Rethinking government
By SHAHID KARDAR

THE most critical constraint today to the effective functioning of the government is the latter’s overextended mandate, beyond its core role, and the competence level of its workforce.

The institutional architecture of running the government is not the outcome of any ‘grand’ design or prioritisation of government roles derived from any strategic vision.

The existing structures have evolved from those inherited at the time of Pakistan’s independence in response to a number of external and internal factors: (a) the constitutional division of subjects between the federal and provincial governments; (b) federal and provincial legislation; (c) international economic, social and political conditions; (d) changing government priorities and ad-hoc decisions taken to address particular problems; (e) political expediency and domestic socio-political pressures. The overall trend has been for structures to grow because it has been relatively easy for new departments, agencies and staff positions to be created or added, but once established, their continued maintenance is supported by stakeholders and system beneficiaries.

As a result, some functions have become obsolete and some have been rendered redundant over time. Also, there is a lot of work duplication even after the 18th Amendment under which a host of functions have been hived off to the provincial governments — but without resulting in any shrinkage in the size of the federal government.

Even within governments interrelated functions have been fragmented across two or more departments or autonomous bodies. Resultantly, it is difficult to differentiate the work of some ministries from that of the autonomous bodies attached to them, diffusing a number of mandates between a large number of agencies and creating inefficiency and problems of policy and implementation coherence and coordination.

However, now with budgetary constraints, competing imperatives, pallid growth and the rising expectations of citizens, governments need to reconsider the functions they should perform, and accordingly re-engineer the institutional set-up.

This would necessarily warrant an overriding vision informing the future role of government. It would involve differentiating between a set of activities that the government should neither do nor pay for, those it should undertake and pay for and those it should pay for but not necessarily perform itself.

Such an effort can be facilitated by harnessing a whole range of instruments (eg telecommunication and internet technology) to improve the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of services, and by partnering with a rapidly maturing private sector. This is an opportune time to conduct an assessment of the kind of roles that the government can play.

The functions it should perform and pay for (its sole responsibility) would include only those in defence, foreign policy, fiscal and monetary policy, justice, law and order and some categories of physical and social infrastructure that the market and the private sector cannot undertake.

The list of what the government should neither do nor pay for but in which it is currently engaged includes running retail outlets for articles of daily use or consumption, banks, airlines, steel mills, etc. Determining the activities that the government should pay for but not necessarily do itself is a more difficult exercise but the following should be able to illustrate this point.

It is the moral duty of the state to ensure that the population gets free and good quality elementary education. Such an obligation translated into concrete action merely requires the government to pay for education.

It does not mean that the government should produce or provide the service itself. In fact, there is enough evidence that if the government provides the service we will continue to have ghost schools, ghost teachers, non-merit based appointments and teachers not attending schools.

There will be no accountability of the service provider (the teacher). In other words, the students and parents (service recipients) will have little, if any, recourse to those to whom the teacher is answerable for service provision.

A large part of the regulatory framework exists because there is lack of clarity on the role of government. This situation creates employment opportunities for skills that the market neither demands nor produces.

In several instances, new products and instruments have become available that are better replacements and more effective mechanisms for achieving the objectives underlying the promulgation of existing laws or institutional and administrative arrangements for their enforcement.

Take, for instance, the case of Grade-11 boiler inspectors recruited and trained to enforce legislation that may have been relevant 80 years ago. They are today expected to inspect and certify boilers manufactured by multinationals like Siemens.

In an era in which technology for manufacturing boilers has taken a leap forward even in Pakistan, the provincial industries department is staffed by professionally ill-equipped boiler inspectors performing this regulatory function. This role could easily be outsourced to universities and private firms providing engineering services and which can be pre-qualified based on well-drafted selection criteria.

Similarly, there are provincial building and electricity inspectors to ensure the safety and security of private buildings used for public purposes, for example, cinema houses. The objective can be better achieved if such buildings are com-prehensively covered by private insurance companies.

Through this instrument, cinema owners can be spared the frequent visits of government employees who would be denied the opportunity for extortion on the basis of the regulatory functions mandated to them. Moreover, the security and safety of the public using these buildings would also be assured, since private insurance companies would ensure the proper construction and maintenance of the property.

The need to reinvent government is also important to bring it in harmony with the demands of a modern economy and the requirements of the technological revolution being spawned by 21st-century science. The demands of a globalised economy require the private sector in Pakistan to adopt internationally recognised technologies, production techniques and management practices to remain competitive with world suppliers of similar goods and services.

However, although the government, which is supposed to facilitate the operations of the private sector expects the latter to become modern in its outlook, it has yet to accept that its own skills, procedures and work processes are antiquated and outmoded.

The writer is a former governor of the State Bank of Pakistan.