IT was a Friday afternoon in May 2019. State Bank of Pakistan Governor Tariq Bajwa was in Islamabad with the IMF mission, flanked by his technical team I led. Unbeknownst to him, his successor was already in the country. By evening, Bajwa had resigned. The finance secretary at the time told me a new governor would be appointed by nightfall: Reza Baqir, the IMF’s resident representative in Egypt, already in town and ready to assume charge. The notification followed the next day, a Saturday. Within 24 hours, over a weekend, a serving IMF official had been installed at the helm of the central bank, as abruptly as Bajwa’s own 2017 appointment had followed a rupee devaluation.
Opacity is not the only problem; law compounds it. The 2022 amendments to the SBP Act, while granting welcome operational autonomy, also imposed restrictions found nowhere in the IMF’s own safeguards assessment: an outright bar on dual nationals, and a requirement that a candidate completes a full five-year term before turning 65. Together, these eliminate precisely the cohort best placed to lead the central bank, favouring insiders over competence.
Contrast this with how Britain appoints the governor of the Bank of England: open international advertisement, a shortlist, ministerial interviews, and months of public notice before the transition begins. That is the process that produced Andrew Bailey to succeed Mark Carney in March 2020. In Pakistan, favoured candidates are installed within a day, while everyone else waits months, even years, for a vacancy the law says must be filled within 30 days.
Mark Carney’s trajectory sharpens the point further. A Canadian citizen who also held Irish citizenship through family ancestry, he was appointed governor of the Bank of England in Nov 2012, and ran UK monetary policy and financial stability for nearly seven years, through the 2016 Brexit shock. In 2018, while still governor, he acquired British citizenship too, holding three nationalities as custodian of Britain’s currency, with no credible case that he favoured Canadian or Irish interests over British ones.
