Perils of the Punjab governing model

Call me old school but I think only relevant people should do chores assigned to them. And a relevant person is the one chosen by the competent authority to do a specific task. As they say in Urdu: Jis ka kaam ussi ko saajhay. Bureaucrats are supposed to act upon the wishes of their political masters; the ministers in charge and politicians should know what they are doing. But in a country where cricketers want to rule, where doctors and engineers become TV anchors and anchors want to be politicians, this evidently is asking for too much.

The recent petrol crisis in Punjab is a case in point. It also brings the failure of the so-called Punjab model of governance to the fore. For five years, the PML-N government in Punjab ruled the province by relying heavily on bureaucrats and making the ministers in charge of a ministry redundant. Where there still was room to perform, the powers were further diluted by installing unelected taskforces meant to oversee the work of elected representatives. This is a recipe for disaster.

I know that my repeated criticism of this model and some actions of our leading bureaucrats often annoy a few of them. Let it be known that it is mainly a complaint about the inherent ridiculousness of this construct; it is nothing personal. When you give a bureaucrat more powers than he/she should have, you are setting that person up for eventual failure and scapegoating. No wonder then that people who were disciplined recently for their part in the petrol shortage fiasco were mainly bureaucrats.



The aforementioned model barely worked in Punjab where politicians have relatively less nuisance value, and even there, frustration among MPAs could not be controlled. At the federal level, where every minister is a political heavyweight in his/her own right, this could never work. And yet against common sense, this model was put into practice. Consequently, the government has spent most of its time in office in putting out fires. Ad hocism and jealousies threaten to paralyse the government even if Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri’s mammoth rallies failed to do so. You will be surprised to know that a majority of the stories about the government’s alleged inadequacies are leaked to the press from within government circles.

If truth be told, the fuel crisis cannot be attributed to a single ministry or department. It is the failure of the prime minister’s energy and finance teams. The former includes the petroleum minister, the water and power minister and the Punjab chief minister. The latter is headed by the finance minister but owing to his frequent international travelling to liaise with the IMF and other such bodies and due to his role in negotiations with opposition parties like the PTI, he hasn’t been able to spend adequate time in the Q-block. As a consequence, the economy, by default, is run by the bureaucracy. But more of that in a bit.

Just like every other crisis in recent days, we can’t say we didn’t see this one coming. Reports of PSO being on the brink of default were being carried in papers since September 2014 when the finance ministry refused to bail it out. A couple of months ago, PSO had failed to retire five letters of credit. Given that this all has to do with the circular debt, the Independent Power Producers Advisory Council’s advertisement in a number of papers threatening default on sovereign guarantees should have served as an eye-opener. This wasn’t to be the first sovereign default. A similar situation arose in 2012 as well. Heads should have rolled back then. However, the finance secretary, Dr Waqar Masood Khan, continued performing his duties in a position he holds to date. It is not about one finance secretary. It is about doing the same thing over and over and the failure to see its inadequacy.

Whispers from the ruling circles don’t stop here. They ask why is it that every crisis originates in Punjab and that, too, when the prime minister is out of the country? While no one knows how to answer these questions, everyone agrees that the Punjab format poses more threats to the system than the solutions it can offer. The nation needs full-time ministers for every department and a direct approach to tackling key national issues. In the absence of this, you cannot expect the same loyalty from bureaucrats that you expect from politicians. They simply have nothing to lose.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 24^th, 2015.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.