It is the delivery system, stupid!

The PPP has announced an excellent manifesto. Other political parties too are likely to announce their manifestos soon.

Not only do we prepare brilliant manifestos at the time of elections, we also make excellent medium-and long-term plans for building an egalitarian society based on inclusive socio-economic principles.

You just have to go through the eight five-year plans to know that we do not lack in imagination and creativity. However, the Planning Commission of Pakistan now makes do with just one-year development plans.

Even if some of these plans had been only attempts at re-inventing the wheel, one cannot but appreciate the overall direction and inclusiveness of these plans. The main objective of all these development plans has been to turn Pakistan into a social-welfare state with a booming manufacturing sector, a thriving farmland, exports going up rather steeply and a population enjoying almost 100 per cent literacy rate as well as a comprehensive nationwide health cover.

That none of these stated objectives could be achieved so far is not the fault of the plans or the manifestos. They failed because our delivery system had failed. And the delivery system failed because those that man this system —the civil service — were never up to it.

We take a lot of pride in the fact that South Korea borrowed our first five-year plan and became one of the Asian Tigers leaving Pakistan way behind proving in the process that there was nothing wrong with our planning.

Impartial analysts attribute our failure to deliver with any degree of success at the implementation stage to the very low intellectual and administrative capacities of our implementers — the civil servants.

Being one of the major instruments of governance, the civil service contributes crucially to the difference between good and bad governance. The other equally important instruments of governance include the police, the judiciary and the security institution.

To the misfortune of Pakistan, within a few years of independence, all these instruments of governance, for want of strict accountability and a lack of a sense of responsibility, were rendered patently inefficient thus bringing down several notches the overall standard of governance in the country.

Making plans in Islamabad with incoherent and shallow inputs from an inefficient and unaccountable set of instruments of governance had rendered most of these plans too out of tune in the context of the felt-needs at the delivery end.

And an inefficient civil servant implementing such a plan would surely end up creating more socio-economic and political problems at the grass roots giving rise, in the process, to the kind of political and socio-economic chaos that the country has been witnessing at least since the early 1980s.

According to a former civil servant, Saeed Qureshi (Governance Deficit: A case study of Pakistan), Pakistan’s civil service has failed to live up to its role which in the author’s opinion is to implement government’s policies and decisions.

Qureshi further quotes a pertinent passage in his book from the Asia Report of International Crisis Group (No 185 of 16^th February, 2010 on Civil Service Reform in Pakistan):

“Decades of mismanagement, political manipulation and corruption have rendered Pakistan’s civil service incapable of providing effective governance and basic public services. Low salaries, insecure tenure, and obsolete accountability mechanisms have spawned widespread corruption and impunity. Recruitments, postings and promotions are increasingly made on the basis of personal contacts and political affiliation, instead of merit. Some 30 commissions have been constituted since independence to reform the civil service, but things have only deteriorated.”

So, it is not the plans or creative manifestos that we need. What we actually need are efficient and responsible instruments of governance. It is the absence of such instruments that is continuously pushing the country down the pole.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 30^th, 2018.

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