the PTI government is faced with an added problem: how to sell continuity as change?

No one constructs a guillotine to offer their own necks. Pakistan’s crony capitalists would have been crazy to invest their ‘hard-earned’ money on a party that wanted to create a welfare state. Pakistan’s electables would have been out of their minds to stampede to a platform that wanted to put an end to their role as mediators of power and patronage. Pakistan’s status-quo powers would have been too naïve to chaperon a party to power that wanted to upset their applecart.

Bringing Kaptaan to power was an expensive business. His four-year long unrelenting election campaign, comprising uncountable rallies, depended on the most modern, most expensive gadgetry and toys including helicopters and executive jets. Much of the resources and modes of transport were provided either by sugar barons or real-estate tycoons.

Many political scientists have argued that the goals of politicians are mainly the goals of the groups that provide them with backing and resources. In countries where money plays a large role in politics, it is common for a government to pay back investors through the policies that suit them. In Pakistan, the link has become stronger than ever. Politicians have become businessmen by taking loans and permits. Businessmen have become politicians by investing on political parties and political leaders. This situation has resulted in the growth of those sectors of the economy that depend on state patronage to survive and thrive.

The only substantial policy document that the PTI has brought forward so far is its mini-budget or the amendment to the budget passed by the former government. The budget shows that the PTI is keen to pay back the socio-economic classes and interest groups that backed it. That means continuity because, more or less, the same groups have been favoured by other political parties.

More than the situation of the national economy, the mini-budget tells us about the PTI itself. After all, the real policy of a government lies in its pocket. How much and from whom a government chooses to collect and to whom it chooses to give are the most important and consequential decisions that a government has to make.

Any policy that is not backed by the budget is a mere electoral slogan and a political lie. The groups backing the PTI may demand more, a lot more, for themselves. But they are not aching for change.

The PTI has promised to facilitate the building of five million homes in five years. What can be better? Pakistan is facing a housing crisis where low-income families have been pushed to overcrowded slums and most of them don’t own homes even in these slums. Even middle-class families are finding it harder and harder to build or buy property.

The PTI thinks this situation can be corrected with the help of foreign experts and investors. Some economists have rightly mentioned the unavailability of mortgage facilities in Pakistan. The PTI is unwilling to recognise the presence of a large elephant in the room and may have moved to aggravate the situation of housing in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s crisis of housing does not relate to banking and construction alone and it cannot be solved through availability of mortgage. It is a situation that has been largely created artificially by real estate itself. Property developers, or the land mafia, have bought land around cities through fair and foul means, displacing and dispossessing the poor and evicting them from lands where they had lived for centuries. This land is developed into plots through minimal development.

These plots are not meant for those who want to build a house but for speculators who want to make money the easy way or want to hide money earned through crime or tax evasion. These speculators buy files of plots in hundreds or even thousands and keep them as fixed income bonds to be sold at a later date.

For every city in Pakistan, there is a larger city of empty plots owned by speculators. Many economists have cried foul over this situation, which inflicts irreparable harm on the economy and goes against the logic of home ownership. These housing societies, that follow the US suburban housing model, eat up agriculture land. These societies have turned into an alternative to the banking system, diverting national savings to one of the most unproductive economic activities.

The last government made a feeble attempt to counter this situation by making it mandatory for buyers of expensive property to register in the tax system. This move made it difficult for tax dodgers to hide their wealth in plots. It was perhaps one of the most effective actions aimed at documentation. The movement of files did slow down and the prices of empty plots remained stagnant. But this situation helped genuine home-builders. To some extent at least, activity in real estate started shifting from speculation in files to construction. The PTI has once again opened the gates of the housing societies to tax dodgers in the name of Pakistanis living abroad, who somehow cannot prove their status to get an exemption.

Imran Khan told us one thousand times that people don’t pay taxes because they don’t trust the corrupt rulers who spend all of the public money on their own haleem and niharis. Now that we have a prime minister who does not even use the milk of a publically-owned buffalo, what can stop people from paying more than their due taxes?

Finance Minister Asad Umar has failed to understand this simple rule of the revolution. He has revised the tax targets downwards for the first year of the PTI government. Asad Umar admitted that the PTI had no tax reform policy of its own and would rather depend on the recommendations of a commission formed during the corrupt era.

Rather than broadening the tax base, the PTI government has taken the familiar route of over burdening the small number of people who have been caught in the tax trap either due to their own stupidity or because of unavoidable circumstances.

It can be safely assumed that in the next one year at least, the PTI government will not mess with Pakistan’s largest tax evaders – traders, services-sector professionals and large land owners. It can’t get new revolutionary zeal after a year and the second year in government is always tougher than the first.

The PTI had promised to hang the cat and it looks unable and unwilling even to bell it. The cat is too big for the party, which itself looks like a furry animal that can mew and purr.

The writer is an anthropologist and development professional.

Email: zaighamkhan@yahoo.com

Twitter: @zaighamkhan