By Isqil Najim
The debt system is often seen as an external imposition; it is a collaborative project. It requires an internal architecture of complicity to keep the gears of extraction rotating.
A nation is steered toward a crisis of productivity, where the state remains perpetually reliant on external debt, imported goods, and services.
The cycle begins with a culture of performative politics.
Politicians, desperate for victory at the polls, sell the dream of a utopian state where all problems will vanish with just a flick of a pen.
They promise free education without a plan on how to fund it.
They promise subsidized fuel without the refineries to produce it, or money to fix the refineries.
They promise to end poverty and create jobs without an exact plan on how this can happen. While they attack the private sector and know that government jobs are not manufacturing jobs, they still incite the citizens to believe the government can create jobs simply through policy pronouncements.
They promise wages that defy the reality of a non-competitive economy. They force wages on employers under the guise of a minimum wage, only for the cost to be passed back to consumers—and subsequently the workers who asked for the pay raise—in the form of galloping inflation.
The Mechanics of the Cycle is built on a self-sustaining ecosystem built on three pillars:
-Performative Populism- The Demand Side
-The Architecture of Complicity - The Supply Side
- and The Illusion of Governance
The people, feeling the sting of inflation, demand further wage increases, ignoring the total lack of productivity that would justify them.
The citizens, trapped in the daily grind and exhausted by the decay, demand more miracles.
They seek the harvest without sowing the seed.
They refuse the collective responsibility to rebuild the nation:
Taxes? We won't pay.
Demand accountability from your local government and state assembly? No, we won't.
Set up industry? No, we need palliatives.
Give us subsidies, give us cheap power, give us religious freedom, and the freedom to lament every day.
The government, having no real sustainable revenue because it has stifled industry, reaches for the only remaining tool: the loan.
The loan is taken for infrastructure, for salaries, to aid the local currency.
The money is consumed.
The currency inflates.
The politicians, now trapped by their own impossible promises, return to the lender. They need to show the citizens they are working, even if only to offer short-term results. At the expense of long-term reform, they take loans because citizens want instant success.
The debt grows.
The conditions deepen.
The elite, who manage this state, are not victims of the cycle; they are the architects. They are the bridge between the local population’s demand for miracles and the foreign bank’s demand for interest.
The state does not "fail" to deliver services; it succeeds in the role it was designed to play: to keep the country desperate enough to beg for the next loan, broken enough that it can never refuse the conditions attached to it, and distracted enough to blame the "economy" for a poverty that is, in fact, a manufactured reality.
And we call it governance.
And we call it fiscal policy.
And we call it, with a straight face, development.
But the future is pregnant with a debt that must be paid back by kids who will bear the burden of our lack of willingness to build today what will sustain the coming generation.
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