Private service

Over the last decade, there has been a fundamental change in the way Punjab’s governance has been run. Around 56 public-private corporations were created under former Punjab CM Shahbaz Sharif to conduct tasks that were already being performed by government departments. Serving bureaucrats and members of the Punjab Assembly have been appointed to head these corporations, enjoying extra powers as well as salary perks that matched the private sector. Over the last few months, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has begun to question the practice. Its current orders remain specific to recovering the extra salaries paid to officials serving on these companies. In October 2017, the auditor general of Pakistan began an investigation into alleged corruption in the said companies, followed by a NAB investigation into the failure to meet public procurement rules. Seventeen of the companies did not submit their records once the investigations started. It is encouraging to see that the matter has been taken up, but it remains to be seen whether this will lead to anything more than asking bureaucrats to return their salaries. The salaries issue is a more complex one than it is being made out to be. In principle, the salaries should be ‘legal’ if the Punjab government checked the paperwork and made the correct legislative changes to allow for these public-private companies to be created – and subsequently amended the service rules for civil servants in the province.

While around three dozen Punjab bureaucrats have agreed to return the extra part of their salaries, one could question whether this is the right way to go about it when the enterprises they served in have not been declared illegal. Maybe a debate over whether these companies are legal entities or not is more warranted. There are significant grounds for questioning why these were created when the same tasks could have been performed by the existing government departments, but this would involve a critique of the overall narrative of the privatisation of public services. The question to be asked: is it illegal to privatise public services? More specifically, are these public-private enterprises illegal entities? Were they merely a shift in governance strategies? The outgoing Punjab government would make the claim that it is the later, which corresponds to the logic that the private sector is better at service delivery than the public sector. Whatever one’s position on this logic, one would wonder if this is a decision that the executive branch is authorised to take. The salaries issue is an easy one for the public to be enraged over, but it would be good to see the judiciary take on the legality of this entire enterprise.