As a people, we are drawn to the dramatic. Be it the promise of turning around the fortunes of the masses in ninety days, or breaking provinces into smaller units as the cure for all governance ills – such slogans attract great trust from citizens who want to believe, without the scrutiny these promises deserve.
The voices demanding that more provinces fall broadly fall into two camps. The first cannot see past the optics. They have mistaken a redrawn map for good governance, the gesture for the substance. The second can see perfectly well, and that is exactly the problem: they want a province of their own, with its secretariat, its chief ministership, its development budget, its fleet of postings, contracts and patronage to dispense.
Neither camp is offering the ordinary citizen of Rajanpur in Punjab, Kashmore in Sindh or Khuzdar in Balochistan anything that will change the texture of his daily life. Because the thing that would change it – a real, empowered, constitutionally protected tier of local government – is the one thing neither camp is willing to build.
Let us be fair to the proponents, for the grievance they invoke is genuine. The distance from power is real and it is felt. But notice what is being peddled. The complaint is about distance from the citizen; the proposed cure is a new provincial capital. A provincial capital, however much closer it sits to the people, is still a capital: a seat of concentrated authority, a place where files get lost for years. We will have simply moved the bottleneck from Lahore to Multan and called it devolution. The man in the village will be no nearer to the office that decides whether his school gets a teacher or his union council gets water and sanitation. He will merely have acquired a fresher set of elites to be ignored by.
The honest unit for bringing government to the people is not the province. It is the village council, the tehsil, the municipal committee, the district – the third tier that our political class has spent three-quarters of a century shying away from. That this tier is absent from the current conversation is not an oversight. It is the smokescreen.
Two countries ran the experiments we are now debating, and their results cut directly against the slogans. India’s 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments of 1992 did something Pakistan has never quite dared: they gave panchayats and municipalities constitutional status, mandated elections every five years, required dissolved bodies to be reconstituted within six months and obliged every state to establish a Finance Commission to push funds downward.
Even with that shield, the Indian local government has chronically underdelivered- not because the design was wrong, but because the states above refused to release the funds. Three decades on, fewer than 20 per cent of Indian states have fully devolved the 29 functions listed in the Eleventh Schedule. A constitutional guarantee is hollow if the tier above will not release the funds. If India’s constitutionally protected local bodies go hungry, what fate awaits ours, which enjoy no such protection at all?
Indonesia tried the other route. Jakarta’s 2001 ‘Big Bang’ decentralisation transferred real spending authority to 299 district governments almost overnight, pairing it with direct elections at every level. Local governments came to account for nearly half of all public expenditure, and dependence on central transfers fell from 82 per cent to 48 per cent over two decades. The principle stands: they put the money and the vote where the citizen lives.
The contrast frames our choice plainly. India built the constitutional house but would not furnish it. Indonesia furnished it, even if imperfectly. But Pakistan proposes to build more houses of the wrong kind; more provinces, more capitals, more chief ministers – while leaving the one room where the citizen actually lives permanently locked and empty.
Why does the third tier stay locked? Our provinces do not devolve to local governments for exactly the same reason Islamabad was reluctant to devolve to provinces: power, once concentrated, is sweet, and patronage is the currency of our politics. Every reform since Ayub’s Basic Democracies has promised devolution only to end in dissolution.
Then ask the decisive question. If existing provincial elites aren’t willing to honour Article 140A by not surrendering power to the tier below under a clear constitutional command, what reason do we have to believe a freshly minted elite in a freshly minted province will behave differently? The new chief minister of a Bahawalpur province will inherit the same incentives, the same appetite for patronage, the same instinct to govern from his/her new capital rather than empower the districts beneath him. We will have multiplied the governments that hoard power without creating a single one that shares it, that too at a cost of billions in new secretariats, chief minister houses and high court benches, borne by a federation already stretched thin.
For the well-meaning proponent who cannot see past the optics, the answer is to look harder at the mechanism. A map is not a policy; a new provincial capital is not a clinic. Redrawing boundaries delivers nothing unless accompanied by a transfer of money and authority to local governments that the citizen can see and vote out; and that does not require drawing a single new line.
For the second camp, the province is the prize, not the means. A new province is an estate: a governorship, a chief ministership, a cabinet, a high court bench, a public service commission, a development authority and the thousand postings, contracts and discretionary funds through which patronage flows. For the regional notable confined to a divisional pond, elevation to a provincial sea is an immense enlargement of personal dominion. The slogan of devolution has been captured by those who take it to mean the devolution of patronage to themselves.
If we are serious about the citizen rather than the spectacle, the sequence is undramatic. Protect the third tier constitutionally as India did – fixed tenure, mandatory elections, bar on premature suspension. Financially devolve it as Indonesia did; real spending responsibility, guaranteed transfers, beginning with urban property tax, which sits unexploited while we debate the cartography of power. Only then, if still felt necessary, convene a depoliticised commission as India did in 1953, to examine whether provincial maps need redrawing at all.
My own suspicion is that, once the third tier is genuinely alive, funded, elected, protected and answerable to the neighbourhood it serves, much of the province agitation will evaporate, because the grievance feeding it will have been addressed at its source. The citizen of Rajanpur was never asking for a capital in Multan. S/he was asking for a school that has a teacher, a clinic that has medicine and a local councillor s/he can confront in their shared neighbourhood. None of that requires a new province. All of it requires the courage to give power away, which is precisely the courage our political class has been unwilling to muster in eighty years.
That unwillingness, and not the number of provinces, is the real subject of this debate. Everything else is a smokescreen.
The writer is a sociologist with extensive work in social policy and development. He can be reached at: [email protected]
