A smaller, better cabinet

The size of the current cabinet was a heavy burden on the taxpayer and the focus of much public resentment and anger.

The decision by the PPP’s Central Executive Committee to authorise the prime minister to dissolve the cabinet, in effect paving the way towards a leaner and smaller cabinet, is a good one and should be welcomed in that it seeks to implement the Eighteenth Amendment in letter and spirit. Even after the withdrawals of the MQM and the JUI-F, the size of the current cabinet – over 50 members – was a heavy burden on the taxpayer and the focus of much public resentment and anger. One of the main reasons, the people have been told, for the dissolution was that several ministries had been devolved fully to the provinces and hence these divisions needed to be closed down since they did not need to exist at the federal level. A similar kind of exercise happened at the Sindh government level earlier this past week with 12 advisers to the chief minister being let off, and here too the Eighteenth Amendment was cited as the reason.

While it is too early to know what the size of the new cabinet will be, one hopes that it will be not more than half of the outgoing one. Also, the prime minister, one sincerely hopes, will consult with his coalition partners to choose individuals who can do justice to the portfolios that are assigned to them. In fact, that should be the primary purpose behind this “right-sizing”, as the government is calling it. The idea should also be to find new, preferably younger, faces and especially those individuals who have a moderate worldview and are forward-thinking. It would be a waste of time, frankly speaking, if the same old faces are instead picked up because as far as performance goes, apart from a few ministers – and this number can be counted on the fingers of one hand – the rest have performed miserably. That is where democracy’s missing link is found in this country – in that those who are elected by the people to parliament do practically nothing for the electorate and the result is all before us: massive levels of misgovernance and an abject failure by the government to deliver even the most basic of amenities and services to ordinary Pakistanis.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 5^th, 2011.