An appalling shambles

What ought to be a cornerstone of best practice, the best of the best when it comes to management and administration, is revealed as a shambolic ruin. This disaster that has been long in the making is the ministry and planning and development and we have the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to thank for the latest revelations. The PAC is threatening to hold senior officials of the planning ministry accountable for the submission of a false record of development spending. Standing before the PAC were Planning and Development Secretary Shoaib Siddiqui, and the ministry’s consultant on Public Sector Development Programme Asif Sheikh. They acquitted themselves poorly, apologised on innumerable occasions for deficits and mistakes in their presentation, and gave every impression of men who would have difficulty running a chai-stall never mind one of the most important ministries in the land.

It is of note that even members of the treasury benches on the PAC were exasperated by what was playing out in front of them. A catalogue of incompetence at every level so great that it surpassed mundane corruption. The PAC was forensic in its dissection of the planning ministry representatives. There are trillions of rupees in the mill, thousands of projects and the ministry itself is being run as a project and led by a man years past superannuation.

Apologies are meaningless when matters have reached this level of decay. Projects in the works even if they were fully funded would take up to seven years to complete. The PAC picked holes in the presentation regarding the Karachi Metro Line and finally skewered the planning division when it pointed out that the presentation of misleading documents was tantamount to misleading parliament. There is no plug-and play fix. Years of internal turf wars have weakened the planning division and if the current government is going to do anything to rectify matters — or make a start thereon — it needs to ruthlessly chop out the dead wood and quickly move in the fixers and firefighters armed with a powerful mandate. Hens are as likely to lay cube-shaped eggs. The PAC has served us well, but sadly to little likely effect.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 15^th, 2017.

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