Poor evaluation?

Prime Minister Imran Khan spent over eight hours with Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) cabinet members on Monday to assess their performance during the first 100 days with a three-pronged criterion laid down for their evaluation: identify the amount saved due to a proactive austerity drive, new initiatives identified and launched and the future road map. Subsequent to the presentation by 26 cabinet members, Imran Khan reportedly expressed his satisfaction over everyone's performance and reportedly stated that "speculations are deliberately being made with the design to create cracks and confusion within the government."
Unfortunately, if confusion is defined by conflicting claims by his own cabinet members, then confusion certainly prevails. Shahzad Akbar, his special assistant on accountability, is on record as having made claims about the assets held by politicians of other political parties in foreign countries and later retracting these claims. He also publicly claimed that it is through the proactive efforts of the incumbent government that information of assets held by Pakistani nationals abroad is being received, a blatant untruth as exchange of information under the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) signed in Paris in September 2016 by Pakistan specifically stipulated that exchange of information was to begin from September 2018 onwards. The Prime Minister also claimed that an agreement has been reached with 26 countries on assets held by Pakistani nationals, with Shahzad Akbar later reducing the number to 10 countries with which an agreement has been reached. Be that as it may, the perception is that the Khan administration would be a lot more proactive in investigating corruption and money laundering activities of members of the opposition parties than in the past but then accusations that accountability process is partisan is gathering momentum given that investigation against several of the PTI members who joined the party just before the 2018 elections and who are implicated in serious fraud/corruption cases remains stalled.
However, what is much more serious are claims by several cabinet members/advisers that are simply not accurate and appear to be designed to take credit for a favourable outcome whose groundwork was laid during the previous administration. Exxon Mobil, Coca Cola, Pepsi and Suzuki indicated a desire to invest in Pakistan during the PML-N administration and the proof is available in reports in the media. Thus, it was extremely unfortunate that the prime minister and his cabinet members claim credit for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows from these four companies. As the former head of a large corporation like Engro, at least the finance minister knows well and should have apprised his colleagues that multinational companies do not take millions of dollars of investment decisions and that too in a foreign country within 100 days of a new government.
But perhaps even more serious is the fact that the direction set by some ministries is being challenged by sector experts. The Ministry of Finance has taken no out of the box solutions and the supplementary budget adheres to the same policies implemented during the previous administration that account for the current economic impasse, notably raising the current expenditure, reducing development expenditure and envisaging a rise in revenue from sources that are simply not doable. The export incentive package and the subsidies to urea and for tube-wells also pre-date this government. To consistently maintain that the incumbent government would succeed where previous administrations failed reflects a mindset that is not only arrogant but also fails to understand the impediments prevailing in the country's institutions and laws though the Law Minister Farogh Naseem, from the MQM, appears to be a lot more focused on achieving the PTI's manifesto promises than PTI cabinet members. The Railways Minister is taking credit for expanding the rail network and reclaiming encroached land, however, freight and not passenger trains are profitable and he should have considered reducing the number of employees rather than increasing them.
To conclude, sector experts are challenging the direction as well as the capacity of this administration in the absence of well-defined steps for stabilising the economy and set it on a sustainable course.