DigiVoyager

Recently, I have been looking into the inflation crisis of my country, and my deepest gratitude to my old school fellow for his patience and succinct explanations of everything as well as valuable data. He currently works in the office of the Accountant General of our province doing audits and the like – that province is Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly the Northwestern Frontier. A province that is more like Afghanistan, in contrast to our other provinces. Punjab and Sindh, for instance, are far closer to India, both in culture, language, ethnically and so on. Then we have Balochistan which is perhaps even more of a separatist entity, their culture being strongly Iranic. This digression is merely to paint a picture of how diverse Pakistan is, essentially it is at least 4 major countries in one, and KP, formerly, NWFP has been historically wronged and deprived of much needed development, with funds going to other places, whilst our dams are the most valuable source of electricity for the nation.

Anyways, as for our inflation, it has been a thing since 1971, when Bangladesh split from Pakistan – formerly we were two, West (where I am) and East Pakistan (Bangladesh). As for their splitting, it is most justified and I am happy for them, but it would be too lengthy to go into here. We have been saddled with corruption, inefficiency and incompetence, and plain ineptitude for multiple decades. It started with the stupidity of nationalizing all the industries, and further corruption meant this nation has been in perpetual beggary since then. Foreign investors do not want to invest a penny here, and rightly so. The constant meddling of the (Men in Green, shall we say) in overthrowing governments for their own reasons make this a most volatile place to invest, would you put your money in a bank that was constantly changing all its employees, and you had to deal with a different manager and different biometric systems every time? Most of our bureaucrats are dinosaurs and they do not understand the first thing about doing business or making things convenient for the general public, every process here is a bureaucratic nightmare, perhaps by design to create a false sense of need for these bureaucrats but that would be giving these dinosaurs too much credit. In fact, they are too old and too out of touch.

And speaking of dinosaurs, one would be remiss to leave out our biggest dinosaurs (my sincerest thanks to the most kind Men in Green for giving him so many chances to utterly ruin this nation, despite being its so called custodians, lol)

See those two guys in the middle? Orange and blue? In just one term, both of them doubled our national debt, just like that. And guess whose parties are in charge again, against the will of the people, an undemocratic government. These two guys (insert roaring applause from my non-existent audience here)

Still, at least the man in orange was dealing with crazy amounts of terrorism, and his finance man kept our economy relatively stable in tumultuous times, until the famous Bin Laden debacle, where he was found in a house suspiciously close to an academy where they train men to become the next generation of the “Men in Green” so they too can play golf and lounge around talking about real estate, that's what all Men in Green are born to do, after all.

Mr Baldilocks, in blue on the other hand, is exemplary. Suppose there was a man who you gave your money to, to invest. He lost it all once. Fair, you'll never trust him again. But you're not the Men in Green, and they love him. They gave him the keys to the bank again, and he defaulted the nation again. Screw you and your money, they don't care.

And then, you couldn't bring him back a third time because you removed him to bring your other project to the fore, so you bring his brother instead, and his daughter who is about as qualified for CM as Team Rocket is to teach an Ethics course.

So, Mr Baldilocks' party defaulted the nation twice, and his party has been brought back again for a 3rd time, by force.

“If you are Pakistani, screw you and your vote” – Not me, but the Men in Green say this (they literally burned them and flipped the results anyway)

There's something special about how the Men in Green play golf and lounge around, talking about how they are going to bring an agrarian revolution and save the economy. This is akin to an insane man setting your house on fire while you are at work, and when you return he offers you a cigarette, and tells you “Don't worry, things will be okay, we will build better houses”

Then he leaves you with a cardboard box and a paper that says I.O.U (He owes you one making you disappear for good)

Of course, the Men in Green and the well off also love to tell people that they are being dramatic, and overreacting, and being thankless, and many other things. A common defense given is: It was always this bad, Pakistan was always poor and inflation was always a thing. This, of course, is classic gaslighting, and one that the stats disagree with. As this Consumer Price Index chart shows (and below, I will explain why even this number is actually a cooked underestimate, on the ground things are even worse) 2023 and 2024 are the worst years in Pakistan's economic history when it comes to inflation in the last 43 years.

