Zafar Masud: the life I am living now is a borrowed heaven

A migrant family, an actor for a father, and a banking DNA

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing his guest at unusual length. Zafar Masud is the president of Bank of Punjab and the chairman of OGDCL, but the framing Muzamil chooses is not the titles. It is the survival. Most viewers, he says, will recognise Zafar as one of the two people who walked out of the PIA crash in Karachi. What followed in studio, Muzamil tells the audience up front, was one of the best conversations the platform has hosted in three years — three hours long, and worth every minute.

The family story is the first surprise. Zafar’s father is Munawar Saeed, a film and television actor whose career spans decades. His grandfather did not migrate to Pakistan in 1947; he migrated in 1956, because his son had begun showing an interest in show business and his cousin Kamal Amrohi was already established in the industry. As a Syed family, the worry was social rather than economic. The decision was made overnight. The family arrived in Karachi, settled in PIB Colony, and lost the chance to file property claims — the deadline for migrants from India had already passed.

The result, Zafar is careful to explain, is that his self-description as middle-class is not false modesty. The poets and artists in his family tree — Raees Amrohvi, John Elia, Syed Mohammad Taqi, Kamal Amrohi — are public property, in his phrase. The money was not. What stayed, even as his father’s industry collapsed after 1979, was a refusal to let lifestyle drift upward. When his youngest sister was admitted to the University of Chicago, his father sold his Prado to fund it. “He sold that Prado to make sure that his daughter goes to university in America,” Zafar says. The phrase he returns to throughout this section is that priorities, not resources, are what carry a family across a generation.

Muzamil pushes the point harder. Middle-class is a mindset, he proposes, not a balance sheet — and the test is what a family does when money does arrive. Zafar agrees, and quotes his grandfather Syed Mohammad Taqi: “If you are middle class it is fine, but never get into that mindset.” The line that follows is the one that organises the whole conversation. The right elite to idealise, Zafar argues, is the educated one. The wealthy one is to be respected, not emulated. “On the day you bring your child into that mindset,” he says, “his priorities will be set right.”

The IBA test he sat for during a wedding

The conversation moves into how Zafar himself got educated. Cathedral School in Lahore for matric — he tried and failed to get into a better school — then FSC at FC College, with admission secured on the strength of a table-tennis trophy, not grades. Then a turn. He topped Hailey College, finished third across Punjab University at the B.Com level, and in 1991, in the middle of a cousin’s wedding in Karachi, sat the IBA entrance exam on a dare from a relative.

The story Zafar tells about the result is one of the more memorable passages in the episode. The IBA result was sealed and stamped, and could not be opened in his hands without invalidating the admission. He spent an entire night in Lahore with the envelope sitting next to him. “The result was lying with me the entire night and I could not do anything about it,” he says. The training his father had given him is what mattered. When he reached the IBA interview the next day, having travelled on his father’s ticket, he had no investment in the outcome. He wanted to be a chartered accountant. IBA was a fallback. “Because you walked in without having anything to lose,” Muzamil observes. Zafar agrees. He took the questions cold, gave decent answers, and was in by August.

Why he wanted to go abroad — and why he never did

Muzamil presses on the chartered accountancy dream. Why so single-minded? Zafar gives three reasons. He wanted to run his own firm and not work for anyone else. He wanted the exposure of living outside Pakistan. And — the reason he names last, and the one that carries the most weight — articling abroad would mean not asking his parents for money. His sister had already taken the family’s resource for her American degree. He owed it to his siblings, he says, not to be a second drain.

He never went. American Express picked him up out of the IBA class of 1993, then Citibank in 1997, where he ran the North region from Islamabad. In 2005, at thirty-five, he set up Dubai Islamic Bank in Pakistan from scratch, working what he describes as “twenty-four-seven, literally” — three to four hours of sleep a night for the better part of a decade. He never married. The joke he tells in studio is that he considers himself lucky to have survived two crashes: the plane, and the marriage that never happened.

