Headless bodies

The sclerotic bureaucracy that has become dumbed down after years of patronage and dilution is now feeding upon itself

In the tightly stratified world of the Pakistan civil service, where nobody is responsible for anything if they can possibly help it, the entire ‘not responsible’ culture is being systematised. The Capital Administration and Development Division (CADD) is taking an excessively casual approach to filling key positions in its subsidiary education projects, to the detriment of their administrative and management functions. The pretext under which this hobbling of key agencies is perpetrated is ‘merit appointments’ and the CADD Joint Secretary for Education airily dismisses the situation as being ‘not as bad as it looks’. He swatted away criticism that the five bodies that lacked permanent heads were in any way compromised and said that vacant positions were to be filled on the basis of merit. He then presumably went back to reading his newspaper and sipping tea.

This is simply not good enough. A parliamentary panel of the cabinet division has recently asked the CADD to move a little faster than its current ‘dead slow’ speed and fill the positions that have been administered on the basis of ‘additional charge’. ‘Additional charge’ is a bureaucratic device which ‘parks’ a post with a person who has no authority to use the authority of the post that is parked with him or her. Much of the current malaise stems directly from the fallout of the Eighteenth Amendment, which saw the dissolution of federal ministries and lopped off the heads of assorted education bodies that had permanent heads. Add to the mix the infighting and turf wars energetically conducted by education offers and one has a recipe for dysfunctionality that strikes at the heart of an already enfeebled education system. The sclerotic bureaucracy that has become both highly politicised and dumbed down after years of patronage and dilution is now feeding upon itself. The Federal Directorate of Education is headless as are four other key educational bodies. There is no rational excuse for this and somebody, somewhere needs to swing an axe at heads that are failing in their duty, and soon.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th, 2014.

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