Governance breakdown is visible everywhere. Even the Peshawar school massacre is symptomatic of a disease that has gone unattended due to long-running negligence of governments and half-measures of state machineries.
Ahsan Iqbal and his team at the Planning Commission (PC) are trying to get the ball rolling on the Vision 2025, which was approved by the Prime Minister this August. Yesterdays Pakistan Governance Forum held in Islamabad was supposedly PCs first agenda-implementing activity organized for that framework. Fourteen discussions areas during the event included reforms in civil services, police, criminal justice, social sectors, local government, SOEs and regulatory bodies. Recommendations will be taken to the cabinet for approval, it is said.
Quite a hotchpotch, it seems, but there are some observations at this point. First, while governance dialogue is great, there is urgency to move beyond "talking" and start "doing". The subject has already been talked out, many times. Dr. Ishrat Husain, the keynote speaker in the inaugurating session rightly pointed out that a diagnostics and prescription exercise had already existed in the form of National Commission for Government Reforms (NCGR) recommendations.
The NCGRs exhaustive and holistic policy work - it was titled "Reforming the Government in Pakistan" (May 2008) and is now available in book form - is presumably catching dust in the government shelves. Understandably, Dr. Ishrat - who championed and worked on that NCGR project for two years - feels strongly about the subject of governance reforms and cautions against reinventing the wheel. The polite IBA dean didn ask, but this column will: When solutions are already available, what exactly is the Planning Commission trying to achieve here? Is implementation already not a hard enough job that valuable time and efforts are being spent on "discourses" that go on and on? (Remember Dr. Nadeem ul Haqs FEG?) Ahsan Iqbal loves to talk about PML-Ns Vision 2010 that was abandoned after the 1999 military coup. By starting over and not giving serious thought to NCGR recommendations, this government is perhaps guilty of following the same path.
Secondly, there seems something wrong with clubbing an issue that requires action now (here, civil service reforms) to a framework that has a long expiry date and arbitrary goals. Governance needs reforms and solutions today. 2025, when the results will be judged, is more than a decade away. So the government must keep the 2018 clock in mind, when elections are officially due, and strategize and implement accordingly. Otherwise, the whole "discourse" may just turn out to be loud talk.
And thirdly, the fact that there is no stated political consensus on Vision 2025 makes one question the utility of the whole exercise, if not its intent. Dr. Ishrat minced no words when he said that implementation of NCGR recommendations will spawn more than one electoral term. Then the related, pending issues like district-level devolution and states reasonable market departure will also take time and political capital to come through. (Follow this space for more on governance reforms later).
Yet there is no commitment so far from the top political parties that governance reforms - which may politically cost the sitting government now but handsomely pay the next government later - will be politically off-limits. More than that, the sitting government would require active and unflinching support from the political class to carry out serious reforms, which will challenge the state and societys parochial interests and shake up the entrenched incentive structures.
It is hoped that the PML-N government will make an effort to convince itself and others and help politicians coalesce around a common agenda. But optimism is in short supply.
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