PTI government's struggles to overcome challenges.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government has not learnt any lessons in governance - at least so far. From whichever angle one looks at the complex evolving political scenario, one is driven to the inescapable conclusion that the regime has failed to deliver on many fronts. This is shocking considering that the rank and file Pakistanis had many great expectations from a new dispensation that was, on the face of it, forward-looking and determined to bring about a long-awaited 'change' that would reflect the aspirations of millions of impoverished Pakistanis.

That was not to happen. As a matter of fact, the party had already ruled the province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) for five years before taking control of the government at the Centre in 2018. If that government in K-P was a model for the rest of the country, the lessons can be easily drawn because the PTI government's performance there was anything but exemplary. The party was plagued by the neurosis of a lack of experience, lack of knowledge, lack of competence and a lack of desire to learn and improve.

Fascinated by grandiose ideas and ignoring objective realities, the government in K-P, with a green signal from the top, designed and implemented one of the most ridiculous, ill-planned and wholly unjustified and unwarranted projects building a long flyover which was to pass through all the main roads to ease 'traffic congestion'. The project would envisage running about a hundred buses on the elevated motorway known as the BRT or Bus Rapid Transit.

The project was to be completed in six months - by itself a preposterous assumption. It has taken more than three years and counting. Even when it is completed, the province and the nation would have paid more than Rs80 billion for running just a hundred buses on a route on which more than 10,000 public transport vehicles and rickshaws are plying already. And in the process, Peshawar's infrastructure has been destroyed.

This is just one instance of a stupendous expenditure on the most ill-conceived work ever to be undertaken. In its current incarnation as a federal government, the PTI regime has gone about upsetting all calculations of exercising prudence, foresight and sanity. Never before in the history of the country has inflation gone as berserk as it has since the summer of last year. Never before in the country's history has such a prodigious loan been obtained and the rupee lost its value so dramatically in such a short span of...