Institutional Rot

The plight of Pakistan’s hockey players exposes a country obsessed with reputation at the cost of institutional decay.

Pakistan's latest embarrassment concerns its national hockey players, who were recently compelled to turn whistleblowers after administrative chaos left them stranded without accommodation during an official tour of Australia.

What began as a viral video of athletes standing on the streets of Sydney with their luggage quickly caused a political embarrassment in Islamabad—and revealed, once again, a country where mismanagement and corruption are not episodic failures but emblematic features of governance.

The scandal forced Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to order an inquiry into the Pakistan Hockey Federation (of which he himself is a patron of), after it emerged that funds had been released for hotel bookings that were never paid for. Players reportedly waited over 13 hours in transit, arrived at hotels with no reservations, and were left to wander the streets before makeshift arrangements were made

Pakistan’s national sport, once a source of global awe, had been reduced to a case study in how a state mismanages even its most basic obligations.

The details are humiliating. Players allegedly waited more than half a day at airports, arrived at hotels that had not been paid for, and were left to roam the streets before accommodation was scrambled together. The team, physically drained and mentally frayed, lost every match.

The eruption of the scandal had a whiff of black comedy to it. After publicly criticising the Pakistan Hockey Federation, the team captain promptly released another video claiming that everything was fine. But back in Lahore, he admitted the truth - the reassurance had been a lie, a “cover-up” designed in order to “maintain Pakistan’s reputation in India.”

That confession says more about the modern Pakistani state than any white paper or IMF report. A country whose economy is in tatters, whose institutions rot from within and whose writ barely extends beyond its own press conferences is still obsessively concerned about what Indians might think while exporting violence across the border with a straight face.

This reflex to suppress reality rather than confront it is Pakistan’s defining pathology. From airlines to energy utilities, from sports bodies to civil administration, dysfunction in Pakistan is the name of the system.

Sharif’s predictable response has been to order an inquiry and issue sombre statements. Pakistan is littered with the paperwork of past inquiries. What it lacks is enforcement. The same federations limp on and the same decay is repackaged as misfortune.

The collapse of hockey is especially telling. Pakistan once dominated the sport through discipline, organisation and depth. Its decline mirrors the erosion of state capacity itself. Administrators are now appointed through patronage, not competence while federations operate as fiefdoms. Athletes are expected to perform internationally while being treated domestically as inconveniences. That players were allegedly washing dishes before matches is emblematic of the decline.

What makes the episode darker is the logic that justified the lie. The truth, the captain said, would damage Pakistan’s reputation abroad. This anxiety about appearances runs deep. Pakistan’s elite remains fixated on how the country is perceived, while showing far less concern for how it actually functions.

That obsession has consequences well beyond sport. Instead of building institutions, the state polices narratives. Instead of fixing delivery, it manages denial. Failure is explained away as sabotage, conspiracy or misunderstanding. The result is a culture in which telling the truth becomes an act of disloyalty, and exposing mismanagement is treated as betrayal.

While fretting over reputational slights, Pakistan’s conduct routinely ensures reputational damage on a far grander scale. Its economy survives on bailouts. Its institutions stagger from crisis to crisis. Its public services barely function.

A country that cannot house its own athletes abroad but manages to shelter extremists at home cannot plausibly complain about misunderstanding or prejudice. Pakistan’s reputation is not harmed by viral videos or hostile neighbours; it is corroded by the persistent gap between what it claims to be and what it repeatedly does.