However, while we certainly welcome the idea of vacant positions being filled, we find the reason for the government’s decision distressing. The cabinet took this decision not as the result of some careful and well thought out plan to increase government hiring to fulfil necessary public functions, but as a response to a political crisis where the government feels it can placate voters through populist means. It represents the same old broken mentality that the only way to reduce unemployment in the country is for the government to hire more workers. We thought the centre-right PML-N was opposed to that sort of thinking.
Contrary to popular perceptions, the civilian part of the government is actually neither too big nor too expensive a burden on taxpayers. Indeed, it can and should be increased in order to provide better services to citizens and that does mean that the government should hire more people. But the hiring decision should be preceded by a plan of what services to provide, an assessment of how much manpower the government will need and how much it currently has. Instead, the current approach appears to be ‘hire now, assign later’.
Beyond the few vacant positions that have defined functions, what will all the rest of the new government hires do? Would that not be a tremendous waste of public money? The PML-N can defend this practice all they want, but it is materially no different from what they have always accused their political rivals of doing. That is truly a pity, because this opportunity to improve the quality of government services is going to be wasted on a futile populist exercise.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 28th, 2014.
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