The cleanup at Zarai Taraqiati Bank

There are times when an organisation is a mess. There are other times when it can be a big mess. On rarer occasions one can go so far as to call them a train wreck. Perhaps if the situation is urgent enough the term dumpster fire can also be thrown around. 

In the case of Zarai Taraqiati Bank Ltd (ZTBL), it would not be a stretch to say it was a trainwreck on repeat taking place inside a dumpster fire large enough to contain multiple passenger trains.

Founded in 1952 as the Agriculture Development Finance Corporation, ZTBL has gone through multiple rounds of mergers, rebrands, bailouts, and major slumps. For nearly the entirety of its existence, the bank has served as the primary vehicle used to provide financing to the country’s farmers — the individuals that make up the single largest sector of Pakistan’s GDP. Over the decades it has existed, its most impressive feature has been the massive headquarters near Zero Point in Islamabad. The building is considered by many to be Islamabad’s first skyscraper, and the curvature architecture behind the twin buildings is still an iconic part of the federal capital’s skyline. 

But for most of its existence the pretty building is the extent to which good things could be said about ZTBL. For years the bank has served as an example of everything that can be wrong with a state owned institution. It has an abysmal history of loan recovery (something that is usually considered quite important in the industry), it has regularly posted losses, appointments are often politically motivated, their branch network is in shambles, and the entire business model is dependent on the government disbursing subsidised schemes to farmers through it.