In 2007, Barclays moved him to Zambia as country manager and then, three months later, regional CEO for Southern Africa — Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana. He was thirty-seven, on the UK payroll, paid in pounds, sitting on the management committee for Barclays’ emerging markets. His mother’s line about that period is one he repeats. “Jungle mein mor naacha kisi ne dekha?” Who saw the peacock dance in the jungle? Performing in Zambia was hard not because the work was hard — it was — but because the validation system back home could not see it.

Overseas Pakistanis as soft power, not as a problem

Muzamil uses the Zambia chapter to open a wider point about diaspora. India celebrates its NRIs; Pakistan, for reasons he cannot fully explain, demonises them. Twelve million Pakistanis live abroad today, and the projection — with aging European populations, Japanese demographics, and Africa opening up — is twenty-five million within twenty years. That is the third-largest diaspora in the world. It could, Muzamil argues, be the country’s soft power.

Zafar’s response is the one of the more interesting moments in the discussion because it pushes back on his host. Yes, the diaspora should be supported. But the diaspora also owes something. “The society took you to a level,” he says, “on the basis of which you are now going abroad — because a whole ecosystem runs, a whole society runs.” He extends the point through the American example: US foreign policy is run by corporate America, and the Sundar Pichais of the world are the lever through which a country’s interests get carried into another country’s boardrooms. Pakistan has not built that bridge. Both sides — the state and the diaspora — owe it to each other to build it.

The forty-two-year-old who turned down a CEO job to join the State Bank board

By 2011, Zafar was back in Pakistan. He had set up Burj Capital with his former Citibank and Dubai Islamic boss Saad Zaman, run it for five years, sold it to Aljazira, and ticked the entrepreneurship box he had been chasing since IBA. The next decision is the one Muzamil flags as unusual. Offered a CEO role at a DFI and another at one of the largest banks in the country, Zafar turned both down and asked the government to put him on the State Bank board instead. He was forty-two — probably the youngest board member the central bank had ever had. The Monetary Policy Committee followed.

“What kind of a man is this?” Zafar laughs, recalling how the government read him. “We are saying we will make you a CEO, and you are saying no, I want to go there.” His reasoning was that he wanted to understand the economy from the regulator’s side first. Five years later, in 2016, National Savings came up — and again, he took it. The job paid less than the private sector. The point was not the money. The point, he says with care, was that his father had always wanted him to serve the country, and his own financial position was comfortable enough to do it without compromise. “If my financial position had not been good,” he admits, “I would not have done it that way.”

National Savings under his two years became a digitised system rather than a manual one. Then Bank of Punjab in February 2020 — a job he accepted at a salary roughly twenty-five percent below what the previous CEO had been paid, in exchange for one non-negotiable: independence to operate.

What changed at Bank of Punjab in three years

Muzamil asks the question viewers will want asked. State-owned banks have a perception: sticky floors, queues, marketing material that nobody designed in this decade. What did Zafar walk into, and what has actually changed?

Zafar turns the question around. He asks Muzamil what he thinks has changed. The marketing collateral, Muzamil says, is at least inviting now. The honesty of his admission — “I have never been into a branch myself” — is in the recording.

The list Zafar offers in response is precise. Bank of Punjab has crossed two-point-two trillion rupees in balance sheet and is now formally in the State Bank’s large-bank category. It is number one on the State Bank’s DEI matrix among Pakistani banks. It is number one in government-scheme lending, number one in SME lending, number one in middle-market agricultural finance, and posted a profit of eighteen-and-a-half billion rupees the previous year, with this year tracking higher. It has won the Asia Money award for best SME bank in Pakistan, the first time in the institution’s history.

The mechanism, he is careful to credit, is not him. It is that he was allowed to attract the best people in the industry, and that he then deliberately built a governance structure that distributed power away from the CEO’s chair rather than concentrating it. “I put myself at a deficit, gave other people more empowerment than I be the centre of the entire power,” he says. “That is how you attract talent.”

The privatization argument — with a warning

Muzamil pivots to OGDCL, where Zafar is chairman, and to the wider privatization conversation. Zafar’s position is unambiguous and worth quoting directly. “There is no need for OGDCL to be in the public sector. It needs to be privatised. The Discos do not need to be in the public sector. They need to be privatised as of yesterday.”

