It was a sight to behold. The Prime Minister was chairing a key policymaking conference. Sitting alongside him were all the four provincial chief ministers. The AJK Prime Minster was also on the stage. Top cabinet ministers were in attendance, too. This visual--where all of the countrys elected leadership had assembled to discuss the countrys future direction--was both rare and striking.
The event was the Planning Commissions (PC) consultation conference on Vision 2025 held in Islamabad last Friday. It brought together a large number of people from the government, private sector, academia and researchers. In the latter half of the conference, plenary stakeholder consultations were held on over 50 socio-economic areas. Such consultations are supposed to make their way in the final document, likely to be released by December end.
But, one shouldn get too excited with this display of political harmony for agreement on a national roadmap for the future. After all, the memory of the PCs 2011 Framework for Economic Growth (FEG) is still fresh.
The FEG--which became the legacy of Dr. Nadeem ul Haque, PCs previous deputy chairman--had also brought the public and private sectors together. It was fed with more than 500 stakeholder sessions and various seminars and conferences. Well-funded by the donors, this framework had the blessings of the then finance minister. Even the then PM approved it back in May 2011.
But, the FEG now sits pretty in archives, as it never gained traction for implementation. What went wrong when things seemed just fine? Absence of a broad-based political ownership during 2011-13 led to its fall. The dissenting provincial governments at that time, and the ruling partys own indifference to matters of governance and growth, downed this high-flying document whose preparation took lots of hard work and public resources.
Will things be different this time? Will the political consensus converge towards a long-term vision for the country when there is seldom any agreement on yearly budgetary targets?
While the mood at this moot was one of optimism, there exist good reasons to be cautious. For one, the final document is not ready yet. When it is, it will assign the provinces some difficult o do lists of reforms and targets. That may prove to be a needle in the consensus balloon.
Secondly, the current nature of political economy has started to become increasingly fractious, with the looming center-KP standoff on drone strikes. That doesn inspire any hopes for future collaboration.
Thirdly, the fact that the Federal Government has been putting on backburner major economic decisions--e.g. tax reforms, SOE appointments, privatisation plans, etc.--doesn exactly dissuade this impression that this planning exercise is also just loud talk.
In that context, one hopes that this policymaking exercise survives optics as well as politics.
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