ONE can have many opinions regarding privatisation, but a knee-jerk rejection of all plans to privatise any state-owned enterprise, without any mention of what alternative one has to stem the mounting losses, means the political opposition in the country is running out of ideas.

The senior leadership of both, the PPP and the PTI, have categorically stated that they will resist the government’s plans to privatise PIA or the Pakistan Steel Mills.

These plans are unrealistic to start off with, and not many people believe that the government can pull off in a matter of months what successive governments have failed to do in close to a decade and a half.

Attacking such unrealistic aspirations from platforms as high as the parties’ top leadership only shows that the rival parties are firmly opposing things for the sake of opposing them.

What might have lent more credence to such pronouncements coming from such high offices is if the parties in question had advanced any alternative vision for how the ailing public-sector enterprises can be turned around.

The accumulated losses at PIA are now about Rs320bn while PSM’s losses have touched Rs161bn. At this rate, within a few years, these losses could swell to become larger than our annual peacetime defence budget.

Both entities required regular injections of equity from the government, at taxpayer expense, to make their payroll or meet crucial debt-service obligations.

Clearly, they cannot continue lumbering along like this for much longer.

The fact that they stand at this pass is testament to the failure of our collective political leadership to develop any kind of vision of the way forward.

This style of politics, of opposing strategic steps only to put up resistance to an idea conceived by political rivals, has done enormous damage to Pakistan over the years.

There are some realities that just should not be politicised.

Our rising gas deficits, for example, or the lack of indigenous mining expertise or the bleeding of the public-sector enterprises are clearly among those realities.

Each of these issues has been the subject of opposition for the sake of opposition, of crude smear campaigns and sinister innuendo, and have therefore suffered from the lack of any political consensus on a resolution.

Now, in the twilight of its reign, the government has come up with a plan that few are taking seriously regarding the hasty privatisation of two large public-sector entities.

It is one thing to decry the haste in which this is being championed, but quite another to do so while having no ideas of one’s own of how the mounting losses are to be contained.

When dealing with these issues, some sort of consensus on the way forward is what is needed more than cheap political point-scoring.

Published in Dawn, March 6th, 2018