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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You should also look at the other side of the equation i.e. tax revenues as a percentage of GDP because that is what is going to be used to pay their wages. Pakistan has among the lowest numbers in the world for that as well. So we can't afford a larger government.
You also have to consider that right now the government is busy selling off state owned enterprises. They are doing this to raise revenue, build up forex reserves and for idealogical reasons because it is said that the government has no business doing business. So on the one hand they are reducing the size of the government by privatization and on the other increasing it by hiring new people. Sounds like quite a confused bunch, don't they?
Finally one reason for this change is policy is that one of the electricity distros wants to hire more meter readers. About 10,000 more. Instead of hiring 10k meter readers they could spend just 5-6 months of their salaries and install smart meters. This will be a one time cost and the savings are obvious, but it looks like the beaurocracy is averse to using technology.
The issue here is not the ratio of government employees to population but that the vast majority of them sit around doing nothing. It is a dream job for most Pakistanis, with lifetime job security and pension. Ok, the pay is not that great, but it becomes lucrative depending on which ministry one belongs to. There should be a serious effort to cut down bureaucracy and not add to it. An improvement in people's work ethic in general would do wonders for government efficiency and less costly as well.
The role of a government is to create economic conditions that attract investment, both internal and external, that create jobs. It is not the government's role to become an employment exchange.