PTI news, updates and discussions part ll

[Pakistanithinktank]

Technocrats can just fcukup your country and leave. Politicians are atleast answerable to public.

It's not like with technocrats you will get milk and honey flowing in rivers. A technocrat is leading the ministry of finance for 3 years now. How are we performing economically ?

Technocrats can just fcukup your country and leave. Politicians are atleast answerable to public.

It's not like with technocrats you will get milk and honey flowing in rivers. A technocrat is leading the ministry of finance for 3 years now. How are we performing economically ?

ایک دفعہ ڈاکٹر صفوان رضا نے کہا تھا کہ ’’غریب لوگوں کا ذہن ہمیشہ بہت چھوٹا ہوتا ہے اور وہ اپنی منفی سوچ سے باہر نہیں نکل پاتے‘‘۔
It’s not always the case but this is exactly the mindset of majority of Pakistani. (How did I come to this conclusion? Personal experience, working on the ground, dealing with people)

Regarding your comments…..You’re mixing up bad implementation with bad idea.
A failed technocrat doesn’t prove technocracy is the problem, it proves Pakistan’s system is designed to sabotage competence.

“Technocrats can just mess up your country and leave.”

That’s not an argument, that’s a governance failure.
If a country allows anyone (politician or technocrat) to “mess up and leave,” the issue is lack of institutional accountability, not the profession of the person in charge.

Politicians also “mess up and stay,” protected by electables, patronage networks, and vote‑bank politics.
Accountability isn’t automatic just because someone contests elections.

If anything, technocratic contracts can be structured with KPIs, performance reviews, and removal clauses, something Pakistan has never applied to politicians.

“Politicians are answerable to the public.”

In theory, yes.
In Pakistan, absolutely not.

• People vote on biradari, not performance
• Electables win even after destroying their constituencies
• Corruption cases vanish after switching parties
• No politician has ever been fired for economic mismanagement

This is not accountability, this is electoral feudalism.

Technocrats don’t replace democracy.
They replace patronage‑based appointments with merit‑based governance.

“A technocrat is leading finance for 3 years. How are we performing?”

This is like blaming the doctor because the patient arrived half‑dead, refuses medicine, and keeps smoking.

Pakistan’s finance minister, any finance minister, operates under:

• IMF constraints
• political red lines
• elite capture
• zero tax reform
• circular debt
• provincial resistance
• military‑political interference

A technocrat cannot fix an economy when the system blocks every structural reform.

One technocrat in one ministry cannot undo:

• 40 years of fiscal mismanagement
• 70 years of elite tax exemptions
• 20 years of circular debt
• chronic political interference

This is why the EZ model exists:
to create parallel governance units where technocrats can actually function without being strangled by the old system.

Technocrats are not magicians.
But politicians running technical ministries is guaranteed failure.

You don’t put a poet in charge of neurosurgery.
You don’t put an electable in charge of macroeconomics.

The EZ model doesn’t say “technocrats will bring milk and honey.”
It says:

Put the right people in the right roles, protect them from political interference, and measure them by results, not speeches.

That’s how every successful country operates.

The choice isn’t between “perfect technocrats” and “accountable politicians.”
The real choice is:

• Competence with accountability
or
• Patronage with zero accountability

Pakistan has tried the second model for 75 years.
Look where we are.

 

[Gripen9]

Aaaah..was "Alpha Bravo Charlie" the greatest drama of your youth also ?

Sunherey Din ....

 

[Gripen9]

I confess I struggle to see the purpose of this debate. The lines have long since been drawn, the loyalties fixed, the conclusions reached before the arguments are even made. Each camp inhabits its own political universe, impervious to evidence that might disturb its convictions.

Imran Khan, it seems to me, is destined for a fate not unlike that of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt: a leader whose popular mandate ultimately proved no match for the entrenched power of the state. And today, with Pakistan's generals once again finding themselves useful to Washington's strategic calculations, one should harbor few illusions that earnest lectures about democracy, human rights, or constitutional freedoms will emerge from Western capitals. Geopolitics has always been a more persuasive language than principle.

The PTI has, for all practical purposes, been neutralized. Meanwhile, the familiar civilian parties PML-N and PPP, continue to play their allotted roles in the political theatre, lending democratic legitimacy to decisions made elsewhere. Their bargain is neither subtle nor new: political survival in exchange for compliance. The rewards, as always, are access to the machinery of the state and its vast patronage.

Those who expect meaningful change through parliamentary maneuvering alone may be waiting a very long time. History suggests that entrenched systems rarely surrender power voluntarily. Real transformation would require a mass national uprising on a scale reminiscent of the Iranian Revolution, a prospect that many Pakistanis speak of in whispers but few genuinely desire. For such upheavals carry a terrible price. They are written not only in slogans and speeches, but in blood, prisons, and graves.

And therein lies Pakistan's dilemma: widespread frustration exists, yet the collective willingness to endure the cost of revolutionary change does not. Until that contradiction is resolved, the cycle is likely to continue.


*** Had ChatGPT formulate my thoughts as if written by Robert Fisk ***