‘BB bad for business’
DM Monitoring

In an article published by the highest circulation Australian newspaper, The Sunday Morning Herald, a leading Australian economic analyst, Mr. Eric Ellis has written that a third term for Ms Bhutto would be the worst thing that could happen to Pakistan. Ellis also writes for the Fortune Magazine. His analysis on Pakistan’s economy is excerpted below:-
“Since 2004, when General, Musharraf appointed Mr. Aziz Prime Minister, Pakistan has enjoyed growth to rival its illustrious neighbours China and India.
Mr. Aziz’s pro-business, market-oriented reforms have pulled Pakistan back from near-collapse in 1999, no small feat in a country burdened by unremitting corruption and a moribund bureaucracy. September 11 and the “war on terror” helped too. The US and its allies have paid plenty for General Musharraf’s support, cancelling debt and boosting aid.
“The Government has no business in business,” Mr. Aziz told me last year. This makes him unpopular with old crony plutocrats hooked on the state drip, but genuine entrepreneurs have been unleashed to the point of mercantile mayhem. To stroll along Karachi’s chaotic I.I Chundrigar Road, Pakistan’s Wall Street, is a near death-by-deal making experience.
Pakistan has been on of the world’s most booming economies this decade. Its property market fizzes as Hong Kong style off-the-plan complexes sprout. Karachi’s stock market is 50 per cent up this year and one of the world’s best performers this decade.
Foreign suitors like Australia’s BHP Billiton, drilling for gas in Balochistan, have expanded and are doing well, citing annual returns of 20 to 30 per cent and pleasing productivity. There is even a thriving Bangalore-style outsourcing industry. Infrastructure - freeways, airports, ports, electricity supply – would be a revelation in most parts of India. And it’s all goof for the military.
A plus is that Mr Aziz doesn’t regard public office as a personal ATM machine. He was a self-made millionaire before he took office, trading an Upper East Side lifestyle in Manhattan for a beaten-up Toyota staff car and assassination attempts. Importantly, he wasn’t politician, a particularly putrid species in Pakistan. A contender for the post of Citibank chief executive worldwide before he was tapped by General Musharraf to be finance minister a week after the 1999 military coup, the urbane Mr Aziz headed Citi’s corporate banking operation for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East through the 90s, and its private banking division. Mr Aziz told me last year he has never heard of General Musharraf until he saw news of the putsch on CNN. He dismissed it as “another co, another general”, but was intrigued enough to take his call – and the job.
Officials here tend to specialise in oleaginousness, but Mr Aziz says he views his job as “volunteer national service”. Few Pakistanis perceive him as corrupt, a first for their prime minister.
The West prescribes job creation, a strong economy and fighting corruption as the antidotes for terror and Islamist radicalism. That Mr Aziz is delivering these could please Islamabad’s Western patrons. But the West favours a feudal baroness twice ousted as prime minister for corruption, whose administrations were condemned as incompetent and on whose watch rose the Taliban.
In a decade of exile, Benazir Bhutto has clubbably presented herself in Western salons as a liberal democrat who can deliver Pakistan from the Taliban, while dodging hard questions about her competence. Her record isn’t pretty, but her backers in Washington, London and Canberra seem to have developed an acute bout of amnesia about her abilities.
Witness Alexander Downer’s unbounded regard for Bhutto, now angling for a third stint as prime minister. The Foreign Affairs Minister said last week that he thought Bhutto was “a good woman”, someone who stands for the things we stand for in Australia”.
Perhaps Mr Downer sees in Bhutto shades of another irrepressible politician dear to him. Ambition also unbounded – or perhaps it’s something else – Bhutto qualifies as a sub-continental “”Lazarus with a Triple Bypass”, in trademark white headscarf instead of a Wallabies tracksuit. But Mr Downer is more correct that he might imagine.
He claimed ignorance of the AWAB oil-for-food scandal in his departmental backyard; Bhutto has a similar skeleton dangling in her closet. The same United Nations inquiry that fingered AWB alleged that her company made some $Us 144 million in dubious Iraqi oil trades when Saddam Hussein rules in Baghdad.
It could run in the family. Pakistanis know her husband, Asif Zardari, as “Mr Ten Per Cent”. Bhutto dismisses the corruption allegations that plague her as political. But funny money asides, many say a third Bhutto term is about the worst thing that could happen to Pakistan, bearing in mind that it was during her second term that the Pakistan-raised and funded Taliban consumed Afghanistan.
The conservative American historian and South Asia specialist Arthur Herman describes Bhutto as “one of the most incompetent leaders in the history of South Asia”. Jemima Khan, former wife of the cricketer-turned-[politician Imran, has described her as “kleptocrat in a Hermes scarf” and the country’s “most self enriching leader.”
The Asian development Bank says Pakistan’s economy is now five times bigger than it was under Bhutto in 1996. Foreign reserves are 15 times what they were in 1990, when her first term ended, and 10 times those of 1996, when her second term ended.
The corruption watchdog Transparency International ranks Pakistan 138th of 179 countries surveyed.
It is hardly Scandinavian-style probity, but it’s cleaner than Indonesia and some distance from being the second-most corrupt country on Transparency International’s list, as it was when Bhutto last ran the place
.Pakistan is dismissed as a near failure where only the foolhardy would invest, but it generates some of Asia’s best return for foreign investors and the country’s general”.