Civil service reforms now left to politicians

ISLAMABAD: After the departure of Dr Ishrat Hussain, the PTI government’s chief reformer, politicians representing the Imran Khan cabinet will now decide the fate of civil service reforms.

Ishrat Hussain, Adviser to the prime minister on civil service reforms, has recently tendered his resignation, which Imran Khan is yet to accept. The departure of Hussain will leave the fate of the civil service reforms with the Shafqat Mehmood-led cabinet committee.

Government sources say that the cabinet committee on civil service reforms will now meet once a week to deliberate upon the changes required in the bureaucratic structure. The sub-committee, headed by education minister Shafqat Mehmood, includes cabinet members Pervez Khattak, Khusro Bakhtiar, Fakhar Imam and Shahzad Arbab. Except Shahzad Arbab, the PM’s special assistant on establishment who is a retired secretary, all the others are politicians.

The Dr Ishrat Hussain-led task force on civil service reforms will cease to exist as soon as Hussain leaves the government. The PM’s adviser in his resignation has indicated his unavailability with effect from September 1, 2021.

A government source claims that the prime minister is reluctant to see Hussain depart but the latter is of the view that he has completed his work, which has already been approved by the cabinet as well, and now it is for the government to implement the approved reforms.

Independent sources, however, insist that the ministers and their ministries have been the major hurdle in the implementation of many of the reforms that the Dr Ishrat Hussain-led task force came up with and got approved from the cabinet. Hussain was frustrated because of the lack of political will required to implement the reforms already approved.

Now, however, the entire civil service reform agenda and its implementation will be dependent on the cabinet committee dominated by politicians. Although Dr Ishrat has got several reform proposals approved, the main issue of the politicization of the civil bureaucracy remains unattended.

For the appointment of federal secretaries and heads of government institutions, a procedure has been approved and adopted but the tenure of most government servants still remains insecure. The lack of security of tenure is, however, at an all-time high in Buzdar-led Punjab where officials from secretaries of departments to key field officers--including commissioners, deputy commissioners, police officers and others--are changed frequently on the whims of politicians.

The police department is also politicized like never before and there is now no one either at the federal or provincial level in Punjab to reform the police. After coming to power, Prime Minister Imran Khan had assigned former IG Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Nasir Durrani, who recently passed away due to Covid-19, the task of reforming the police, mainly in Punjab.

Durrani, however, opted to resign after having been disappointed at the frequent transfer of provincial police chiefs in Punjab. Later, a committee under Punjab Law Minister Raja Basharat was assigned to continue the task but it too never produced any report and consequently the police remained politicized and unchanged.

In its manifesto, the PTI had committed to enforce the depoliticization of the police by building upon KP’s successful police reform model, which was to be replicated nationally. The PTI manifesto admitted that the police in Pakistan is ill-equipped, poorly trained, deeply politicised, and chronically corrupt. It lamented that police reforms had been neglected by successive governments that continued to use the force as a political tool.

It promised to reform the police by replicating the KP Police Act of 2017 across other provinces and appoint professional inspector generals to lead the depoliticization of the police as in KP ; professionalize police hiring and career management, ensuring no political influence on policing in all matters from the hiring, posting, and transfer of personnel; replicate KP’s success in creating specialised training institutions.

It was said that the PTI would also invest in new policing systems and processes by tracking performance, equipping districts with modern surveillance/command and control centres. A lot more was pledged but the manifesto promises remain unfulfilled to this day.