There is a special kind of cruelty in telling a man he must tighten his belt while his master feasts at the same table. Yet this is precisely the theatre of the absurd now playing out across Pakistan, where the International Monetary Fund's latest austerity programme has served up a banquet of suffering for the impoverished multitude while the country's rapacious elite continue to dine with impunity.

The recent decision by the Punjab government to abolish nearly 150,000 vacant government posts spanning Grades 1 to 16 across all departments is not merely an administrative pruning exercise. It is a moral indictment of a system that has chosen to pulverise the already broken rather than disturb the comfortable.

The numbers, stark as they are, barely capture the human devastation. In the education sector alone, 30,391 posts have already been eliminated, with another 30,000 teaching positions marked for the chopping block in a second phase. Watchmen, clerks, assistants, and naib qasids — the sinew of public service delivery have been cast into the wilderness.

The Punjab Finance Department, with bureaucratic coldness, issued formal notifications declaring these abolitions necessary to ‘reduce the financial burden on the provincial exchequer.’ One wonders where this fiscal zeal was when the same government was doling out political patronage and pork-barrel largesse to institutional constituencies that keep the ruling class in power.

To understand this crucifixion of the poor, one must follow the money trail back to the International Monetary Fund, which has once again demonstrated its remarkable talent for prescribing leeches to anaemic patients while the vampires roam free. Pakistan is currently shackled to its 25th International Monetary Fund programme — a $7 billion Extended Fund Facility approved in September 2024,........

© The Friday Times