There is a particular Pakistani ritual that outsiders struggle to understand. A senior official stands at a podium in front of the very people who have run the country for decades, and announces that the country is broken. The audience nods. Some clap. Everyone stays exactly where they are. The diagnosis is delivered, absorbed, applauded, and everyone returns to running the thing just declared unrunnable.

This is theatre with a policy vocabulary, dressed up as reform.

Pakistan's problem was always a surplus of people willing to say the system has failed. Every few months someone with a government title says it more dramatically than the last person. The word "collapse" has been used so often it has become furniture, the way a "cash only, machine down" sign at the utility bill counter has become part of the counter's design. The vocabulary of crisis has become the country's most fluent language. A country that can describe its own collapse this eloquently, this repeatedly, has stopped treating collapse as an emergency and now treats it as genre.

What Pakistan needs is someone willing to explain who benefits from the system staying exactly as broken as it is.

Consider the country's founding contradiction, still alive after seventy-eight years: a state built on the promise of equal citizenship that has spent those decades building everything except the institutions equal citizenship requires. Land records that predate independence still determine who eats and who goes hungry. A civil service designed by a colonial power........

© The Express Tribune