Pakistan’s ruling elites busy with foreign engagements instead of tackling domestic challenges: Report

Islamabad, Nov 9 (SocialNews.XYZ) The ruling elites of Pakistan have been paying inordinate attention to foreign engagements instead of tackling domestic challenges. Pakistan's media focusses more on foreign policy and international events than on fundamental problems confronting the country, a report has detailed.

Talks shows on TV endlessly discuss overseas engagements, defence agreements of Pakistan and other global developments. Some of the reporting is justified as a war is taking place in the neighbourhood and global events do have an effect on Pakistan. However, domestic issues which are more important for Pakistan's fate and future rarely receive the same attention, a report in leading Pakistani daily 'Dawn' detailed.

Several factors will be behind Pakistan's ruling elites paying more attention to foreign engagements as it is way to access and have geopolitical rents to keep the economy afloat, enabling them to avoid undertaking domestic reform. According to them, the notion of success relies on foreign alignments that can deliver these rents without having to expend political energy resolving structural economic problems at home. As a result, the ruling elites focus on foreign pursuits and lack of reform at home.

"For governments resting on dubious electoral mandates, it is also the means to acquire international legitimacy to compensate for its absence at home. This is more so for authoritarian and hybrid regimes. There is also more cachet in taking overseas trips and having photo-ops with world leaders than trying to get ministries to do their job. That is why ministers often spend more time abroad than in the country, with prime ministers exceeding their predecessors’ record of foreign visits," Pakistan's former ambassador to the US, UK and UN, Maleeha Lodhi wrote in an opinion piece for Dawn.

"Fixing the country’s problems is much harder than flying off to, say, Davos. A cynical explanation is that the country’s problems — poverty, hunger, lack of education, and health facilities, malnutrition, growing population numbers — don’t affect the power elite, so if they fester there is no skin off its back. Certainly, it sees no urgency in addressing them. Pakistan’s future will be determined at home, not abroad," the author added.

The most important task for the government is to improve the living conditions of Pakistan and Pakistan government has not lived up to this task as poverty, for example, has increased in recent years. Pakistan has also featured among the top 10 nations in the world where millions face acute hunger, according to an international humanitarian organisation 'Action Against Hunger'.

Worsening food security in Pakistan has attributed to economic instability, inflation and climate shocks. Apart from food insecurity, Pakistan has the world’s second highest number of out-of-school children while 37 per cent of people in the country remain illiterate. No nation can make economic progress with that level of illiteracy.

"Human capital and human development, crucial for economic growth, have suffered from government indifference and deteriorated over time. Foreign engagements count for little when there is no improvement in the condition of the majority of people. Nor does the ‘glamour’ of foreign trips obscure the grim reality of the economic and social deprivations people face across the country. Nation-building at home should have priority. Pakistan’s future, after all, will be determined at home, not abroad," Maleeha Lodhi wrote in Dawn.

Source: IANS