Worse than almost every one of its 77 year history, in fact the only other time Pakistan had inflation like this, was when it split in two, and Bangladesh went its own way. The next 2 years had similar figures, but that was in the midst of a war, and a loss of various valuable industries. This time, there is no war, only a cavalcade of buffoons running the country.

Of course, the nation has not grown as expected, either. Pakistan always cycles between periods of artificial (cooked) growth – the booms – and the bust, negative growth or contraction. Pakistan has been struggling with boom-and-bust cycles for decades, leading to 22 IMF bailouts since 1958. Currently, the IMF is the fifth-largest debtor, owing $6.28 billion as of July 11, according to the lender's data.

Things are so bad, that almost everyone that can, is trying to leave. Yours truly is stuck here till the end sadly, perhaps he will be buried a ways down the road someday, if he is not taken by a flood, and perhaps many years later his grave will also become part of one of their golf courses, as is the way. When that happens, I will be sure to haunt them.

Addressing the earlier point about inflation figures being cooked, one of my rant loving colleagues revealed that our government's statistics bureau measures inflation by:

1. Calculating utility prices based on the lowest tariff, which is subsidized for electricity and gas. Note that due to consumption, no one is ever billed on the lowest tariff, they will almost certainly exceed it.

2. Prices of essential items are taken from Utility Stores, where the government subsidizes many products. Even if the products are unavailable, not of passable quality or even expired. Indeed, expired.

So when you read “Inflation went up so and so or down so and so” it is all data fudging done to make the really bad numbers look just a little more acceptable, most data from Pakistan is worthless, dishonest, cooked.

Now, the funny thing about all this poverty? Pakistan's problem is easily reduced significantly, if not solved, if one were to implement real estate taxation reforms. In this case, there is a very simple treatment, but this treatment would hurt the Men in Green's real business, their main source of income, the real estate market that is essentially a giant black hole for money laundering. The cartels and those of influence do not like being taxed, but even they cannot avoid it occasionally. The Men in Green, on the other hand, hold the leash. They can.

Now imagine a poor nation where the minimum legal wage isn't even paid to most of its people, your average guard working at a Government Hospital (which should be obligated to pay this, no?) makes 15,000 Rupees when the so called minimum is 32000. That's $54 a month, to make ends meet he does two shifts, one with my hospital at night and the other at the Gov Hospital during the day. Altogether, he makes $120. After bills, he is left with barely nothing, and we doctors often donate to these guards to help cover the rest. As a side note, one of our guards was suffering cancer quietly, he decided to use up what remained of his body (he had Stage 4 CA, we did not know) to work 3 shifts and never even sought treatment after his diagnosis.

To quote my old blog “It was only today I learned he had Stage 4 cancer, and he did not choose to seek treatment for it. The time he did spend here, he knew his diagnosis, but he wished to earn whatever paltry money he could for his family, rather than spend time getting treated.” Today in this context was well after his demise, sadly, may he be happy in heaven. I had been rather blunt about the outcomes of Stage 4, not knowing he had it, my apologies again.

The full article is here Link to my blog

This is mainly to drive home how desperate people are. Rather than implementing reforms on real estate (their piggy bank) and uplifting the nation, they are kicking more people into poverty daily.

To quote: “The poverty in Pakistan increased within one year from 34.2% to 39.4% with 12.5 million more people falling below the poverty line of $3.65 per day income level, according to the World Bank. About 95 million Pakistanis now live in poverty.”

Imagine so many more people being pushed below, that is Pakistan for you, or rather the Men in Green.

Source

This is from last year. Things are even worse now.

Note how the line is $3.65 per day, now we are at the really important stuff. 39.4% people were there in 2023, there are even more now, but let us stay with 39.4 for argument's sake. Have you ever worried about the cost of one liter of milk? If you have, you are now in the right mindset. If you haven't, picture it, you're the average Pakistani, part of the 39.4%, your daily wage is less than $3.65 (which is now more like $3 due to devaluation)

Ultra-high temperature, or UHT, milk now costs 370 rupees ($1.33) a liter in supermarkets in Karachi (one of our biggest cities). In Peshawar, where I am for my training, it is going for 390 PKR ($1.40). That compares with $1.29 in Amsterdam, $1.23 in Paris, and $1.08 in Melbourne, according to data collected by Bloomberg. An 18% tax was applied to packaged milk as part of taxation changes approved in the national budget last week. Previously, it was tax-exempt. Source: Bloomberg

Now imagine you make less than $3.65, and your family needs milk. No, people have just stopped buying it, what else will they do? That, by the way is milk. Similar things have happened to almost every food staple. All this in the midst of a world record heat wave, when basic essentials and utilities are now more expensive than ever.

