EDITORIAL: Senate Chairman and former Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani while addressing a conference attended by over 70 presidents of chambers of commerce and industry and diplomats regurgitated the prevailing mantra – ‘the government has no business doing business’. This is indeed a welcome change of heart for a veteran Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader who was convicted in 2011 of hiring 600 people from his constituency that cost the exchequer 30 million rupees annually and spent nearly six years in jail. While he and his party leaders claimed his incarceration was an act of political victimisation by military ruler Musharraf, yet soon after his release he said he had no regrets in providing employment to those 600 people – a high moral ground that left the country with rising budget deficits that is an inflationary policy, which impacted negatively on all, including the 600 recruited by him.
It is important to note that in the early years after its inception the PPP supported nationalisation over privatisation on the then prevailing logic that the private sector is ruthlessly engaged in profiteering which is to the detriment of the common man, and that a nationalised unit guarantees job security to workers. This policy led to the financial collapse of many a state-owned entity (SOE) and, in time, the party began to use SOEs as recruitment bureaus for its loyalists. This approach too has changed and in 2019 Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said he was proud to inaugur.
