As long as I remember, Pakistan has been a developing country. Regardless of our immense desire to see our name amongst the developed and already progressed nations, we have not been able to get rid of the third world label. Around 2010 to 2012, Pakistan was on the brink of economic default since the buoyancy of country was being tested by the sustainability challenges increasingly exacerbated due to terrorism, corruption and internal political dissensions. Pakistan did great in tackling terrorism which slowly waned probably due to successful kinetic operations and societal rejection of terrorist narrative. On the economic front the previously flashing red indicators gradually turned amber and subsequently green. Although the spikes of high and low could be seen on the country’s economic graph, yet some of the present day indicators have shown positive trends while others are also expected to improve in due course of time. Besides this, since the international financial institutions have started to express an enhanced level of confidence on economic management of the country, our hopes are being raised.
Notwithstanding all the claimed positive developments, the entire system of governance in countrystill falls short of the desired average. However, the present government cannot be blamed alone for this. All the sectors including macroeconomic environment,health and primary education, higher education and training, technological readiness infrastructure, financial market development, goods market efficiency, labour market, efficiency market size, business sophistication and innovation etc show an adverse picture of governance at provincial as well as national level. International reports have negatively commented on the governance aspects in Pakistan while the society at large has always been critical on government management aspects, painting a dismal scene about poor implementation of policies by government.
Extremely weak institutional coordination at every level among the implementing partners i.e. public and non-government and civil society organizations, remains a conspicuous feature of this failure. While government’s bad performance cannot be ignored, the civil society also did very little to assist the government and could not get integrated into the overall plan. Although most of CSOs, NGOs, not for profit and media organizations remained indifferent in this regard. The list of governance caveats is long and would require to be dealt in another column. All these issues related to governance shall remain outstanding until and unless a framework is devised to align the government with its governance partners in political, economic, social and other domains.
The prime reason for governance failure in Pakistan is the lack of a durable performance management system in the country. It is understood that response to majority of issues related to governance rests in the challenges connected to political, social or economic and many other domains. Thus the government needs aninstitutionalized performance management model before it could propose generic approach to overcome these governance challenges in each of above domains. It is clear that without improvement in processes and smoothening the system, governance cannot be improved. A digital comprehensive national level system augmented by well-designed softwares would be required to monitor thegovernance. A system would be mandatory to link all the government and public setups including the ongoing projects and their KPIs (key performance indicators) to ensure growth in right direction. Performance of each sector would be required to be registered and recorded while ensuring the application of corrections where necessary. The principal “Incentive for good and correction for bad performance” would be required to be adopted. This may call for overhauling the entire governance process and may thus need extensive lobbying within the government, with other political parties and society at large.
It is clear that without improvement in processes and smoothening the system, governance cannot be improved. A digital comprehensive national level system augmented by well-designed softwares would be required to monitor the governance
While the government engineers one of the models to manage performance, foremost challenge in this would be to develop the measuring scale of performance for each of department, organization or sector. It is a tricky affairs since selection of performance dimensions for each sector might be different while they should lead to exactly measure of efficiency, less efficiency or inefficiency. Besides, measuring the performance of an organization by a single category of metrics might not be sufficient.
Public perspective would definitely be one of the dimensions to gauge the performance but while working on management model, it also needs to be considered that not everything can be measured through tangible KPIs. So at times instead of developing and monitoring KPIs, management of particular identifiable risks is undertaken. It is sometimes better to identify the hurdles in achievement of the objectives and address them. Assessment and rating of performance on ministry, departmental and sub-departmental level is required to be introduced. Assessment systems used by developed countries can provide guidance while designing this. A lot has been done in the countries like Malaysia in this regard which can be used as a precedence.
Several decades have passed after Pakistan achieved the desired individuality as a free country, however the country still remains under-developed. Without introducing a system of governance and efficient management in the country, welfare of people cannot be ensured as promised. Road to become a welfare state will never lead to any destination of our liking without streamlining the government processes and systems. Good governance is the only meaningful way to positively influence the lives of people. From friction of economic differences that exist between these social divisions to rampant corruption, from child labour to gender discrimination, from domestic violence to unaddressed problems related to youth and from poor socio-economic conditions to social extremism, good governance remains a compulsory part of every resolution to the problems we are facing today.
A strong political will would be required and the complacent attitude that unfortunately occupies every government in Pakistan, needs to be shunned away to improve governance in Pakistan. Let’s hope to see present government coming up with a plan to bring forth a governance management system that would guide the nation to the glory that our founding fathers once dreamt about.
The writer is a versatile analyst and a speaker on contemporary issues