Analysis | Pakistan’s Imran Khan loses control of coronavirus fight to military, amid corruption scandal
- The military, which helped bring Khan to power, intervened after the prime minister downplayed the Covid-19 threat and opposed a lockdown
- Khan is under pressure to improve his government’s performance, and a massive sugar price-fixing scandal has further weakened his administration
Khan’s 18-month-old administration has been further weakened by a massive corruption scandal, after his office on Sunday released the results of a federal investigation into sugar price-fixing.
It found that three of his close political aides – all mill owners – earned tens of millions of US dollars following a federal cabinet decision last July to allow the export of sugar. They had already benefited from a sizeable subsidy on domestic rates from the Punjab provincial government, which is also controlled by Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party.
Khan conceded that he had chaired the cabinet meeting and approved the proposal because he thought it would benefit millions of farmers. Instead, the export of sugar, along with wheat flour, triggered nationwide shortages which practically doubled retail prices by January, and fuelled double-digit consumer price inflation rates in the midst of an economic slowdown.
Since then, Khan has been under increasing pressure from the military to improve the performance of his government, said Abbas Nasir, a London-based analyst and former Asia-Pacific executive editor for the BBC World Service.