Finance minister Aurangzeb’s debut budget last June was written on an emergency-ward clipboard. He walked into Q-Block in mid-March, found the fiscal tables already laminated by mandarins, inflation roaring in double digits, the policy rate sitting at twenty-two percent, and an IMF term sheet stapled to every file. Stabilisation—not transformation—was the only sane brief.
Twelve months later the excuses have expired. FY25 will close with that rare double act—a current-account surplus and a primary surplus in the same year. Inflation has slipped under five percent, comfortably below the SBP’s band, and the policy rate is drifting toward territory where private credit can breathe. Brent is anchored below seventy dollars.
Washington’s tariff growl has mellowed to a grin, Beijing is obliging, and the wider world has resumed polite engagement. The patient is out of the ICU; the question is whether the doctor walks him into rehab or escorts him straight to the maghaz-nihari buffet.
Rehab starts with honest revenue surgery. Last year’s surplus rested on a once-off State Bank dividend and a convenient freeze on development cheques—tricks that won’t encore. Agricultural income tax must raise more than coffee money, the sanctuary of non-filer status must be buried without resurrection, and every surviving concession and SRO needs a stamped date of execution. If the retail and land barons still escape, Pakistan will have chosen oligarchy over solvency—full stop.
The energy labyrinth offers an equally stark fork in the road. Converting power-sector arrears into a sukuk is defensible only if the budget engraves automatic quarterly tariff indexation and pins a timetable for three DISCO concessions within the year. Gas must follow the same script: bi-annual tariff resets, zero tolerance for unaccounted-for gas, and captive-power fuel priced above grid electricity. Without those triggers the sukuk is merely wallpaper over damp.
Trade protection has outlived every excuse. The budget speech should delete the used-car import ban, flatten the tariff pyramid, and cancel the alphabet soup of special zones that hand out tax holidays for zero performance—live, line by line, on the floor of the House. Anything softer will be redrafted by lobbyists before the ink dries.
Privatisation must move from PowerPoint to gazette. Pakistan International Airlines should be slated for sale by August; two power distributors and a gas company before June next year. No asset parks in a sovereign-wealth cul-de-sac until IFRS audits and OECD-grade boards are in black and white. Investors and citizens deserve to know whether these carcasses will be run for profit or patronage.
Only after the state proves it can collect taxes and live within its means should it be allowed to dream of new motorways. A federation whose net revenue is smaller than its interest bill has forfeited the moral right to ladle out “development” pork. Decades of evidence show the PSDP’s real purpose is contract distribution, not growth. Freeze it at bare-bones maintenance until the exchequer runs genuine surpluses or crowds in private capital; anything more is fiscal vandalism and an invoice to unborn taxpayers.
Climate resilience belongs on the fiscal ledger, not in donor slide decks. A carbon levy on petrol and diesel, effective this July, should finance flood defences and canal rehabilitation, while irrigation water charges rise on a transparent five-year glide path. Every rupee raised must be matched by a rupee in targeted BISP transfers so the vulnerable receive cash, not promises.
When Aurangzeb strides to the rostrum next month, the words he utters after “Bismillah” will decide whether he is etched onto Pakistan’s economic brass plaques or disappears into the grey footnotes of caretaker technocrats. Manmohan Singh faced a minority coalition, a balance-of-payments crisis, and double-digit inflation in 1991 yet rewired India’s political economy in one budget.
Aurangzeb enjoys friendlier oil prices, a calmer IMF, and a rare twin surplus. Choose rehabilitation—deep tax reform, hard budget constraints, genuine trade liberalisation, transparent privatisation—and he might become the unlikely architect of the liberalisation Pakistan has postponed since 1988. Choose the buffet, and history will remember him as the physician who kept the patient upright only to let him binge on jalebi after bypass. The monitors are steady, the lights are green; the next move is his.
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