Reform or surgery?

Public policy is a gravitational force that holds the people and the government together. In case this force weakens, the two bodies would recede from each other until a point the force cannot hold them together. The result is a cold, silent, and oblivious death. Rest pessimism: public policy has qualified this death description in our case.

The government executes its policy through its apparatus of civil service. Our civil service is a serious patient on the ventilator with the “currency-utility-syndrome”. The symptoms include the patient being a jack of all trades who has internalised the belief that he is managing everything and is infallible. This is a patient with an unbending fixated personality. He is surrounded by a stoic toxic circle of self-infatuation which has thickened into smog. Can the doctor of government reform reclaim him now?

Sadly, the recent government reform agenda seeks to do the routine job again. It has missed out the main issue to focus on. The issue here is not connected with the efficacy and efficiency of the civil service alone. The issue is with the basic model and structure of the civil service. We are done with this model of gross generalists and we need to redesign a model which has the right man for the right job with the right load and people-inclusiveness in our system of governance.

Public policy is a mix of choices and priorities. In our case, this has occurred with the prerogative of the government who has further delegated this task to the civil servants. Thus, the policy ends up depending entirely on the sweet will of the few chosen ones who decide the destiny of millions in a godly fashion. The inclusiveness, wholesomeness, and collectivism which are the formative ingredients of sane public policy are meticulously compromised with the debris of insanity left all around.

The effects of such policies are reflected in the people and the society at large with having spent billions of rupees on development yet the common man’s life has not witnessed any reliable and vivid change. This is so because the spending just forms one stream of the science of public policy whereas the planning, institutional arrangement, implementation and the very incorporation of specific policies makes the critical part.

The long and short story of public policy in Pakistan is an inexpert perpetuation of the colonial traditions. Reforms in the current civil service would be a futile exercise as we need to redesign the whole model and make it responsive to the public’s needs and issues. One such incomplete model was offered in the Musharraf era through his local government arrangement. But it suffered as it intended to subside the civil service supremacy and create a parallel set of counter supremacy.

This is an unfortunate fact that the people for whom the government exists are out of the mainframe of the policy preparation and decision-making processes. Simultaneously, the over-generalist civil service is power-craven and strides to protect its own interests, maintains the status quo and revives the colonial legacy of the grand civil service of antiquity. The schizophrenic personality of the civil service needs not a reform therapy but a major remodeling brain surgery.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly states are just the outputs of similar public policies. The people’s disconnect with the realm of state policymaking in Pakistan must be bridged. Secondly, we must care, respect and utilise our professionals and make them part of decision-making. The real reform would entail devising a model standing on the pillars of the people, government and concerned field professionals. The master and the slave model based on shear generalist civil service should to be done away with as it has given up the ghost and outlived its utility-at-currency.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 14^th, 2019.

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