What must the next PM do

Every crisis creates opportunities for reform. Left to themselves, politicians have succeeded to bring politics, disturbed by a hybrid interregnum, back on the rails. By all reckoning, the next government will be consensual, if not ‘national’. Hopefully, it would let the present National Assembly complete its term to make a lasting impact. With nearly all parties and some of the PTI on board, it should be possible to leave individual manifestoes aside and build consensus on resolving some longstanding issues. A precondition will be to avoid economic appeasement. The economy is in no position to sustain immediate relief. Nor can the poor and the lower middle class bear additional burden. With regrettably necessary renegotiation, the IMF programme must be completed. All international agreements should be respected. No major ongoing project should be disrupted. The message of economic continuity should be loud and clear for the period of transition.

During the transition, the central focus ought to be to strengthen the federation by following in letter and spirit the Constitution, in particular, the Eighteenth Amendment. Starting with the federal government, the number of ministries should be no more than ten. (The US government has 15). There is no need for centralised services, except defence, foreign, customs and internal revenue. Federal List, Part II should be the business of the Council of Common Interests (CCI), with Planning Commission as its independent secretariat. Planning Commission should also be the secretariat of the National Economic Council and its Executive Committee. In the true spirit of federation, members of the Planning Commission come from federating units. Tax collection needs fresh thinking. The answer lies in creating an autonomous single national tax agency answerable to the CCI. It is time the 10^th NFC is delivered and the promise made to the merged districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa fulfilled. As the provinces have larger share in the divisible pool of taxes, the practice of federal funding of projects in the provincial domain should stop.

Provincial rights in the natural resources and fish stock under the Eighteenth Amendment should be respected. The worst loser is Balochistan, the least developed province of Pakistan. Despite a preferential treatment under the NFC, the province does not even receive the bare minimum required to provide basic services to its population spread over a vast territorial expanse. Make South Punjab a reality. Another area of neglect has been the local governance. It took sixty years for the provinces to get their due rights from the federal government. Let’s hope the local level does not have to wait that long to get its rights from the provinces. It is about time to recognise the third tier of the federation, with its own taxation powers. Property tax belongs here. Provincial Finance Commissions should be as serious a business as the NFC.

Finally, in this age of information, we go slow on the collection of basic data. Without any further delay, all censuses — population, agriculture, livestock and manufacturing — should be conducted for informed decision-making. To avoid future delays, the autonomy of Pakistan Bureau of Statistics is essential. The present arrangement as an attached department of a federal ministry that is also the main consumer of information is hardly the way to ensure transparency, credibility and regularity. Its natural location is the CCI, with provinces represented as members.

Whichever party comes to power after elections in 2023 would be able to build on these stable foundations in accordance with its manifesto. For the present, let the whole be greater than the sum of the parts.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 1^st, 2022.

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