Unease within cabinet over lack of reforms

ISLAMABAD: Frustration is growing within the Nawaz Sharif cabinet over the government’s failure to pursue the much-needed reform agenda and sack the non-performing ministers.
Background interactions with some members of the federal cabinet saw them putting the entire blame on the prime minister for doing nothing to improve the governance through reforms and better check and balance system.
Like ordinary souls and media persons, these cabinet members are also unable to understand why the prime minister is not implementing the reform agenda, which is critical for institution building as well as improving the governance.
“People would feel the change only when they would see an improvement in their routine contacts with government departments, police, revenue authorities etc,” a cabinet source said, lamenting: “But unfortunately this is not happening.”
The cabinet source said that the political will to carry out reforms is sadly missing; in two years the Nawaz Sharif government has not introduced and implemented any reform announcing the Citizen’s Feedback Monitoring Programme (CFMP), which remains unimplemented despite the lapse of almost eight months for want of Rs1 billion.
The prime minister had directed in October 2014 the implementation of the CFMP scheme in all service delivery departments of the federal government to fight petty corruption, enhance citizens’ trust and communicate state responsiveness. The objective of this reform was to improve service delivery in all the federal government departments, including CDA, police, civil administration, Sui Gas, Wapda, power distribution companies, Nadra, Passport Office, etc, for ordinary citizens.
Nawaz Sharif has not yet removed even a single cabinet member for poor performance. During one of his initial cabinet meetings, he had indicated that the performance of the ministers would be assessed upon the completion of 100 days and on a regular basis thereafter. During the later part of 2014, the prime minister announced initiation of self-accountability to improve the performance of the government. For this purpose a special meeting of the federal cabinet was convened on October 28, 2014 but nothing happened thereafter.
Media had reported that the prime minister had asked the Raja Zafarul Haq and Zafar Jhagra to assist the cabinet in this review but practically nothing was done. Ahsan Iqbal is on the record to have stated, “PML-N is going to introduce a new culture in Pakistani politics and hold its federal cabinet accountable. For the first time, the ruling party’s chairman, secretary general and other senior leaders will assess the performance of the cabinet and the ministries.”
But the promised self-accountability exercise never took off.Following last year’s PTI and PAT sit-ins, the rulers had claimed to have realised that without performance and reforms it was hard for the government to survive. But the post-dharna situation proves the government has not learnt any lesson.