IT was a Friday afternoon in May 2019. State Bank of Pakistan Governor Tariq Bajwa was in Islamabad with the IMF mission, flanked by his technical team I led. Unbeknownst to him, his successor was already in the country. By evening, Bajwa had resigned. The finance secretary at the time told me a new governor would be appointed by nightfall: Reza Baqir, the IMF’s resident representative in Egypt, already in town and ready to assume charge. The notification followed the next day, a Saturday. Within 24 hours, over a weekend, a serving IMF official had been installed at the helm of the central bank, as abruptly as Bajwa’s own 2017 appointment had followed a rupee devaluation. Opacity is not the only problem; law compounds it. The 2022 amendments to the SBP Act, while granting welcome operational autonomy, also imposed restrictions found nowhere in the IMF’s own safeguards assessment: an outright bar on dual nationals, and a requirement that a candidate completes a full five-year term before turning 65. Together, these eliminate precisely the cohort best placed to lead the central bank, favouring insiders over competence. Contrast this with how Britain appoints the governor of the Bank of England: open international advertisement, a shortlist, ministerial interviews, and months of public notice before the transition begins. That is the process that produced Andrew Bailey to succeed Mark Carney in March 2020. In Pakistan, favoured candidates are installed within a day, while everyone else waits months, even years, for a vacancy the law says must be filled within 30 days. Mark Carney’s trajectory sharpens the point further. A Canadian citizen who also held Irish citizenship through family ancestry, he was appointed governor of the Bank of England in Nov 2012, and ran UK monetary policy and financial stability for nearly seven years, through the 2016 Brexit shock. In 2018, while still governor, he acquired British citizenship too, holding three nationalities as custodian of Britain’s currency, with no credible case that he favoured Canadian or Irish interests over British ones. Central banking is one of the few institutions where competence, not compliance, should be the only test. Stanley Fischer, author of three of the most influential economics textbooks, and former first deputy managing director of the IMF, served as vice chair of the US Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2017, while holding two citizenships, from age 70 to 74. More recently, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand appointed Dr Anna Breman, a Swedish national, as its first female governor. Dr Breman’s appointment in Aug 2025 followed a rigorous recruitment process, that even involved a global executive search firm. Baqir is the more contested recent case, but the criticism was never really about a passport; it was that an IMF insider negotiating a Pakistani programme sat ‘on both sides of the table’, a concern about institutional capture, not nationality. The consequences have been predictable. The governor’s post fell vacant in May 2022 and took over three months to fill, breaching the SBP Act’s 30-day requirement; a deputy governor’s post vacant since Nov 2024 was filled only in Aug 2026. Leadership has increasingly gone to candidates with modest qualifications, and qualified economists are either sidelined or leaving the SBP, a brain drain that is entirely self-inflicted. Brain drain is estimated to cost Pakistan roughly $4.2 billion annually. Pakistan’s economy, sustained by remittances, external borrowing, real estate speculation, and import-led consumption rather than exports, demands sophisticated leadership, not a bureaucratic placeholder chosen for compliance. Article 63(1)(c) bars dual nationals from parliament since an elected official answers to voters as the sole political principal, and a second citizenship competes with that loyalty. A central bank governor is not elected, but appointed, and constrained by statute, audit, parliamentary review, and a monetary policy committee, an accountability built on expertise, not a mandate. That is why dual nationality has long been lawful for the wider civil service, precisely because competence, not electoral legitimacy, is what those roles select for. A 2025 Senate report counted roughly 2,365 civil servants or their spouses holding dual nationality under that lawful regime. Extending the Article 63 logic to appointed posts applies a rule built for one office to a fundamentally different one. The government’s 2026 policy, read past the headline, already leans this way: the Civil Servants (Disclosure and Regulation of Foreign Nationality) Rules require employees to disclose foreign citizenship annually, treating concealment, not citizenship itself, as misconduct. It is a disclosure regime, not a blanket bar. A second passport is often acquired for reasons of economics and convenience, educating children, or freedom to travel, not disloyalty. The genuine concerns — divided loyalty, foreign leverage, capture by a foreign employer — are real, and better addressed by targeted tools than a passport count: disclosure of foreign assets, recusal where a conflict is shown, and cooling-off periods after work for a foreign government or an institution like the IMF. The US Federal Reserve applies this to its officials. It also catches the single-passport holder who has taken money from a foreign government, someone a citizenship test would wave through. Pakistan need not start from scratch. In 2022, the prime minister notified the ISI as the Special Vetting Agency for public office holders. The mechanism only needs streamlining to run on specific safeguards, not opaque “cleared” or “not cleared” verdicts that strip the federal government’s own statutory appointment authority. It is time to remove the dual-nationality bar and age restrictions on appointments to the governor, deputy governor, and Monetary Policy Committee positions. Central banking is one of the few institutions where competence, not compliance, should be the only test. The question worth asking of any candidate is not how many passports are in their drawer, but whether their record and enforceable safeguards assure they will act in the country’s interest. A passport count answers none of that. Performance, integrity, and disclosure do. The writer is the author of The Shady Economics of International Aid, and holds a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge. He has served as chief economist of the State Bank and senior advisor to the IMF. Published in Dawn, October 7th, 2026