Majid Nabi Burfat
When Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif recently ordered a third-party audit of his own austerity plan, it was presented as a serious measure of accountability. On the surface, it promised transparency and discipline — a sign that the government wanted its promises verified. Yet the move raises a deeper question, one the IMF and international observers rarely ask: if ordinary citizens are forced to endure crushing fiscal discipline, who audits the elite who remain insulated from it? Why must a government hire external auditors to check its own austerity when structural waste and privilege have long flourished unchecked?
Austerity is not a complicated riddle that requires forensic accountants to decode. It is the straightforward act of refusing unnecessary expenditure. Either ministries have stopped purchasing luxury vehicles or they have not. Either official foreign trips have been curtailed or they continue as routine privileges. Either the oversized motorcades that symbolize officialdom have been downsized or they still glide through the streets unchanged. These are visible realities, not hidden mysteries buried in spreadsheets. When austerity itself requires an audit to prove it exists, the exercise begins to resemble less a policy and more a performance.
This is where the latest announcement begins to take on the character of what might be called “austerity theatre.” In the theatre of Pakistani governance, elaborate processes often replace decisive reform. Committees are formed, inquiries are launched, audits are ordered. Each step appears responsible, yet the spectacle sometimes overshadows the substance. The conversation shifts from whether the policy works to whether the procedure around it sounds credible. By the time the process is complete, the underlying structural problems remain largely untouched.
The irony becomes even sharper when viewed from the perspective of ordinary citizens. For the public, austerity is already a lived reality. Inflation has steadily eroded household incomes, fuel prices have climbed repeatedly, and utility bills continue to rise with alarming regularity. Every increase in energy costs travels quickly through the economy, making transportation, groceries, and daily necessities more expensive. In practical terms, the public’s finances are audited every day—at the petrol pump, at the electricity meter, and at the grocery counter.
Against this backdrop, official austerity measures often appear modest in comparison. Reducing ministerial perks, limiting official travel, or trimming departmental expenditures may generate headlines, but they barely dent the deeper fiscal imbalances that have plagued Pakistan for decades. In fact, many of the steps currently presented as bold reforms are basic administrative discipline that should have been routine long ago. Cutting unnecessary privileges, controlling government fleets, and restricting discretionary spending are not revolutionary policies. They are the minimum standards of responsible governance.
Presenting them now as emergency responses to global energy volatility risks reinforcing the perception that austerity has been activated as a panic button rather than implemented as a long-term strategy. Pakistan’s economic pressures did not suddenly appear with the latest oil shock or regional tension. The country has been navigating recurring fiscal crises, international lending programmes, and structural budget deficits for years. During this time, economists and policy experts repeatedly warned that deeper reforms were unavoidable. Yet meaningful austerity rarely arrived until circumstances forced the government’s hand.
The real sources of fiscal stress are neither obscure nor controversial. Loss-making state-owned enterprises continue to drain billions from the national exchequer every year. Circular debt in the energy sector remains a persistent burden. Large segments of wealth remain outside the tax net while salaried professionals and ordinary consumers bear the bulk of revenue collection. Public procurement often suffers from inefficiencies that inflate the cost of development projects. These are not marginal leaks in the system; they are structural fissures that have widened over time.
Yet these structural questions rarely occupy the centre of austerity debates. Instead, attention gravitates toward symbolic gestures—salary cuts for ministers, temporary reductions in perks, or administrative restrictions that may quietly disappear once the political spotlight fades. Such measures may convey a sense of sacrifice, but they do little to dismantle the deeper architecture of fiscal waste.
This selective approach inevitably raises questions about equity. Pakistan’s economic structure has long been criticized for enabling a form of elite capture in which powerful sectors enjoy disproportionate influence while contributing relatively little to the tax base. Wealth accumulated through real estate speculation, large-scale agriculture, and segments of the retail economy often escapes the scrutiny applied to salaried income and consumer spending. When austerity measures focus primarily on public consumption while leaving these structural imbalances intact, the public begins to wonder whether the burden of adjustment is truly shared.
The consequences of this imbalance extend beyond economics into the realm of political legitimacy. A functioning social contract depends on the perception that sacrifices are distributed fairly across society. When citizens believe that the state is asking everyone—including those at the top—to contribute proportionately, difficult reforms become easier to accept. But when austerity appears to travel mostly downward, toward households already coping with rising prices, trust begins to erode.
The issue becomes even clearer when viewed in a broader regional context. Countries across South Asia, including India and Bangladesh, have also faced volatile global energy markets and rising import costs. Yet through a combination of fiscal buffers, energy diversification and longer-term planning, they have sometimes been able to cushion the immediate impact more effectively. Pakistan’s challenge is compounded by the fact that its fiscal space has been narrowed by years of delayed structural reform.
None of this suggests that austerity itself is misguided. On the contrary, Pakistan urgently needs financial discipline. A state cannot indefinitely spend beyond its means without eventually confronting painful consequences. Responsible governance requires controlling expenditures, eliminating waste and ensuring that public resources are used with care. But austerity must be credible to succeed. It must target the structural roots of fiscal imbalance rather than relying primarily on symbolic gestures.
This is why the debate should move beyond auditing austerity and toward practicing it where it truly matters. Genuine reform would involve confronting the entrenched inefficiencies that drain public finances. Loss-making institutions would need to be restructured or privatized so they no longer consume taxpayer funds. The tax system would need to expand so that wealthier sectors contribute proportionately. Public procurement would require greater transparency to prevent the chronic inflation of project costs.
Such measures demand political courage because they challenge longstanding interests and habits within the state. Yet without them, austerity risks remaining a recurring spectacle rather than a transformative policy.
In the end, ordering an audit may create the appearance of accountability, but accountability is measured by outcomes, not procedures. Citizens will judge the seriousness of reform not by how many audits are commissioned or how many announcements are made. They will judge it by whether the state itself begins to live by the discipline it repeatedly asks of its people.
Until that happens, the audit of austerity may simply become another scene in Pakistan’s familiar theatre of governance—a performance that sounds convincing when announced but leaves the deeper script of fiscal imbalance largely unchanged.
The writer is a Political Analyst & Columnist, former Civil Servant (CSP), and educationist based in Karachi.