Dr M Ali Hamza
We often talk about governance as a matter of policy papers, interest rates, and institutional architecture. It is an assumption that if we get the incentives right, the system will work like a well-oiled machine. But we frequently overlook the most fundamental ingredient of a functioning society: the shared fate between the person behind the desk and the person in the street.
In China, there is a term for the official who breaks this pact of shared fate. They call him the luǒ guān, or the ‘naked official’. An official is ‘naked’ not because he lacks clothes, but because he has been stripped of his domestic roots. He stays in China to exercise power and collect a paycheck, but his wife and children have already emigrated to London, or New York. His bank account is offshore; his family’s future is under a different flag. He is a man with one foot in the corridors of power and the other on a plane to abroad.
To the Chinese Communist Party, this isn’t just a lifestyle choice; it’s a national security threat. Since the mid-2010s, the “naked official” has been viewed through the lens of political reliability. The logic is simple: if you have an “escape hatch,” can you truly be trusted to make the hard, long-term decisions for the country? If your children are at boarding school in Switzerland and your assets are in a Caribbean trust, do you really care if the local currency collapses or the school system fails?
While China’s approach is the most visceral, it is not alone. Russia, for instance, has the same logic. at times banning senior cadres from holding foreign bank accounts or property; a blunt attempt to force the elite to keep their skin in the game. In Singapore, the state demands an almost monastic level of asset disclosure from the leading class.
The West, by contrast, tends to view this through a lens of procedural liberalism. In the United State r Europe, they focus on disclosure. If you have assets abroad, you report them. They treat family residency as a neutral fact, a matter of individual liberty. They only care if a crime is actually proven, the ‘naked official’ status itself isn’t a red flag, provided the paperwork is in order.
But as we look at the struggling governance in places like Pakistan, we have to see what suits us. In Pakistan, the absence of a ‘naked official’ policy has created a ruling class that operates with a perpetual exit strategy. You see senior bureaucrats, and political elites presiding over a country facing IMF austerity, crippling inflation, and infrastructure decay, even as their own self and families are a minute away to settle down in UAE or the UK. This creates a profound ‘skin in the game’ problem. When the person negotiating a nation’s debt or its environmental regulations has a foreign residency card in his pocket, he is no longer a stakeholder; he is an extractor.
This is where the David Brooks-ian ‘Moral Sense’ comes into play. A society is not just a collection of individuals making rational choices; it is a moral community. Trust is built when the elite and people breathe the same air and face the same risks. When a leader asks the public to ‘tighten their belts’ while his own family is protected by a foreign economy, he isn’t just being a hypocrite; he is hollowing out the state from within. He has signalled that he doesn’t believe in the future of the place he is currently running. The results are predictable: capital flight, brain drain, and a crushing sense of cynicism among the youth. If the people at the top have already checked out, why should the middle class stay?
Adopting a ‘naked official’ policy in a democratic or semi-democratic country like Pakistan, would be a messy affair. It runs headlong into constitutional protections of movement and equal rights. It would face ferocious pushback from the very elites who would be targeted. There is the very real danger that it would be used as a political club; a way for those in power to disqualify their rivals while shielding their friends.
Yet, the core idea is, that certain high-stakes roles in finance, education, judiciary, defence, taxation etc. should be reserved for those, whose primary loyalty and family presence are domestic. It moves us from a culture of ‘prove the crime’ to a culture of ‘demonstrate commitment.’
A soft version of this policy wouldn’t need to be a threatening It could simply be a requirement for radical transparency and a restriction on sensitive portfolios. If you want to run the bureaucracy, politics, or defence, your family shouldn’t be holding foreign citizenship. It’s a way of saying that leadership isn’t just a job; it’s a pledge.
We live in a globalized world where mobility is a mark of success. But for those who hold the levers of power, there must be a limit to that mobility. We need leaders who are not ‘naked’, but ‘clothed’ in the realities of the people they serve. Only when the elite share the consequences of their own failures, will we see the kind of urgent, structural reform that nations like Pakistan so desperately need. The question is not just whether an official is corrupt. The question is: when the ship starts to leak, is he the one reaching for a bucket, or the one already sitting in the lifeboat?
