Unmanageably large. The finance minister’s words about the size of the Pakistani government at a seminar the other day. This rekindles that old debate. How large should a government be?
Anyone who has tried observing how the government works in the country would attest to the fact that the state has a limited capacity to respond to challenges. There aren’t enough people looking at all the issues that need immediate supervision. There are no two views about it. There is the diminutive size of the government and then there is the huge expanse of the country, the “out there”, if you will.
Does that mean, then, that the size of the government is much smaller than it should be? Yes and no. In the vast ledger that weighs the debate, carve a notch in the more-government column for every overclogged sessions court in the country; every crime not followed up on because the police were overworked and didn’t have enough money to go over even to the neighbouring district, where the perpetrator had fled; every tax dodged because there weren’t enough people in the revenue apparatus to go through the entire economy. Similar examples are not hard to find.
Carve a notch in the less-government column every time one sees a bloated state-owned enterprise, filled with political recruits. The PIA, the KESC, Wapda and those two ever-green pastures: the education and health departments. Consider also the rank inflation in the armed forces and the new phenomenon of grade inflation in the civil bureaucracy.
Unmanageably large is an apt enough description of certain units of government. Expecting an IG to run the whole of the Punjab police is as ludicrous as expecting one administrator or nazim of Karachi to function effectively.
The whole process of rightsizing is going to be a tough slog, requiring much navigation through murky political waters. Before the political will comes through, however, the intellectual arguments for these decisions need to be developed. Anyone listening?