Editorial
Inspired by the idea of Dr Nadeem ul Haq
Pakistan has over fifty official golf courses, with some estimates stretching the number close to two hundred. A large portion of these occupy prime public land administered by the military or government. On paper, this looks like institutional support for a sport. In reality, it is something far less flattering.
Membership at elite courses like Defence Raya costs upward of three million rupees for an ordinary citizen. Yet the same gates swing open effortlessly for judges, senior bureaucrats, army officers, and their associated rent-seekers, who enter at rates that border on ceremonial. The land belongs to the public. The benefit does not.
This is the colonial hangover Pakistan never had the courage to cure. The British built clubs not to produce athletes but to conduct business away from scrutiny, to cement alliances, and to keep the governed at a comfortable distance. Independent Pakistan inherited these clubs and, rather than reimagining them, simply changed the faces at the bar. The purpose remained identical.
What has this arrangement produced in competitive terms? Nothing. Pakistan has not generated a single golfer of international consequence despite decades of institutionally protected courses and subsidized access for the powerful. Young players from modest backgrounds find these clubs effectively closed to them. Without open, merit-based pathways, talent dies before it is ever discovered.
Compare this to nations with far fewer resources that have built genuine sporting cultures around golf. They invested in youth academies, open access, and competitive structures. Pakistan invested in exclusivity.
The honest description of Pakistani golf is not sport. It is elite networking on subsidized land, dressed in sporting vocabulary to escape accountability. Every rupee of public subsidy poured into these clubs is a rupee taken from citizens who will never once set foot inside them.
The embarrassment is not the sport. It is the pretence.
The best-selling books of Republic Policy Think Tank, including the landmark book The Bureaucratic Coup, are available at Vanguard Books, Liberty Books, Readings, Kitab Sarai, Sang-e-Meel, Saeed Book Bank Islamabad, National Book Foundation, and others across Pakistan. Contact for home delivery: 0300 9552542.
