REMEMBER the great ‘water car’ mania from the early 2010s? When some fellow managed to convince a large number of senior politicians and TV anchors that he had invented a car that used water as fuel? Remember how far and wide that mania spread, and how the father of Pakistan’s nuclear programme himself took to the airwaves to announce that this was some sort of game-changing new invention that held the solution to all our problems?
Remember the ‘$200 billion in Swiss bank accounts’ mania from the mid-2010s? That’s when some senior public figures, including Asad Umar, who would go on to serve as Pakistan’s finance minister a few years later, proclaimed it from the stage of a dharna. When I wrote an article debunking the figure, I was accused of siding with the billionaires. Years later, after he became finance minister, Umar appeared on the TV show of one of those anchors who had accused me of “siding with the elites” to say that the $200bn figure “is without foundation”.
Then there was the offshore oil canard that then prime minister Imran Khan announced minutes after meeting the team of an oil company undertaking drilling, even though he had been told there were no definitive findings to announce yet. In 2014, Nawaz Sharif showed up in Bahawalpur to announce that reserves of gold had been found there that were sufficient to pay our way out of all difficulties. There was the $10bn being siphoned out of Pakistan every year through illicit channels — a figure erroneously sourced to a State Department report (which in fact contained no such estimate). Imran Khan used this as the basis for his claim that Pakistan’s economy could be fixed simply by stopping this outflow, which he said was the proceeds of crime and corruption.
In fact, every few years the story repeats itself. Some sort of canard is floated along with claims that this find or development will now solve all our problems and the country will not need to go to its creditors or bilateral partners any longer. We don’t have full-blown mania yet, but a low-intensity mania of this sort has been underway around minerals and shale gas in Pakistan, and more recently, there have been early signs of overly optimistic and unrealistic expectations around offshore gas exploration as well.
Something important is trying to speak through these manias that break out regularly every few years.
Something important is trying to speak through these manias that break out regularly every few years. It’s an expectation that lurks beneath the surface — that there is one magic bullet, one single development or discovery or one underlying ailment, which if somehow rectified, will send positive change cascading through the entire economy and solve all our problems.
The manias I mentioned are only the tip of the iceberg of this underlying expectation. They represent the most frenetic and furious expression of this hope. But beneath the level of the manias, this same hope expresses itself in subtler ways, and exerts an influence over the minds of important policymakers that gets in the way of any effort to persuade them of the importance of reforms.
Over the years I have heard important people — civil servants, politicians, army officers — ask me a question that best expresses this underlying hope of a single, magic bullet. ‘What is the core problem that holds Pakistan’s economy back?’ they ask. There are other variations of this question too. ‘If you could change one thing, what would it be?’ Or ‘What is the single most important problem for us to solve?’ And so on.
This search for a magic bullet grows out of a perception of society, economy and politics that is very different from the perception that technocratic-minded people — such as economists — bring to bear when evaluating Pakistan’s economic challenges, with the aim of producing solutions. The economists’ vision begins with some conception of the economy as a whole, as an integrated system that forms the landscape against which economic behaviour plays out. From this conception of the whole, they derive an understanding of how incentives can be structured so as to promote the kind of behaviour the policymaker is striving to achieve, such as promoting investment in export-related industries.
But the magic bullet thinking does not see things the same way. They see the component parts of the system first, and almost always harbour a deep distrust of private capital and technocratic-minded economists. The former they perceive as rapacious predators (not entirely incorrectly). The latter they consider to be ‘hitmen’, or agents of foreign capital that wants to subjugate Pakistan in a neo-colonial relationship so as to exploit its labour and resources.
There is rarely any dialogue between these two camps. Whenever they do speak, they usually talk past each other. There are not even many landing bays where the two camps can meet. Each sees the other’s weaknesses. The economists, or technocrats, can become dogmatic in how they build their construct of the economy as a whole. The other camp often allows its obsession with protecting its own bureaucratic turf to become its sole understanding of what the public interest is. And so the dialogue stalls in a dogma versus turf stand-off.
This is one important reason why a reform conversation has not gathered momentum in Pakistan. The biggest drivers of reform-minded thinking are those connected with creditor capital — the World Bank, IMF, ADB and the donors. Those on the implementing end, particularly civil servants, see their turf under threat from the kinds of changes these bodies propose, and mobilise to secure the funding but stall the change.
Perhaps a bridge can be formed between these two camps. It can begin with a focus on a quick and pointed agenda that focuses its energy on fashioning a greater ‘bang for the buck’ type of intervention. But the ‘big push’ kind of reform agendas are never going to find a receptive audience in high places in Pakistan.
The writer is a business and economy journalist.
Published in Dawn, November 20th, 2025