Life is unlivable, government hospitals are full of those afflicted by poverty who ended their life, this gets even darker when one realizes Islam has explicitly forbidden it, for a Pakistani to take his life (and most are brainwashed by Islam to a radical extent, such that they would suffer rather than end it) things must be dire. Data for suicide rates here is lower than the ground reality, due to various reasons. Sometimes, families ask those in Government Hospitals to write “Heart Failure” or something similar in the medicolegal certificate (should they need one, many don't) because if people find out there was a suicide, they will not attend your funeral. Indeed, I have even seen cases where grieving mothers cried as fathers refused to hold a funeral, but some kind uncle or cousin took the initiative.

That is without even considering the case of the laawaris, the word being an Urdu one meaning one without an owner (a family, essentially). Bodies of such people who have no one end up in hospitals, often with no ID, and no one cares to determine how they died, they are just......discarded and given a funeral. It is a sad state of affairs, indeed many of these cases show clear signs of suicide, but again, not reported.

As for what's documented, it too is disturbing The News: Rise in suicide by youth Dawn News: Spike in suicides

“Shockingly, Pakistan is ranked 72nd globally, with a suicide mortality rate of 9.8 per 100,000 population. What is even more concerning is the year-on-year increase in the suicide mortality rate. According to the World Health Organi-sation (WHO), there were 7.3 suicides per 100,000 in 2019, which rose to 8.9 in 2020, and 9.8 in 2022.”

The epidemic is serious enough that the government was forced to reconsider its stance and decriminalize suicide – Dawn News due to the hard work of the Pakistani Psychiatric Society.

Also from the article: “The concerning rise of ‘kala pathar (black stone) poisoning’, caused by paraphenylenediamine, in districts like Rahim Yar Khan and Sahiwal is a significant public health issue, with a high mortality rate of 50.5pc among rural women.” Rural women have found their own ways of ending it, sadly.

Of course, when the health budget, educational budget and all other developmental spending is slashed for a defense budget for the Men in Green, what else can one expect?

The salaried class is protesting being squeezed to death in a fruitless peaceful protest. We will be squeezed until nothing remains, sadly. I myself am a doctor and only dare eat twice a day, and the meals are nothing special, though admittedly am underpaid due to my unique training circumstances.

The petrol mafia and the flour mafia on the other hand have stopped their supplying, which will have more results. They refuse to pay the prescribed taxes to the government, and they will get away with it. After all, who will pay for the politicians and their 1000 Liters of free petrol, their cars, their houses, their electric and gas bills? Not The Men In Green, nor the seths (landowners, business moguls)

No, it's the salaried class.

My most learned friend at the Accountant General's office (he will be going to greener pastures soon, good luck my friend) is convinced, as are most of our finance people, that this economy is dead. What is happening now is simply the looting of a corpse.

But hey, gotta play golf, amirite? After all, golf does depict the ultimate fate of this nation.

Credits:

1. My learned auditor friend for formulating most of the financial stuff, and explaining it all to me very patiently. I, like most Pakistanis from rural areas, was a financial illiterate until our economy crashed. I didn't know the ins and outs of our economy, or its problems, only that our elite lived egregiously subsidized lives.

2. My colleague whose insights into the data manipulation of the government were quite valuable, her knowledge of our political landscape and its history is almost professorial, I guess it is to be expected from the daughter of a bureaucrat family, that she is still acting like one even in a hospital, hahah. Not that she will ever read this, but you are wasting your time on Medicine, go be a professor of Politics :P

3. Forrest, who will not hand over my IP to the Men in Green if they ever find this article (I hope he won't, and hopefully they don't find it to begin with) and who should remember that the Men in Green are powerless to threaten him, and all such emails should be marked as spam, or perhaps replied to with memes.