The Colonial Mindset of Our Ruling Elite: Luxury J...

Summary

• A citizen crushed by inflation and utility bills sees senior officials travelling in convoys of 20 or 30 vehicles and asks a simple question: if the country is so poor, why does its government continue to live so lavishly?
• Yet the country continues to struggle to bring large parts of the informal economy and powerful economic interests into the effective tax net.
• The question is, why ordinary consumers continue to bear the consequences of a system whose structural failures were created by successive governments and powerful stakeholders.

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By Engr. Abdur Rehman Khichi

There is something deeply disturbing about the way Pakistan’s ruling elite continues to conduct itself in a country where millions of people struggle to afford food, electricity, fuel and basic healthcare. According to a recent World Bank assessment of the MENAAP region, around 48 percent of the region’s poor are in Pakistan, with people surviving on roughly $3 (around PKR 840) a day. The other half of the region’s poor population is concentrated largely in countries such as Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria, countries facing war and prolonged conflict. Pakistan’s own figures are equally disturbing: with a national poverty line of around PKR 8,483 per person per month and a poverty rate of 28.9 percent, roughly 70 million Pakistanis live below the official poverty threshold. For these people, putting food on the table, paying electricity bills and buying fuel are daily struggles. Yet the priorities of the state often seem to belong to another world.

At a time when the government repeatedly calls for austerity, reports of the Punjab government’s purchase of a luxury aircraft costing roughly PKR 10 billion, despite an aircraft already being available, and the federal procurement of dozens of luxury bulletproof vehicles are difficult to justify. A citizen crushed by inflation and utility bills sees senior officials travelling in convoys of 20 or 30 vehicles and asks a simple question: if the country is so poor, why does its government continue to live so lavishly? The contradiction becomes even sharper in taxation. The salaried class is among the easiest groups to tax because its income is documented and tax is deducted at source. Yet the country continues to struggle to bring large parts of the informal economy and powerful economic interests into the effective tax net. When the Federal Board of Revenue falls short of its targets, the burden often returns to those who are already paying. The government also relies heavily on petroleum taxes and levies to raise revenue, meaning that every litre of fuel carries a substantial fiscal burden. The ordinary citizen therefore pays not only for the cost of petroleum but also helps compensate for the state’s broader revenue-collection problem. The irony is painful: the documented taxpayer is squeezed harder because he is easy to find.