EDITORIAL: The prime minister’s decision to award performance-based certificates to 10 ministers has drawn considerable flak from the opposition as well as sections of the press, but while it may be appreciated as a step in earnest, it is unusual and in all likelihood divisive and counter-productive. Officers in government service that form the civil bureaucracy are regularly graded, after all, without which it would not be possible to tell which must advance first and be placed in more important positions than others. So why not do the same but to then announce it publicly may well be seen as an exercise in naming and shaming.
Perhaps it was the rather arbitrary nature of the exercise that drew more criticism than praise than the decision to review performance itself. And it does seem as if the prime minister went more with his own gut feeling than a formula that has been developed and is going to be applied to all ministries going forward. There is also the feeling all this was more about ministers than their ministries, and also to give the media something new to play with just when it was full of unfavourable news for the government.
It’s also very interesting that some of the most important ministries did not make it to the top 10, like foreign affairs and finance, leaving it to the people to decipher it themselves; whether it was because the others were so much better or these were just not good enough.
The foreign minister, Shah Mahmud Qureshi, promptly dispatched a missive to the Special Assistant to the prime minister, Arbab Shahzad, questioning the criteria and criticizing the method employed for adjudging the foreign ministry. Since both interpretations paint very different pictures about the working of some of the most important arms of the government, a little clarity would not have harmed anybody at all.
Besides, the PM’s recent tweets have been full of praise for the finance minister as he negotiated the resumption of the Extended Fund Facility (EFF). One would have expected, then, that Shaukat Tarin would be somewhere near Murad Saeed on the list. Yet he’s nowhere to be seen.
There’s no doubt that this idea should be refined and made a regular part of official proceedings but not made into an exercise of naming and shaming cabinet members. Lately, the government has been obsessed with downplaying the opposition rather than amplifying its own game. For, even has he distributed certificates and waxed eloquent about this new idea, the PM could not help drag the opposition to the centre of the debate and then go on and on about how all that is wrong is actually their fault.
One sincerely hopes that the opposition is not right about the PM being happier with ministers that sledge on the field than those that simply concern themselves with the scoreboard and the asking rate.
It almost beggars belief that nobody in the government, all the way up to the prime minister, has yet realised that the good-offence-is-the-best-defence strategy has completely failed. They didn’t learn it after losing a string of local bodies polls and by-elections.
And they’re not learning it as people have begun jeering their senior leaders in public. Being determined and staying the course is one thing, but refusing to read the writing on the wall is quite another; especially for an administration that must have set the record for, and takes pride in, taking U-turns.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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