Pakistan’s crisis is not only economic. It is a crisis of how we think, whom we trust, and why we keep confusing the loudest man on the stage with the wisest.
Every nation gets the leaders it chooses, and Pakistan has been choosing the same kind of leader for more than fifty years. In 1970, it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto promising roti, kapra, and makaan. In the 1990s, it was Nawaz Sharif promising motorways and prosperity. In 2018, it was Imran Khan promising a Naya Pakistan built on the model of the riyasat-e-Madina.
The slogans differed. The pattern did not: a wounded nation, a charismatic rescuer, an enemy to hate, and, in the end, a country poorer, angrier and more divided than before. To understand why, we have to begin not with the leaders but with ourselves: the voters.
Voter ignorance is not an insult. It is a precise idea in political science. It means citizens who vote without understanding what they are voting on. That includes not knowing how the economy works, where the state’s money comes from, what a member of the National Assembly is actually responsible for, what a candidate achieved or failed to achieve in office, and whether a promise can be paid for at all.
The American economist Anthony Downs described it in 1957 as rational ignorance. Because one vote almost never decides an election, most people decide that studying policy is not worth their time. Bryan Caplan went further in The Myth of the Rational Voter, arguing that voters are not merely uninformed but systematically drawn to ideas that feel good over ideas that work.
In Pakistan, ignorance runs in both directions. We talk endlessly about the uninformed voter and almost never about the uninformed candidate. Many of the people we send to our assemblies could not explain the federal budget they vote on, the IMF conditions they accept, or the laws they pass in a single afternoon without debate.
The “electable” is chosen for his biradari, his land and his ability to get an FIR registered, not for any understanding of governance. An ignorant voter electing an ignorant candidate is not democracy failing by accident. It is a closed loop, and both sides of it are comfortable.
The usual answer is education, and education matters. The 2023 census put literacy at about 61 per cent, and more than 25 million children are out of school.
But we should be honest about something uncomfortable: a degree has not cured us. Some of the most passionate spreaders of conspiracy theories in Pakistan hold MBAs, medical degrees and foreign passports. Engineers forward doctored videos. Professors explain away every failure of their chosen leader.
Research by the Yale scholar Dan Kahan found that more educated and numerate people are often better at twisting evidence to fit what their political tribe already believes, not worse. A degree teaches you how to argue. It does not teach you to doubt yourself.
Pakistan has produced millions of certificates and very few critical thinkers because our classrooms reward memorisation and obedience, not questioning.
This is the soil in which demagogues grow. A demagogue is a leader who wins power by appealing to emotion, fear and prejudice rather than reason. Aristotle described three tools of persuasion: ethos, the speaker’s character; pathos, the audience’s emotion; and logos, evidence and logic. The demagogue uses the first two and despises the third.
Populism is the ideology that gives the demagogue his script. The political scientist Cas Mudde defines it as a worldview that divides society into two camps: “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”.
Jan-Werner Müller, in What Is Populism?, adds the most dangerous part. The populist claims that he alone represents the real people. Anyone who disagrees with him is therefore not just wrong but illegitimate: a traitor, a thief or a foreign agent.
That is the logic of “us versus them”. There is no opposition, only enemies. There are no critics, only conspirators. Compromise becomes betrayal.
No Pakistani leader has used this script more completely than Imran Khan. His supporters saw a cricketing hero, a philanthropist who built a cancer hospital, and the one honest man in a corrupt system. That was the ethos of rare power.
He turned it into a politics in which every opponent was a chor or daku, every institution that crossed him was compromised, and every failure was someone else’s conspiracy.
He promised ten million jobs and five million homes. He reportedly said he would rather commit suicide than go to the IMF, then went to the IMF. He called U-turns the mark of a great leader.
When he became the first prime minister removed through a no-confidence vote in April 2022, he did not ask why his government had lost its majority. He waved a diplomatic cypher and told millions that America had removed him. Few of those who believed it ever read the document.
On 9 May 2023, that anger spilt into attacks on military installations and public property.
The deepest damage was not to the economy. It was to us. Populism of this kind entered our homes. Brothers stopped speaking to brothers. Families divided along party lines at dinner tables.
A generation of young Pakistanis learned that politics is loyalty rather than judgement and that a leader’s word outweighs any evidence.
When a society loses the ability to say “my side was wrong”, it loses the capacity to correct itself. That is the real destruction the saviours leave behind: not empty treasuries, which can be refilled, but closed minds, which are much harder to open.
To be fair, Khan did not invent this. Bhutto’s populism ended in nationalisations that crippled industry for a generation. Sharif’s politics of personal loyalty and dynastic succession hollowed out his own party.
And the establishment, which has ruled directly for roughly three decades and indirectly for much longer, created many of these saviours before discarding them.
When citizens believe elections are engineered, they stop trusting arguments and start trusting whoever promises to fight the engineers. Political engineering does not defeat populism. It manufactures it.
In February 2024, turnout was about 48 per cent. More than half the country had stopped believing its vote mattered.
What Pakistan needs is the opposite of a saviour: a statesman.
The difference is simple. A populist thinks about the next election, while a statesman thinks about the next generation. A populist tells people what they want to hear. A statesman tells them what they need to know, even when it costs him votes.
A populist divides the nation into the pure and the corrupt. A statesman reminds us that the people on the other side are citizens too.
On 11 August 1947, with the subcontinent in flames, Jinnah told the Constituent Assembly that religion had nothing to do with the business of the state. That was statesmanship: reason spoken into a storm of passion.
Nelson Mandela forgave his jailers to hold South Africa together. Even our own rivals briefly managed it when they signed the Charter of Democracy in 2006 and passed the 18th Amendment in 2010. Those moments faded as soon as power came within reach.
Can reason ever defeat emotion in Pakistan? Only if we stop waiting for it to arrive on a container.
It will come when schools teach children to question instead of memorise, when every manifesto is publicly costed before an election, when governments are allowed to complete their terms and be judged by voters alone, and when citizens begin to ask one simple question of every leader who makes them cry: how, at what cost, and who pays?
The tragedy of Pakistan is not that we have had no honest leaders. It is that we have so often preferred the one who moved us to the one who could be measured.
Until those changes, the saviours will keep coming, and they will keep leaving us poorer than they found us.
The writer is an independent researcher from Islamabad. He can be reached at mohaminnnnzeeshannnn@gmail.com.
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