It doesn’t have to have reached this. A week ago, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi had to issue a formal guarantee to foreign investors that their investments would be “secured at all costs.”
According to news reports, the Interior Minister assured a delegation of foreign investors that the authorities had account for the recent “attacks by criminals” and that “legal measures” were being taken against them. While the details were scarce, it seemed from the minister’s comments that violence aimed at foreign fast food chains was an important point of discussion in the investor agenda.
Supposedly instigated by a religious-political party, mobs had attacked and destroyed at least 10 fast food outings in different parts of the country in early April, during national protests against violence that is being perpetrated in Gaza. In one of those incidents, a restaurant worker was deadly shot by unidentified criminals. The question is, where was the state when the attacks continued to occur day after day?
Promises and guarantee that Ring Hollow after the prevenible life loss and property have already occurred. And they serve little to assure investors when there are many other examples that accompany state failures that result in commercial interruptions.
Consider, for example, that some of Pakistan’s most important logistics routes remained closed for 10 days due to a political dispute over the new channel projects that the authorities had long refused to address. The news reports indicated that the road closures of the protesters in Sindh had forced many local manufacturers to suspend production due to the shortage of raw materials, and even threatened a country of fuel shortage. The blockade also left millions of dollars in exports stranded on the roads, in addition to stopping much of the national trade.
Throughout that period, the State did little but observed and waited while companies suffered the costs of their catastrophic calculation error on the channel problem. And who can forget last year, when the entire IT industry was made while the authorities played with Pakistan’s internet services with several pretexts.
These are just some of the many unforeseen but not unexpected ‘interruptions that investors face routinely. Due to the prevailing socio -political instability and because its institutions are weak and the State has gradually undermined its own court order, investors face a greater risk that their commercial routine operations can be completely turned at any time.
This ‘standardized unpredictability’ is an anathema for operational continuity and development of companies, since their risks and costs are invariably in charge of them. Given the time investing in attracting investors to Pakistan, it is inexplicable why the government does not make a constant effort to guarantee the rule of law, whose absence is what eventually drives investors. Addressing the symptoms of the problem but not its root causes can only produce temporary successes.
Posted in Dawn, May 5, 2025
