IN the space of a few short months, the PML-N government has demonstrated, by its ineptness as much as anything else, just how substantive Pakistan’s structural crises are.

Its dithering makes it difficult to put a finger on the regime’s major priorities; the only thing we can know for sure is that the Sharifs’ commitment to ensuring that loyalists control the levers of the most coveted sources of economic and political patronage is unmatched.

Amidst the wreckage, privatisation has emerged as one of the only coherent policy objectives of the government. Lest we forget, the Sharifs have remained loyal to the ‘everything is for sale’ mantra since they first tasted power during the Zia years. Following the adoption of the first structural adjustment agreement in 1988, it was the two PML-N governments in the 1990s that initiated the most sales of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

Most notoriously, the Muslim Commercial Bank (MCB) was granted to the Mansha group, a well-known band of Sharif loyalists. Other relatively big operations were also given over to preferred buyers. The trend seems set to intensify with foreign buyers, particularly from the Gulf, likely to be amongst the most significant bidders. Indeed, the Sharifs have clearly stated their intention to sell the biggest SOEs, a target that was not met during previous stints in government.

To the extent that proposals have been made public, PIA’s name has come up more than any other. Yet my sense is that loss-making entities like PIA, Pakistan Railways and Pakistan Steel Mills are eliciting far less interest from possible buyers than the lucrative Oil & Gas Development Corporation Limited (OGDCL) and Pakistan Petroleum Ltd (PPL).

It is relatively more straightforward to make a case against privatisation in the cases of profitable SOEs like OGDCL and PPL in comparison to loss-making ones. After all, why sell off assets that are raking in considerable monies for a cash-starved government? Yet in focusing on profitability and/or so-called ‘white elephants’ often said to be a major burden on the economy, we lose sight of what I consider the main issue when it comes to privatisation: what role the state should play in ensuring the provision of basic needs to the widest possible cross-section of society. Privatisation entails a free hand to the forces of the ‘market’ to allocate goods and services not on the basis of need, but ability to pay. We need only to stop and think for a second to realise that more and more basic goods and services here – and in the world at large – have become subject to market logic. Everything from basic education to electricity is provided by private entrepreneurs who care only about profits, not about whether the needs of the worst-off are being met.

Those with the means to acquire goods and services from the market do not concern themselves with what the state should be doing. This is the class that has a laissez-faire (pun intended) attitude towards the public sector: it is taken for granted that the state does not meet power, education, health, housing and many other needs and so the only question to be asked is which private provider should be patronised.

The poorest segments that cannot go out and send their children to the latest (substandard and over-priced) private school nevertheless try to navigate the market, with skewed consumption patterns, a mountain of debt, and sometimes suicide amongst the outcomes. It is this class that, knowingly or otherwise, most suffers from the absence of a politics that raises critical questions about state and market.

If and when concrete steps are actually taken by the government to start divesting shares of SOEs like OGDCL, PPL, PIA and others, expect some resistance by trade unions and leftist political parties.

There will likely be some back and forth about profitability and efficiency, and nepotism in the selling process. But what we really need is a holistic debate about the kind of society we want to create and the kind of state necessary in this regard because even if the planned spate of privatisations is scuttled, the unannounced and unplanned encroachment of the market principle in virtually every nook and cranny of social life will continue unabated.

Writing during the Second World War, the Austro-Hungarian thinker Karl Polanyi urged that the growing influence of the ‘self-regulating’ market be subjected to criticism. He emphasised that the manner in which natural resources constituting humanity’s means of subsistence were fast becoming commodities would eventually result in the “subordinat[ion of] the substance of society itself to the laws of the market”.

Seventy years later, much of our world has already been privatised; this is why we must protect what remains in the hope that we can sooner or later re-embed the market into the society it is supposed to serve.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.