In Pakistan, every new government arrives like a marketing team, eager to rebrand, relaunch and repaint, but rarely to repair. From education to energy, healthcare to housing, governance has become a contest of visibility, not vision. What matters is not what works, but what looks good.
Our politics runs on optics. Ministers announce programmes with fanfare, scrap previous ones and rename existing projects to claim credit. Each government runs its own race, chasing short-term applause instead of long-term continuity and the race restarts every five years.
The education sector is the most painful example of this. Every government promises a “revolution in education,” yet each reinvents the wheel instead of building on what came before. The Punjab Education Reform Roadmap, launched in 2011 under Shahbaz Sharif, praised internationally for improving enrollment and monitoring, was quietly shelved after 2018. In Sindh, a World Bank supported school rehabilitation program begun in 2013 stalled midway, leaving hundreds of schools incomplete and teachers unpaid.
When the PTI government took office, it introduced the ‘Single National Curriculum’, noble in intent but launched without consultation or capacity. It became another headline initiative that faltered in execution and faded with the next political shift. Meanwhile, provinces continued to open new universities in politically strategic areas, while older institutions decayed due to a lack of maintenance and research funding.
The same story repeats across other sectors. Health reforms, digitalisation drives and local government systems all meet similar fates. Punjab’s Sehat Sahulat Card, Sindh’s Peoples Primary Healthcare Initiative and KP’s Insaf Health Card offered the same services under different names, parallel systems competing for political credit instead of coordination. Local governments, the backbone of democratic governance, are dissolved or redesigned every few years depending on who occupies the chief minister’s office.
Projects like the Nandipur Power Project, Quaid-e-Azam Solar Park and early CPEC energy schemes were once hailed as ‘game changers’. By 2019, most had been stalled, downsized or placed under review as new governments sought to launch their own signature ventures. Even social programmes such as the Prime Minister’s Youth Program were discontinued, not because they failed, but because they carried the wrong political label. Billions were spent, lessons were learned, yet nothing evolved into a lasting national framework.
Even in moments of crisis, the instinct remains to manage perception rather than reality. The recent floods exposed how fragile our planning and infrastructure truly are. While relief efforts in Punjab were visible and prompt, the focus leaned heavily towards photo opportunities, press briefings and temporary camps rather than long-term resilience. There is still no comprehensive water conservation strategy, no modern flood management system and no coordinated plan to protect rural settlements from future disasters.
Punjab’s annual smog crisis tells a similar story. Each year brings anti-smog campaigns filled with slogans, drones and spray trucks, yet the causes of pollution remain untouched. Policies are announced but seldom enforced. The focus remains on how well the crisis is presented, rather than how effectively it is prevented. The air worsens, the public suffers, and officials move on to the next announcement.
Pakistan’s greatest governance failure is not a lack of talent or resources but the absence of continuity. Every new government dismantles what the previous one built. Institutions do not evolve; they are reset. The result is paralysis disguised as progress, plans that never reach implementation and implementation that never delivers results.
Governance must become generational rather than electoral. Policies should serve the people, not the party in power. A child starting school in 2025 should not be reading a curriculum rewritten in 2026 and forgotten by 2027.
The obsession with optics has cost Pakistan decades of real progress. True leadership requires humility, the willingness to start a reform that another may complete. That is the political maturity Pakistan still awaits.
The writer is a former state minister and former parliamentarian.