As the 16th National Assembly reaches the close of its first year in power, the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (Pildat) has issued performance evaluations for all the federal ministers based on their work over the past year. Pildat evaluated the candidates based on two key criteria: attendance of ministers in parliament and the amount of time they spoke during parliamentary sessions. Based on these metrics, Pildat judged Senator Azam Nazeer Tarar, the federal minister of law and justice, to be the most influential and effective member of the federal cabinet in terms of his performance in parliament during 2024-2025. He can be credited with the passage of most of the 38 government bills in the National Assembly during the first year, which is believed to be a record for the number of bills passed by any past National Assembly during its first year. His presence in both houses of parliament – National Assembly and the Senate – was found to be the highest by significant margins as he attended 57 per cent of all sittings in the two houses and spoke for more than 17 hours. Following Senator Tarar, though by some distance, is Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif, who attended 44 per cent of parliamentary sittings and spoke for more than five-and-a-half hours, coming in second in both attendance and speaking time. Again, it is hard to think of too many jobs where one can not show up over half the time and still come out second-best in terms of attendance.
That the highest ranked minister in terms of attendance only attended just over half of all sittings does not exactly speak highly of the performance of federal ministers as a group. One can understand that ministers have important duties outside of parliament too. However, the legislature ought to be at the centre of our governance, where the people’s representatives draft, debate and decide how to help their constituents. As such, attending parliament and speaking and working on bills there should consume the majority of a minister’s time. That is, in a democracy that actually works as intended. That the attendance numbers tell a different story suggests that this is not the case. And while it is good to keep track of how often cabinet members are turning up in parliament, this says nothing of the actual quality of the work they did while there.
How effective, useful or beneficial was the record number of bills passed by the 16th National Assembly? More importantly, did parliament actually work to enhance the role of the people in their own governance and protect their fundamental rights? One can get somewhat of an answer to the second question by looking at the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Peca) (Amendment) Act 2025. Passed about a month shy of the 16th National Assembly’s first anniversary, the bill did everything possible to make a law that almost all experts agree seeks to muzzle online speech even more censoriously. After a year in power, the current cabinet could arguably not have given the people a clearer message about where they stand in the governance hierarchy and what it thinks about their rights. Quality issues notwithstanding, the cabinet also appears to have a representation problem. Only one of the 20 ministers is a woman and none of the ministers belongs to a religious minority. Ministers and their colleagues in parliament should aim to turn up more often and actually protect and help the people who voted them into office in their second year. Anything less would be a disservice to the democratic ideals our politicians keep talking about.