Curse of the big office.

Byline: Fahd Husain

GLOOM is also an infectious virus.

People in Pakistan are talking about the PTI's policy prescriptions and related problems; they are talking about the PTI's muddle-headed approach to structural weaknesses of the economy and the adverse impact on reform; and they are talking about the PTI's inability to manage delicate relations with political allies and the ensuing instability generated by such mismanagement - and yet, there is something else here that may be far more disturbing and far more worrisome than all of these issues combined.

It is not a sense of drift, because drift can happen under the enormous weight of problems; it is not ill-preparation, because people learn on the job and figure things out; it is not insincerity, because no one has ever doubted the right intentions of the prime minister; it is not even the weakness of the team, because the cabinet is peppered with a fair number of experts - no, ladies and gentlemen, there is something else here far more disturbing and worrisome than all of these combined.

It is not the lack of any improvement in the FBR, because it has suffered from poor performance in successive governments; it is not the inability to make any headway in reforming the SOEs that bleed billions of rupees every year, because they have bled like this under successive governments; it is not the stunting of the economic growth rate and the pain that comes with it, because growth has slowed under IMF programmes under successive governments; it is not even the sky-high interest rate and inflation that are squeezing credit, culling industrial expansion and forcing companies to lay off workers, because interest rates and inflation have gone sky high under successive governments. No, ladies and gentlemen, there is something else here more disturbing and worrisome than all of these combined.

And it hides in plain sight.

When optics - and those too symbolic ones - begin to substitute for hard-nosed macro work, red lights should start blinking furiously.

Government is a big office to hold. This 'big-ness' combines the sheer size of the machinery, the scale of the problems and the complexity of governance. For an individual used to dealing with normal scales, government can be a truly frightening affair in terms of absorbing amounts, weights, extents, measures, volumes and the immense expanse of the canvas. The only way any person can even begin to paint on this canvas of governance is to have the big...