But — and the qualifier carries weight — privatization requires two prerequisites that Pakistan currently does not have in place. The first is a strong regulator. The second is a deliberate selection process for the buyer. Selling a utility to a private-equity firm is the example he reaches for, without naming the firm. Private equity has a short horizon. A utility has a long one. “Either the private equity company will sit down,” he says, “or the utility will sit down.” One of the two breaks.

On the steel mill being pulled from the privatization list, his reading is that the asset is unsellable as a single unit — a fifty-to-seventy-year-old plant on two hundred and fifty acres, where the value is now in the land. Re-adjustment, he suggests, has to come first.

On the single-buyer model in power, the argument is one viewers of the episode should sit with carefully. Privatising the distribution companies is not the end of the journey. Once those Discos are negotiating downward with consumers, they will negotiate upward with the generation companies — and the entire generation piece will deregulate by default. He puts the timeline at ten to fifteen years, using the average twenty-five-year life of a power plant as the rough denominator.

The fiscal account is the disease; the dollar is the symptom

About two hours in, Muzamil turns the conversation toward the question viewers came for. Pakistan’s debt is snowballing. What is actually happening on the rupee side, beneath the dollar headlines?

Zafar’s answer is the most concise economic argument in the episode. “The dollar is a symptom. The whole external account issue is a symptom. The core problem is in your fiscal.” Fifty-two percent of GDP comes from three sectors — agriculture, real estate, retail — that contribute almost nothing in tax. Bringing them into the net, conservatively, releases two-and-a-half to three trillion rupees of inflow. That pocket exists. The realisation exists. The decision has not been taken.

He layers in the monetary policy point next. The crackdown on dollar hoarding and smuggling, which sit on top of those same three untaxed sectors as a whitening channel, reduced inflation by roughly five percent in a single month — from thirty-two to twenty-seven — and pulled currency in circulation down from nine-point-two trillion rupees to eight-point-four trillion. That is the kind of compounding the fiscal fix produces.

On the expenditure side, his prescription is structural. Pension liabilities should not be cash-funded. They should be funded by transferring developable government land — he names the Pakistan Secretariat in Islamabad as an example — into a privately managed pension fund, which then brings investors in to develop the asset and uses the rentals to meet the liability. OGDCL, he notes, has already used this approach. Its entire pension bill is now one hundred percent funded. “We are a cash-strapped country,” he says, “but we are an asset-rich country at the same time.”

Subsidies, taxation, and why every Pakistani is already paying

On subsidies, Zafar takes a position he flags himself as radical. Eliminate them. All of them. No subsidy on fertiliser, no subsidy on power, no subsidy on gas. Use the National Socio-Economic Registry and the BISP scorecard to deliver targeted cash to the people who actually need it. The trickle-down through commodity, fertiliser and energy price distortion does not reach the farmer. It fattens the fertiliser company.

His tax framework is equally direct. He does not believe in income tax as a primary instrument. “Income tax is the biggest reason why people hide their income,” he says. He wants turnover-based taxation in its place — UK-style, in his framing. For agriculture, the tax already exists on a per-acre basis; eighty-nine percent of farmers fall below the twelve-and-a-half-acre exemption threshold, but eleven percent of the largest farms contribute fifty-five percent of agricultural GDP. The collection agency is wrong. It should sit with the Provincial Revenue Authorities, not where it sits today.

For real estate, the DC rate captures thirty to thirty-five percent of actual transaction price. He references an Indian model: if a seller declares a price below the government’s assessment, the government reserves the right to buy at the declared price. “He knows the game is over,” Zafar says. For wealth and inheritance, he is openly in favour of both — Nordic-style wealth taxation, and inheritance tax on rental property received through estate. “These are settled, established taxation principles,” he says. The Pakistani elite has been protected from them under a trickle-down argument he does not accept. “I am very sorry. I do not buy that.”

He goes one level further on enforcement. The right architecture, in his reading, is to break FBR into a policy arm and a collection arm — they currently sit together, and that is a conflict of interest — and to allow cross-default across utilities, taxes and banking. If you do not pay your electricity bill, your credit card should be cancelled and your gas should be cut.

