Defining the Edifice Complex
It was in the 1970s that Behn Cervantes, a Filipino activist, coined the term edifice complex. It symbolized the Philippines’ first lady, Imelda Marcos’s infatuation with using publicly funded projects for personal projection.
Historian Gerard Lico has authored “Edifice Complex: Power, Myth and Marcos State Architecture.” He writes that Imelda reveled in her edifice complex, deeming it a personification of power, glory, and progress. Lico describes it as a ruse to perpetuate power and to legitimize the dictatorial Marcos regime.
Replete with gross overspending and corruption, this infatuation was satiated by taking loans. In 1986, when Marcos was finally ousted, the Philippines was mired in an outstanding debt of over 28.3 billion dollars.
Supreme Court’s Ban Meets Punjab’s Loophole
In May 2024, the Supreme Court of Pakistan imposed a ban on politicians putting up their plaques on development projects. It also directed the federal and provincial governments to implement their 2021 decision to ban the same.
Issuing the orders, the SC remarked that Pakistan was neither a monarchy nor were the people subjects. Personalizing public projects, the SC said, could only be done if an individual had personally financed the same.
In turn, the Punjab government incorporated a provision in the Punjab Public Awareness and Dissemination of Information Act, 2025. Through it, the provincial government has granted itself the power to name or rename any public project.
It validates all public awareness campaigns undertaken by the government since January last year. They have also been granted immunity from judicial review. The act makes the DG Public Relations responsible for these campaigns and a redressal forum. The DG shall decide on any complaints with the Secretary PR as the only appellant forum.
The Latin phrase “nemo judex in causa sua” – no one should be a judge in his own cause – is a cardinal rule of natural justice. An antithesis of vested interest and bias, it is the bedrock of legal systems the world over. We scoff at it.
Pakistan’s Fiscal Follies: A Cycle of Debt and Mismanagement
The Punjab government has announced a record 1.24 trillion rupees Annual Development Program for the 2025-26 fiscal year. The AGP report for 2024-25 has unearthed irregularities of over 1 trillion rupees in Punjab’s 2023-24 expenditure accounts. Almost a balancing act!
The report describes the irregularities having been realized through fraud, misappropriation, unauthorized payments, financial mismanagement, suspicious procurement, and unauthorized retention of consolidated fund receipts.
The federal cabinet approved the sugar import of 500,000 MT and waived import taxes to offset the fallout of its earlier 765,734 MT export decision. An AGP report revealed that the exporters made a 300 billion rupee killing. Those who continue to suffer are the consumers. The IMF was told that the import tax waiver was justified due to a “food emergency.” The unamused lender scuttled the tax bypass. The IMF termed it a major breach of the commitment against preferential tax treatment and commodity purchases. Undeterred, the government has entered into yet another agreement with the all-powerful millers, allowing sugar export if stocks exceed 7 million MT.
The current fiscal year saw 15 SOEs accumulating a record 5.9 trillion rupees in losses. According to the Ministry of Finance, 616 billion rupees were poured into these SOEs during June-December 2024. This is a leap of 42% compared to the same period last year. Since 2019, the IPPs have been paid nearly 8 trillion rupees in capacity payments. An estimated 2,091 billion rupees is payable in the current fiscal year. Lest one forgets, these payments are regardless of whether the electricity is generated and used. Another AGP report reveals that electricity distribution companies defrauded consumers of 244 billion rupees to cover up line losses and electricity theft.
These implosive acts see us ever plummeting into a decimating debt trap. Chambers of Commerce are unanimous in protesting against government policies. Our total public debt is nearly $267 billion, 65% of our GDP. An external debt payment of $23 billion is due this year.
Edifices Over Accountability
Vainglorious supplements and hours of airtime at taxpayers’ expense are as great a disconnect as they are an affront to the pulverized masses. Advertisements are now educating us that the recent monsoons are a natural disaster. It is not nature that is the culprit; it is apathy and indifference to human misery, a purely human trait. Year after year, the country remains unprepared, defenseless, and meekly reactive against devastating deluges and the disease-outbreak aftermath.
Disaster management’s first step, untaken so far, is disaster vulnerability assessment. It identifies the vulnerabilities of a community and its infrastructure against natural disasters or human-induced threats. The latter’s example is the subsidence and dilapidated buildings in Karachi and elsewhere, or Swat’s unregulated mining and encroached-upon riverbanks.
What we can do is install a new single-bid 23.83-billion-rupee Indus Telemetry Project. In 2000, with WAPDA at the helm, General Musharraf initiated the first telemetry system. It was abandoned after years of malfunction. This time around, WAPDA is the executing agency again, and the consultants remain unchanged.
In a democracy, even minor demeanors, if repeated, can send a government packing. Here, despite glaring anomalies and continuously questioned legitimacy, the government has managed a constitution-amending parliamentary majority. Such a dichotomy can only be spawned where institutions lose their role as accountable referents.
Does this woeful situation demand somber introspection and judicious policies or a garish and delusional edifice complex? Nothing could be a greater fallacy than the belief that edifices, paeans, and paid promotions are a barometer of public service. The opportunity to serve people is in itself a privilege and an honor. Flaunting it is to sully it.
This is summed up ever so sublimely in these Marcus Garvey words: “The ends you serve that are selfish, will take you no further than yourself, but the ends you serve that are for all in common, will take you into eternity.”
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Mir Adnan Aziz is a freelance contributor.