Pakistan: The Reckoning Begins
By Shahid Ur Rehman
Sanjh Publications
ISBN: 978-969-593-415-9
270pp.

Mismanagement of resources was a primary concern for Shahid Ur Rehman, an outstanding journalist reporting on the economic and financial affairs of Pakistan. In his over 50 years of reporting and writing, he felt anger and frustration at how blatantly the powerful elite served their own purposes while neglecting public development and welfare.

His earlier books Who Owns Pakistan (1998), Long Road to Chagai (1999) and Pakistan Sovereignty Lost (2006) had attracted wide appreciation among academic and journalistic circles in the country. Shahid Bhai (as we fondly used to call him) was giving final touches to his book Pakistan: The Reckoning Begins when he breathed his last in 2020, during the lockdown days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The credit for bringing out the book goes to his son Arslan Shahid, who remained steadfast in his commitment to preserve the legacy of his father and make it available to readers.

The book presents the author’s insights into the energy landscape of Pakistan, with meticulous research that he kept doing throughout his life by keeping detailed notes of his interactions and interviews with the power managers in this country. There are highly informative anecdotes and pretty interesting events that Shahid Bhai was an eyewitness to. He has documented them with his absorbing style of writing that keeps the attention of the reader, despite a fairly flat subject matter that could be boring coming from some other reporter.

The posthumous publication of a book by a well-respected financial journalist takes stock of Pakistan’s energy politics and exposes how........

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