EDITORIAL: On Friday, the federal cabinet approved a summary to increase the salaries of federal ministers, ministers of state and advisers by 188 percent.
This decision comes after the Prime Minister’s decision to more than double the cabinet strength late last month – from 21 to 55 which now consists of 30 federal ministers, nine ministers of state, four special assistants, four advisers and eight special assistants to the prime minister.
There is a concern that with more than three appointees attached to some ministries, each belonging to a different political persuasion, the syndrome of too many cooks may spoil the broth may be activated.
An example of this is Mohsin Naqvi as the Interior Minister, Talal Chaudhary as the Minister of State on Interior and Pervez Khattak as the Advisor to the Prime Minister on Interior.
Political pundits, however, maintain, perhaps with a greater degree of credibility, that the increase reflects a continuation of the policy of patronage, commonly referred to as recompense for extending key support.
Many of the cabinet members are not elected members of parliament, or selected in the Senate by the party leadership, yet it is relevant to note that the raise for cabinet members will be over and above the 200 percent increase in the salary of members of national assembly members after the bill titled “members of parliament (salaries and allowances) amendment bill 2025” was unanimously passed by the assembly, including Opposition members, in February 2025 with the justification that the increase would bring the salaries of parliamentarians at par with that of federal secretaries at 519,000 rupees every month.
These decisions by parliamentarians and the Cabinet, at a time when the fiscal space is extremely narrow evident from the unrealistic revenue targets - a rise of 40 percent in collections this year compared to the year before - with the growth rate continuing to be held hostage to the severely contractionary fiscal policies being implemented by the authorities with International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) concurrence.
This leads to an obvious conclusion: this was certainly not the right time to support such a massive raise for public representatives and cabinet members who, on average, have incomes enjoyed by the top five percent of Pakistanis.
And if one adds the 44 percent poverty levels prevailing in the country today, one is utterly baffled as to the seeming disregard of the country’s elected representatives to the plight of the people of this country.
Questions are also being raised as to whether these unjustified decisions were the reason behind the IMF’s refusal to allow the Prime Minister to announce a tariff reduction on 23 March – a pledge that was made through a press release by the Prime Minister on 15 March, the day after the departure of the IMF team to undertake the first review of the ongoing programme ended without reaching a staff level agreement, a requisite to tranche disbursement.
The Prime Minister’s statement claimed that “the financial space created by oil price adjustments and other financial measures is being carefully utilised to craft a robust relief package.”
The raise in salaries as well as doubling of the cabinet will be a very small portion of the total budget outlay for the year, 18.877 trillion rupees, yet there is widespread anger within the public as such measures show a complete lack of empathy with the electorate.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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