By Uzma Ehtasham
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles over a country when its leaders keep asking for patience. Pakistan knows this feeling well. This week, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif stood before his federal cabinet and did what prime ministers here so often do: he acknowledged the pain, blamed circumstances beyond the nation’s borders, and promised that if everyone just holds on a little longer, the dawn will arrive with honor intact. The war in the Middle East, he explained, has set back Pakistan’s economic recovery. Oil prices have surged. The petroleum import bill has climbed from $300m a week to $800m. These are not small numbers, and they are not abstract ones. They translate into something very concrete for the family trying to decide whether to buy bread or medicine, for the rickshaw driver watching his earnings dissolve into the fuel tank, for the mother who has learned to stretch one meal across a day.
The prime minister is not wrong about the gravity of the moment. The conflict involving Iran, the United States and Israel has sent shockwaves through every import-dependent economy, and Pakistan, with its chronic balance of payments vulnerabilities, is near the front line of those feeling the tremors. To its credit, the government moved quickly on the diplomatic front. A twenty-one hour negotiation session brokered by Pakistan between Washington and Tehran was no small feat. The army chief and the foreign minister worked the phones and the back channels to extend a fragile ceasefire. Saudi financial support helped repay $3.5bn in foreign debt. Even as the Strait of Hormuz faced blockade, Islamabad quietly secured permission from Tehran for tankers to keep reaching Pakistani ports. These are genuine achievements, and they deserve the praise they have received from abroad.
And yet. The word that hangs in the air after every cabinet briefing, every press conference, every televised address from the prime minister, is that word. The government raised petroleum prices dramatically within the first week of the war. Not once, but three separate times in a single month. A global price spike may be an external shock, but the scale, the speed and the cumulative weight of those domestic increases were a choice. In Pakistan, fuel is not simply fuel. It is the thread that holds the entire economy together. When diesel becomes more expensive, so does every truck carrying vegetables from the countryside. When petrol rises, so does every bus, every rickshaw, every ambulance. The effect cascades immediately and mercilessly into wheat, sugar, milk, cooking oil, rent and the price of a doctor’s visit. Inflation in this country does not creep; it gallops. And this month, it has been given free rein.
What makes this so difficult to defend is not the necessity of adjustment but the distribution of its weight. Pakistan is an import-dependent economy with limited foreign exchange reserves and a rupee that has spent years learning to fall. No serious observer expects the government to simply absorb global price shocks indefinitely. However, there is a difference between necessity and reflex. And the reflex in Islamabad, across successive civilian and military administrations, has always been the same: pass the bill to the consumer. Raise the pump price. Let the common citizen absorb the shock while the elite’s privileges remain curiously untouched.
Ask yourself what sacrifice has looked like in Pakistan over the past decade. Salaried workers have watched their purchasing power evaporate. Laborers have seen daily wages stagnate while transport costs double. Pensioners have learned to survive on savings that inflation devours like a slow fire. Small traders have closed shops. Farmers have struggled to afford diesel for their tubewells. Meanwhile, the governing class continues to enjoy subsidized government facilities, oversized vehicle protocols, lavish housing, unnecessary foreign travel and tax exemptions that survive from one administration to the next as if carved into stone. The prime minister speaks of emerging from hardship with honor. However, honor, in this context, begins to sound like a word for everyone else’s endurance.
There are alternatives. They are not easy, but they exist. The government could cut non-development spending rather than passing every cost to the public. It could impose meaningful austerity on its own privileged echelons, starting with the visible trappings of power that so outrage ordinary citizens. It could crack down on tax evasion with the same urgency it applies to raising fuel prices. It could limit unnecessary imports, redirect subsidies toward the poorest households, and place a fairer burden on those who have for so long been insulated from the country’s cycles of pain. None of these measures would fully shield Pakistan from global shocks, but they would do something arguably more important: they would signal that sacrifice is shared, that the elite is not exempt, and that the prime minister’s promise of emerging with honor is not just another layer of rhetoric over an unchanged reality.
The government needs to look at the economy not through spreadsheets alone but through a human lens. Relentless fuel price increases are the easy solution, the dangerous solution, the solution that requires no political courage and no uncomfortable conversations within the ruling class. What is required instead is a fair distribution of the economic burden: the elite cutting its privileges, royal government expenditures abolished in all but name, resources shared equitably, and ordinary citizens granted the simple right to survive another month without having to choose between dinner and the journey to work. Only then can the state be strengthened. Only then can the people be given reason to believe that their leaders’ hopes for renewal and prosperity are something more than the same old story dressed in new words.
(The writer is a public health professional, journalist, and possesses expertise in health communication, having keen interest in national and international affairs, can be reached at uzma@metro-morning.com)