On demonetisation, and why now is the wrong time

Muzamil asks the obvious next question. Should Pakistan demonetise the five-thousand-rupee note? Zafar’s answer is precise and counter-intuitive. He supports it. He is on record as a major supporter of the idea. But the timing is wrong, and the sequencing matters.

The 2016 demonetisation in India was that country’s third attempt. They still messed it up. Ninety-nine-point-three percent of the demonetised currency returned to the banking system — which Zafar refuses to read as evidence that all of it was clean. Currency in circulation fell from ten percent of GDP to seven-point-seven percent, and then crept back up to eleven within three years. The Guardian’s read, which he quotes, was a one-and-a-half percent dip in Indian GDP growth.

Pakistan is currently growing at one-point-nine. “If we take a two-percent dip,” he says, “we go into negative.” The loopholes have to be plugged first. The economy has to be strong enough to take the disruption. Then the call can be made.

The crash, and the borrowed heaven

The longest single passage of the episode is the one Muzamil approaches carefully. He wants to ask about the crash. Specifically, he wants to ask whether Zafar carries survivor’s guilt.

The answer Zafar gives is layered. He was unconscious before impact. The other survivor — a passenger sitting in row eight — was awake through it, climbed onto the wing as the plane settled, jumped through the hole the wing had punched into a house, and walked out at thirty-five percent burns. “He is the real superhero,” Zafar says. “In my case it is pure miracle, miracle and miracle.”

The two transformations he names are the heart of the episode. The first is the one he calls a three-hundred-and-thirty-second story. Before impact, his entire life played out in front of him on a single canvas. Childhood in Lahore, return to Lahore, Bank of Punjab. No regrets. He was ready to go. “I said to myself, and I believe I spoke to my god, and I am coming.” The discovery he made afterward — and the line that gives the episode its title — is that this absence of regret has become his greatest liability. Every action he now takes runs through one filter: if I die in this moment, will I regret this? “I have to call up my parents at half past ten every day,” he says. “I believe that is the most important thing in my life.”

The second transformation is the one he frames for the country, not for himself. There is a phrase — survivor’s guilt — that he had to look up after the crash because he kept feeling it. He avoids the families of the victims. He avoids funerals. Then he made the connection. The Pakistani elite, he argues, has survived a Pakistani economic crash. The poor took the hit. “I think our elite needs that guilt,” he says. “Survivor’s guilt is what is lacking today. They need to understand it is a privilege. It is no longer their right. The life I am living now is a privileged one. It is a borrowed heaven.”

The borrowed phrase comes from the Cure song his forthcoming book is named after. The working title is Last Breath. He would prefer Borrowed Heaven.

A defining moment, not a delicate one

By the end of the conversation Muzamil asks the question he asks all his guests. How does Zafar see Pakistan in 2050?

Zafar refuses the word delicate. “I am completely fed up of hearing it,” he says. “We are at a defining moment.” The location-based importance Pakistan has leaned on since the 1960s — sixty years of getting picked up by America, Russia, the Saudis, the Chinese — is gone. The Persians and the Arabs are at peace. China has its own balance sheet to worry about, and is the largest creditor to sixty-five emerging markets. “Pakistan is the least of their problems,” he says. The resource is squeezed. The fiscal account, by Pakistan’s own choices, has been hollowed out for the benefit of one set of sectors and one set of constituencies.

The good news, in his framing, is that all of these problems are domestic and all of them are fixable. The other piece of good news is that the realisation has finally arrived in the society at large. “This is what is going to change the fate of our country,” he says. “If we take those difficult decisions in this defining moment, then the future is very, very bright. If we do not — I have to be the most optimistic man in the world because of my own situation, and even I would say I do not see a very bright future.”

By the end of the conversation Muzamil thanks him for trusting the platform with the harder parts of the story. Zafar’s response is the one Muzamil keeps the camera on. The book is coming. The mission, post-crash, is to put the learnings into as many hands as possible. The borrowed heaven is the obligation, not the gift.