Reimagining governance

In the 1990s, Pakistan was the richest country in South Asia. Today it is one of the poorest. In 1995, Pakistan ranked six places ahead of India and 18 places ahead of Bangladesh in the UN’s Human Development Index, which measures longevity, education and income.

Today we are 29 places behind India and 32 places behind Bangladesh. The most urgent question for us therefore is: has Pakistani governance over the years steadily deteriorated to the point of becoming fully dysfunctional?

Our provinces have four main responsibilities: health, education, policing and civic services such as water, sewerage and roads, etc. These are the main areas where citizens expect services from the government. We shall see below that, accentuated by the absence of autonomous local governments, our provinces have failed in all four areas.

Let’s start with health. Pakistan has the second highest neonatal mortality in the world, behind Lesotho and equal to South Sudan, abysmally high percentage of stunted (40 per cent) and wasted (17 per cent) children and women with iron deficiency (42 per cent), the highest global incidence of diabetes and the lowest life expectancy in the region.

In education, we must start with these two facts: 78 per cent of our ten-year-olds aren’t able to read two sentences in any language, and 26 million kids are out of school (shamefully the highest number in the world). Additionally, three million kids attend madrassas, thus limiting their career choices. According to the 2023 AESR survey, only 45 per cent of Class 5 kids can do Class 2 sums and the percentage was less than 30 per cent for Sindh and Balochistan.

When it comes to judging our police, an easy question to ask is: do most Pakistanis consider the police a blessing or a burden? I think the readers know the answer and know how useful this service is in their lives.

Finally, let’s discuss civic services. Much of our largest city Karachi doesn’t have piped water and the situation is getting worse, not better. And water is then sold to people so mafias can make money.

Every year for weeks our second largest city Lahore doesn’t have air you can breathe. An average Lahori loses 2.7 years of life due to the polluted air he’s forced to breathe.

Garbage removal in major urban areas remains shoddy at best and doesn’t even exist outside privileged urban areas. Open sewage drains are the norm across Pakistan. Except for the motorways in Punjab, financed by the federal government, and some important roads used by VIPs, the average road in Pakistan is quite dilapidated.

It’s quite clear that our provinces have failed our people in all four important areas. And yet for these ‘services’ provided to us by the provinces, Pakistani taxpayers pay the provinces Rs12,000 billion per year. This is every Pakistani, rich or poor, young or old, paying Rs50,000 to the provincial government annually.

To finance these and other bonanzas, we have one of the highest income and sales tax rates in the world. We tax our salaried class (including teachers) at 38.5 per cent, our business individuals (including doctors) at 49.5 per cent, and companies (including exporters) at 59 per cent. And of the little that is left with the poor citizens after paying income tax, the government’s sales tax makes almost everything we buy, including infant milk and medical devices, 18 per cent more expensive.

The failure of the provinces is not to say that the federal government is run any better. How well it operates can be judged by the fact that we have the most expensive electricity and gas in not just our South Asian region but also similar-income countries globally, such as South Africa, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia.

We have fewer foreign airlines coming to Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad combined than just Dhaka. Our flag carrier PIA lost Rs88 billion but ferried only 4.5 million passengers in 2022 (the last year for which such information is available). This means that our taxpayers paid PIA a staggering Rs19,500 every time a passenger flew on PIA. Since then, PIA’s losses have only increased.

Our railways will carry fewer than 2.9 crore passengers this year but will be given Rs109 billion in subsidy – meaning again a ridiculously high subsidy for each passenger trip of Rs3700.

Our state-owned companies this year will lose over Rs750 billion of your hard-earned and over-taxed money. And yet our government has become incapable of undertaking any reform. Not one corrupt person can be fired, not one incompetent employee demoted, and not one money-losing business can be closed down.

In this century, we have seen martial law, democracy and hybrid rule. We have seen governments on the same page and at loggerheads, we have seen the judiciary stepping beyond the constitution and then being encaged, we have seen reasonably fair elections and completely fraudulent ones, we have seen government at both the federal and provincial levels run by all the major parties – but what we have not seen is any improvement in our lives.

We have only seen our government getting bigger and more indebted and our rulers becoming more distant, entitled, rich and incompetent. And our governance has degenerated into a system that can produce meetings, committees, SROs and ordinances but cannot deliver anything tangible for the people. Ask yourself this: what service do the federal or provincial governments provide to you?

Pakistanis are not less than anyone. If we dismantle this colonial, elite-captured and statist system and adopt a model based on increased individual liberty, social justice and small government, there is no reason why we cannot again surpass our South Asian neighbours in a few years.

What do we need to do? Devolve education, water and sewerage etc to the district level, and devolve roads, police and health to the division level. Fund divisions and districts directly from the federal government. Let the well-off districts, divisions and provinces raise a large portion of their own revenues, with the federation helping the poorer areas more. Have no more than ten ministries at the provincial level and 15 ministries at the federal level.

Privatise all public-sector enterprises, from oil and gas exploration to power generation to gas distribution. From airports to train stations to railways to bus services.

Reduce government regulations and simplify procedures. Reduce income and sales taxes. Reduce power and gas tariffs.

Give poor parents the option of vouchers (of the same amount the government spends per child in public schools) to send their children to private schools. Make boards run the remaining public schools and give parents a say in how they are run. Ensure that all poor kids get a free meal in school. And carry the full cost of the brightest poor children in the best private schools of the country.

We need to drastically reduce the size of the government, as the bloated government actively keeps us poor. For instance, if we reduce the Balochistan government’s expenditure from over Rs900 billion to half that, we can give each of the 25 lakh families in Balochistan Rs15,000 per month. That will change the economic, educational and political landscape of the province and the insurgency there will die in a couple of years.

But we need to be able to think out of the colonial box.

The writer is the Secretary of Awaam Pakistan.