Is our nervous system in disarray?

“We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece filled with straw,” lamented T S Eliot: the ‘hollowness’ we have attained by embracing ‘irrationality’ through and through. Along these lines, Atif Mian, a renowned economist, in a recent article, christened – and not for the first time – Pakistan’s (government’s) decision-making process a “broken nervous system”.

What is a nervous system? I asked ChatGPT, and it responded: “The nervous system is a complex network of nerves that controls and coordinates the body's activities by transmitting signals between different parts of the body and the brain, enabling responses to internal and external stimuli.”

In the context of a country, the ‘nervous system’ can metaphorically represent the institutions and communication networks that control, coordinate, and respond to the nation's needs. This includes the government, infrastructure, and systems that ensure information flows efficiently, enabling the country to function effectively and respond to internal and external challenges.

Are there information lacunae? Yes, of course. We have all experienced it in our daily lives. For instance, if you go to government offices, most probably, there is still no file-tracking system in place; any document still needs to be signed physically by the hierarchy (whose telos is apparently nothing but to jot down signatures), instead of digitization – not even an iota of it. One can even sometimes see Windows XP in its full bloom. And needless to say, to oil the rust, one needs to inject cash for the snacks (chai-paani) of the people commandeering the dullard machinery.

Just try obtaining a police clearance certificate. First, you need to go to your nearby police ‘chowki’, then to the police station in your area, and finally to the higher hierarchy station (probably at the CCPO level) to get your certificate. Why is it so? Because everything is maintained on manual registers. Another similar predicament that we all face would be the degree attestation, which follows the same lethargic path.

At the macro level, the situation is even more overwhelming. The government's accountant, the AG, does not know exactly what the pension liability or government commitment is, how much value the government's assets possess, how much foreign borrowing the government owes, or if the DDO has withheld the approval of the contractor to get his ‘cut”, or if the pensioners are even alive (just look at the 120,000 pensioners of Pakistan Railways) and whatnot.

Another instance highlighting how much ‘coordination’ is prevailing is the Medium-Term Budget Strategy Statement for the period 2024-25 to 2026-27, where the fiscal deficit has been accentuated for FY24-25 to be 6.9 per cent of GDP, accounting for a 1.0 per cent increase from Budget 24-25. Furthermore, it is expected that the provincial governments would generate a combined cash surplus of 1.0 per cent of GDP (Rs1,250 billion) in 2024-25, while contrarily, the four provincial budgets for 2024-25 reveal that the proposed combined cash surplus is below Rs750 billion. One may wonder: how on earth is this gross ineptness possible?

Coming to the ‘responding’ or ‘decision-making’ part, the following examples would be enough to appreciate the current state of affairs:

First, for months, the internet has not been working smoothly; a plethora of reasons are attributed to the updating of the web management system (WMS) for “increased cybersecurity”, as the chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority conceded before the National Assembly’s Committee on Information Technology. This is causing, apart from the decimation of our not-much-acknowledged digital rights, an estimated financial loss of $300 million. It has throttled, along with the internet, many income streams of freelancers. And mind you, we are talking about Pakistan – a country suffering from elastic imports and inelastic exports for years.

Another instance is the Punjab government's decision to reduce electricity bills by Rs14 per unit for those consuming between 201 and 500 units in Punjab for two months, at a cost of an unbudgeted Rs45 billion. Rumours also suggest that this squandering along with the inability to bag rollovers from friendly nations, could affect the IMF situation here.

This electric move happened even though it will cost the cash-strapped exchequer, or the fact that the artificial galloping of consumption won’t do much in the long run, or that many affluent leveraging multiple electricity meters and PV panels would be bagging the government’s benevolence. And that even after years of failure in providing relief to the real downtrodden through a top-down approach instead of bottom-up, BISP is not exploited for direct relief, instead of blanket charitableness.

While I fully acknowledge that the system is ‘irrational’, I think it is a bit myopic to fully underscore the dreary reason lurking behind the disemboweled ‘nervous system’. That is, there is confusion in the cause-effect chain here; my humble submission is that the objectivity of the analysis of the networking is secondary (effect) to pathological morality (the primary cause).

In the above-mentioned examples: Is this perennial tinkering due to a lack of good decision-making or information flow, or is there an ineptness to solve the issue, or is it that the one-who-cannot-be-named was perturbed because of the critical mindset towards it?

And the Punjab power benevolence (read: debacle) happened because the Punjab government is oblivious to the fact that it will worsen things in the long run, or is it political optics? Or why is there no centralized or digitalized police verification/degree attestation system/ any other repetitive process?

You can guess. Bingo!

The problem is not only analysis qua analysis, as he suggests – it is the marring of the system in totality, with cronyism, corruption, and political maneuvering capitalizing on the political economy, which should be named as the heart of the problem. If the very political edifice is brimming with the maladies mentioned, how then would a Monte Carlo analysis do any good? Isn’t it a fact that every analysis is mediated by an ideology? And that consultants are hired for the ‘data tango’ just to tick the minimum requirement for projects from which every mortal in the chain milks his fair share.

We are definitely at a very dynamic crossroads in our collective national chronicle; the sword of Damocles is looming over us. Either we will have to do away with this crony governance of favouring elite capture and punishing foes and instead focus on reforms – or our existence will become questionable very soon.

The writer is a Peshawar-based researcher who works in the financial sector.