Reform bureaucracy to save Pakistan

KARACHI:

The new Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif, has outlined two key areas of focus to address the country’s economic challenges:

Economic stability: He has acknowledged the need for another long-term bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to stabilise Pakistan’s fragile economy. However, he has also vowed to eliminate Pakistan’s dependency on the IMF and work towards economic self-sufficiency.

Urgent economic recovery plan: He has prioritised Pakistan’s economic revival, focusing on tax relief, fiscal policies, and business support.

These plans reflect the prime minister’s commitment to addressing Pakistan’s economic and security challenges. However, the success of these initiatives will depend on their effective implementation and the cooperation of various stakeholders.

To start with, the new government has set up a number of high powered committees tasked with developing plans that will eventually become the road map for the way forward. Committees are often not the quickest and most optimal way to get to a plan.

As the American comedian Milton Berle put it, “A committee is a group that keeps minutes but loses hours.” Let’s hope the PM’s committees don’t lose too many hours because hours are running out for Pakistan.

Be that as it may. When these plans do emerge they must be implemented. And here there is a problem. The implementers, will of necessity, have to be Pakistan’s bureaucracy. The way this edifice is now structured puts the task of implementation well beyond its capability, or for that matter, its desire. So perhaps the first order of business is to reform the bureaucratic setup.

There are two basic problems with this setup. One is that all our bureaucrats are ‘generalists’. And the second is that they are not compensated at a level that would attract the best and brightest.

So who is a generalist? In our civil service you will find people with varied backgrounds. They have a broad range of educational qualifications; art, science, engineering, medicine, education, economics, and beyond.

Applicants must pass a tough examination. The few who make it through the test are enlisted to the civil service of Pakistan and sent for training at a government run institute. Here they receive a fairly general education focusing on how the government functions. They are told that once they graduate they can run any government department. This is the crux of the problem.

In our system a civil servant is rotated over his career from one ministry to another. One day he may be running the ministry of finance and the next the ministry of petroleum, or health, or transport or aviation.

None of which he knows much about but has been conned into believing that he does. This is the generalist. He may have had some relevance in a bygone age but today he has become a dangerous anachronism that stands in the way of good governance and progress.

Contrast this with the private sector and you will see that it is a mirror image. Applicants are recruited whose educational qualifications precisely match the disciplines in which they will work for the rest of their careers.

his allows them to know their particular field inside out. And to keep abreast with the rapidly moving pace of change in today’s world. These are the specialists.

So the first change that must be made to the civil service is that it must recruit and train specialists for each ministry. Those who will work, for example, in the finance ministry, must have finance, economics or business as their first degrees.

Their training, once they are recruited, should focus on finance. And then they should spend their entire careers in the finance ministry. This way the government man will know just as much about finance as the private investment banker sitting on the other side of the table. He, or rather Pakistan, will not get taken for ride.

The second problem is compensation. There was a time in the 1950’s and 60’s when the best and the brightest from Pakistan’s colleges and universities would have at the top of their list of preferred employers, believe it or not, the Government of Pakistan.

Those that couldn’t make the cut for a government job sought work in the private sector. Could it be that Pakistan progressed the most in those halcyon days because we had our best and brightest running the country?

Here’s the basic principle: If you want the best people you have to pay for them. The reason that our best and brightest now head to the private sector is that they get paid more. A lot more. Sometimes the difference can be mind boggling.

The secretary of the Ministry of Finance may have a package that is sometimes a tenth or even a twentieth of a bank CEO. Why then would any bright and sensible finance graduate want to work for the government?

So here’s what needs to be done: Salaries of government servants must be raised ten-fold or more if needed. This will come at a high cost. Some will say too high for a poor country like Pakistan. But the truth may well be that the cost will be dwarfed by the gains in good governance and the removal of incentives to engage in corrupt practices.

And if proof is needed look no further than Singapore. The government there pays its bureaucrats at par with the private sector. Its bureaucrats are recognised as the best in the world. And this is why Singapore, once a shabby, dilapidated back water port, has now become a shining city upon hill.

The recipe for Pakistan’s success and stability is deceptively simple: Seek out the best and brightest for Pakistan’s civil service, ensure that they specialise, and that they spend their entire careers in the ministries for which they are trained, and pay them at par with the private sector.

In the end it is really all about people. Put the best people in charge. And step out of their way. This is what we in Pakistan have failed to do. And until we do, no number of committees will save us from ruin.

THE WRITER IS THE CHAIRMAN OF MUSTAQBIL PAKISTAN

Published in The Express Tribune, April 22^nd, 2024.

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