The debate over new provinces has acquired new urgency after Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi declared on July 30 that Pakistan’s governance system had “collapsed” and called for political consensus on new provinces and administrative units.
The statement was followed by talk of an “administrative reset” and reports of feelers being sent through unnamed sources. Structural change has suddenly become fashionable.
But if the system has collapsed, why assume drawing new lines on the map will fix it? Pakistan’s problem is not primarily that its provinces are too large. It is that power is concentrated at the wrong level, exercised by people too distant from citizens to be held accountable. The real reform is not more provinces. It is to take power away from provincial capitals and put it where citizens can see who governs them and punish failure.
The proposal is to use the existing administrative structure as the basis for a much more powerful local tier, with elected leadership and responsibility for education, healthcare, policing, sanitation, local transport and infrastructure. This will not lead to a dramatic change, but it would be a step in the right direction.
The distinction is fundamental. A new province creates another political centre. Devolution changes who actually runs government. Pakistan already has four provincial governments with substantial constitutional powers and access to a large share of national revenues. The 18th Amendment and the 7th NFC Award were important steps towards fiscal federalism, transferring major responsibilities and resources to the provinces. But decentralisation effectively stopped at the provincial capitals. Power moved from Islamabad to Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta without moving far enough down to cities, districts, tehsils and local communities.
The result is a peculiar absurdity: the state has decentralised upwards while remaining centralised downwards. Provincial governments have acquired substantial responsibilities and resources, while local governments remain institutionally weak, financially dependent and vulnerable to political interference.
Citizens do not experience the state through constitutional schedules or NFC formulas. They experience it through roads, schools, hospitals, water, sanitation and policing. These are largely local matters, yet responsibility is deliberately blurred. Members of parliament are expected to arrange local development, provincial ministers intervene, bureaucrats control decisions, and local representatives depend on provincial governments for money. This is not democratic accountability. It is patronage dressed up as government.
Pakistan should therefore empower administrative divisions rather than create new provinces. A division is potentially large enough to provide administrative capacity but close enough to citizens to make political accountability meaningful. It should become a genuine unit of government rather than remain an administrative layer of the provincial bureaucracy.
An elected mayor or equivalent executive should be responsible for functions devolved to the division. Local governments should have clearly defined responsibilities, predictable transfers and their own revenue sources. Provincial governments should not be able to starve them of funds or dismiss elected representatives at will.
Most importantly, responsibility and resources must move together. There is little point giving a local government responsibility for sanitation if it does not control the budget or personnel required to collect rubbish. Decentralisation is meaningless when officials have responsibility without authority and authority without accountability.
Such reform would attack one of the central weaknesses of Pakistani politics: the conversion of parliamentary representation into patronage. An MNA or MPA is expected to be simultaneously a legislator, development agent and local political broker. Constituents often judge representatives by the road, drain or water scheme they can deliver rather than by their legislative performance.
The system encourages the wrong kind of politics. Politicians compete to control discretionary spending because that is where influence lies. Voters seek favours because institutions do not deliver services impartially. With real local governments, parliamentarians could concentrate on legislating and holding governments accountable, while local executives would govern their jurisdictions.
Creating more provinces could easily make this problem worse. Every new province requires an assembly, secretariat, ministers, departments and senior bureaucratic positions. It creates more jobs for political elites and more opportunities to distribute patronage. Unless the underlying political economy changes, the same networks of privilege and elite capture can simply reproduce themselves on a smaller territorial scale.
Pakistan’s crisis is not about geography but about how power works. Creating new provinces could produce new capitals, assemblies and political elites without producing a more capable state.
Nor should the failure of provincial governments be used as an argument for reversing the 18th Amendment. The principle of devolution was correct. The problem was that it was incomplete. In a previous article, I argued that the fiscal problems of the post-18th Amendment settlement cannot simply be blamed on provinces receiving a larger share of national revenues. The federal government also failed to reduce its own spending in line with transferred responsibilities.
The lesson, I argued in my August 12 article, is not to reverse devolution but to complete it. Authority was transferred without building sufficiently strong systems of local accountability, revenue mobilisation and service delivery below the provincial level.
It is therefore significant that Miftah Ismail’s latest article in these pages, ‘Governance reimagined’ (August 22), moves the discussion in much the same direction. He argues for retaining existing provincial boundaries while creating empowered administrative units within them, with directly elected mayors and nazims, functions assigned to the lowest practical level and a much larger share of NFC resources flowing directly to cities and districts. This convergence is welcome because it shifts the debate towards the question that actually matters: not how many provinces Pakistan should have, but who controls power and money within them.
The political dimension is becoming harder to ignore. The widening differences between the PML N and PPP are significant because the two parties remain partners in the federal government while pursuing increasingly divergent political interests. The PPP, which governs Sindh, has little incentive to support restructuring that could weaken its political base. Yet leaving the current federal arrangement would also carry substantial political and institutional costs. The PPP therefore appears to have few options other than remaining part of the present setup while protecting its interests within it, notwithstanding Bilawal Bhutto’s recent overtures to the PTI-dominated opposition.
This is precisely why local government reform offers a more practical route. It can redistribute power without immediately reopening the constitutional bargain between the federation and provinces.
Pakistan can retain its existing federation and provinces while creating a genuinely powerful third tier of government. Divisions, districts, tehsils, towns and cities can have different responsibilities according to their size and capacity.
The governing principle should be simple and clear: government should be exercised at the lowest level capable of performing a function effectively. The federal government should retain national functions. Provinces should perform functions requiring provincial scale or coordination. Local governments should control services that are fundamentally local. Each level should have enough fiscal authority to discharge its responsibilities.
This is ultimately a political economy issue. Pakistan’s central problem is the concentration of power and resources in relatively narrow networks of political, bureaucratic and economic influence. Changing the number of provinces does not necessarily change the political economy of a state that works mostly for its power elites. Changing who controls money, who makes decisions and who can be removed by voters might.
Pakistan has spent decades moving boundaries, changing constitutional arrangements and redesigning institutions. What it has not done consistently is give ordinary citizens a government they can see, understand and hold accountable. If the system has collapsed, the answer is not to give the same political class more provinces to control. Pakistan does not need more governments. It needs a government closer to the people and accountable to them. The answer is really to redistribute power.
The writer is former head of Citigroup’s emerging markets investments and author of ‘The Gathering Storm’.
