—Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1947)
Pakistan’s ruling elite resemble the dodder vine, a parasitic plant that entwines and drains its hosts while remaining invisible to the soil of the nation it exploits. Like dodder, they siphon wealth, influence, and opportunity from the body politic, embedding themselves across every institution. Yet, instead of transmitting life-saving warnings, they propagate self-serving signals, policies, contracts, and subsidies designed to protect their own networks while leaving ordinary citizens vulnerable and exposed. They flourish by connecting the levers of state power into a closed, parasitic circuit, thriving on our resources while ensuring that accountability never travels through the system. They are the nation’s lifeblood-sucking vine, alert only to their own enrichment, deaf to the alarm cries of the people.
The Elite’s Ransom: Pakistan Will No Longer Pay
Pakistan is not facing a debt crisis. Pakistan is enduring a moral collapse.
The IMF’s latest governance report is not a mere assessment. It is an indictment, written in the blood, sweat, and tears of millions of Pakistanis. The world has finally said what our rulers never will: this country has been captured, looted, and held hostage by its own elite.
For decades, our leaders, civilian and military alike, have marched to Washington with begging bowls while plundering billions at home. Twenty-five IMF programmes in sixty-seven years. Twenty-five. Even the most addicted show more restraint than the Pakistani elite’s addiction to loans.
Here is the brutal truth: Pakistan is not bankrupt. Pakistan has been robbed.
Rs5.3 trillion recovered in two years is only a fraction of what has been stolen. Imagine the billions still hidden, laundered, and vanished into private coffers. This is not abstract math. This is life.
It is every child who dies because a hospital ran out of medicine.
It is the dam that never saved a village from flooding.
It is the GDP growth stolen from our people.
Elite privilege, subsidies for the few, contracts for the connected, exemptions for the powerful, devours billions every year. The IMF finally names the disease: state capture. Policies are not made for the people; they are engineered for cartels, mafias, and dynasties that treat this nation as hereditary property.
Look at the sugar scandal of 2019: a handful of mill owners, ministers, cronies, politicians, exported our future, hoarded resources, created artificial shortages, and forced the poor to pay the price. Who was punished? No one. The system they control shields them from justice.
The judiciary, overburdened and compromised, has become a graveyard where accountability goes to die. Two million cases are pending, but the true backlog is the mountain of crimes never even recorded against the powerful. Even our new “investment councils,” designed to rescue the economy, operate with immunity and opacity. Decisions worth billions are made behind closed doors. Transparency is treated as a threat, not a duty.
How long must ordinary citizens pay for elite immunity?
How long must Pakistan bear the sins of its rulers?
Corruption is not a side issue. It is The Issue. It is the poison in our veins. It is why children study under broken roofs, why the rupee collapses, and why hope itself has become a luxury. It is the theft of our present, the surrender of our future, and the mockery of our past.
This nation has survived wars, floods, dictatorships, and terrorism. But it cannot survive another generation of elite capture. Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah warned in 1947 that corruption would poison Pakistan. His warning has become our obituary, unless we rise to write a new chapter.
We are 240 million Pakistanis. We deserve better than 24 IMF loans and zero accountability. We know the future is not lost; it is being held hostage. And the time for ransom has ended.
Pakistan is not failing. Pakistan is being failed.
We, the people, are done paying.
Cancelling the Debt: A Civic Call to Action
To reclaim our nation, this “cancelled debt” is not symbolic. It is actionable. Every citizen can demand:
Mandatory Asset Declarations:– All elected officials and senior bureaucrats must declare their assets publicly and independently verified.
Judicial Reform:– Fast-track anti-corruption courts with binding, non-negotiable timelines for high-profile state capture cases.
Transparency Act:– All public contracts above a fixed threshold must be published online in real-time, accessible to every Pakistani.
The silence is broken. The debt is cancelled. The nation is reclaiming what belongs to its people.
