Bureaucracy for change
By Dr Pervez Tahir

In the ongoing election campaign, misgovernance by the outgoing regimes at the federal and provincial levels has emerged as a major issue. In the manifestos and public pronouncements, however, there is little appreciation of the fact that weak governance is a reflection of the rapidly deteriorating quality of bureaucracy. The directions set out by the political leadership have to be implemented by the bureaucracy. Pakistan inherited a centralised system of bureaucracy from colonial rule. It acquitted itself well in dealing with the immediate problems arising from an ill-planned Partition, especially the massive influx of refugees. On the annual, it learned the art of wrenching power out of the hands of an inept political class and extracting rents out of the allocation of evacuee property and a plethora of economic controls. Two efforts to reform the system by Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan turned out to be witch-hunting exercises. The third one under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto aimed to bring back political control. It took away the constitutional security provided to civil servants and introduced the lateral entry system. While it opened the steel frame to fresh blood and experts in a predominantly generalist bureaucracy, it also marked the beginning of what, in popular reckoning, is political interference. Postings and transfers have become the main instruments of deploying political power. A rapid turnover of civil servants in key positions has become a bane of our politics. Before a secretary or the head of an organisation has had the time to settle down in his job and learn the tricks of the new trade, he is posted to another position or, worse, made an officer on special duty (OSD) — a glorified title for an officer made non-functional. In recent years, donors have jumped in with money and ideas on civil service reform. The money has been used up and added to the debt while the ideas have been declared unpractical.

Let us face it. The economic and social problems facing the country are too complex for a bureaucracy that has found it increasingly hard to carry out its original mandate — to preserve order and collect revenue. Without a well laid out plan for civil service reform, I have no doubt in my mind that the government installed after May 11 will quickly start hiding behind the familiar refrain that the bureaucracy is creating hurdles in its way. To give a fair chance to implement its manifesto, something like the American spoil system may be in order. A party winning the elections should be formally allowed to appoint people of its choice to top positions. Of course, the bunch leaves when the government falls or completes the tenure, rather than adding to the already bloated bureaucracy.
In this context, the profound implications of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution have not been understood. With most subjects and the bulk of resources devolved to the provinces, the concept of centralised services has become meaningless. Indeed, judging by the manifestos, the local governments are likely to be revived. For effective delivery of services, each level of government should recruit its own bureaucracy according to its needs. It makes sense for the federal government to recruit officers for the foreign service, but recruitment for the police service and providing officers to the provinces require special pleading. Similarly, the provinces have no business recruiting and appointing teachers and doctors for the districts. Finally, at the concurrent level of governance, the Planning Commission needs to become the secretariat of the Council of Common Interest as well as the National Economic Council, with powers to recruit professional staff directly, but in proportion to provincial quotas.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 3rd, 2013.