At this week's wide-ranging press briefing, DG ISPR said something few Pakistanis would dispute: good governance is the key to security and stability. He went further. “If good governance requires an administrative reset, then let that happen,” he said, provided it is done through constitutional and legal methods and “as per the will of the people.” Days earlier, the Interior Minister, Mohsin Naqvi, had floated the creation of new provinces. Between the two statements, a familiar idea is finding its way back into the national conversation: that Pakistan's governance crisis is, at bottom, a problem of maps. Redraw enough boundaries, multiply enough units, and the state will finally deliver.
The premise deserves agreement. The definition does not. Good governance is not an undefined slogan. The World Bank has measured it for three decades: accountability, rule of law, control of corruption, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, political stability, and voice. Read the whole list, then notice what is missing. Nobody asks how many provinces a country has. Governance is not an administrative-engineering problem, and it cannot be produced by cartography.
The Illusion of Division
A province that cannot collect its property tax, staff its schools, or audit its own accounts does not become governable by being cut in half. What division reliably produces is more government: two governors, two cabinets, two secretariats, two assemblies, in time two high courts, and two full sets of protocol, plots, and perks. In a country asking its citizens to embrace austerity, the least credible reform is one whose first and most certain consequence is a larger state to finance.
Nor is redistricting the unfinished business of our federal system. That distinction belongs to Article 140A of the Constitution: elected local governments with real money and real authority. In years of advising provincial governments on infrastructure and PPP frameworks, I have yet to encounter one, of any party, eager to pass its powers downwards. Every province wants devolution from Islamabad, and none wants it from itself. We have not exhausted the constitutional architecture we already possess; we have simply declined to use it.
So where does good governance actually begin? With accountability—every holder of public power answering for its exercise, accounts audited and published, public accounts committees functioning, and no institution's budget or commercial ventures beyond parliamentary scrutiny. With transparency in procurement and right-to-information laws that are honoured rather than exhausted. With laws that bind the powerful as firmly as the powerless. With appointments made on competence rather than loyalty, in the civil service, in the regulators, and in state-owned enterprises whose annual losses now exceed the federal development budget. And with austerity practised first by the state upon itself, before sacrifice is demanded of the citizen. None of this requires a constitutional amendment. It requires something scarcer: the willingness of those who hold public power to be answerable for it.
Above all, good governance is respect for the voter. Governance derives its legitimacy from consent, and consent is measured at the ballot box, nowhere else. This is where the hybrid arrangement of recent years fails the most elementary test. A system in which elected governments formally hold office while decisive authority is perceived to reside elsewhere breaks the chain of accountability at both ends: citizens cannot sanction those who actually decide, and those they can sanction do not actually decide. The spokesman himself, to his credit, said that decisions on new provinces “rest solely with the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.” The principle is correct. It is also much bigger than provincial boundaries. It applies with equal force to economic policy, public appointments, foreign affairs, and the ordinary business of governing, every single day.
The True Meaning of Loyalty
The briefing also invoked Article 5, loyalty to the state as the basic duty of the citizen. As a lawyer, I would respectfully suggest reading the provision in full. Article 5(2) declares obedience to the Constitution and the law the “inviolable obligation” of every citizen, and, by necessary implication, of every institution exercising constitutional authority.
The fundamental rights in Chapter 1 are not rewards for good behaviour; they are the conditions on which the state is permitted to exercise power at all. In a constitutional republic, loyalty is owed first to the constitutional order, not to any office or institution within it.
Investors price constitutional risk before they price taxation - every experiment that blurs the line between elected authority and unelected influence adds basis points to every megawatt, every motorway, and every port this country hopes to finance
Nor should the security argument be asked to carry more weight than it can bear. Pakistan owes a real debt to the soldiers and civilians lost this year, and the tempo of operations reflects the burden our forces carry. But two decades of kinetic campaigns have taught us that insurgencies are not defeated by force alone, because the problem in Balochistan is not geographical. It is political. A young Baloch's grievance is not answered by placing him in a smaller province. It is answered when his vote is counted as cast, when jobs and contracts are won on merit, when royalties are published and audited, and when representatives who are genuinely his sit in the rooms where decisions are made.
Inclusiveness is not the soft companion of security policy; it is one of its foundations.
The Commercial Cost of Constitutional Risk
There is a hard commercial point here too. I have spent twenty-five years papering power plants, pipelines, and toll roads, in Pakistan and well beyond it, and the first question a lender asks is never the size of the province. It is whether the rules signed in year one will still mean the same thing in year twenty of a thirty-year concession. Investors price constitutional risk before they price taxation. Every experiment that blurs the line between elected authority and unelected influence adds basis points to every megawatt, every motorway, and every port this country hopes to finance.
So yes, let there be an administrative reset. But let it begin where the Constitution already points. Hold local government elections everywhere and devolve genuine authority under Article 140A. Publish the audited accounts of every public body, without exception. Fill public offices through open, merit-based processes. Make procurement competitive and visible. Cut the state's expenditure on itself before touching the citizen's plate. Not one of these reforms needs a new line on the map.
ISPR was right that the governance debate belongs to the politicians. Let them lead it in substance, then, and not merely in name. The will of the people is not a flourish to be appended to a proposal; it has a precise constitutional address, and that address is the ballot box. Good governance in Pakistan begins on the day every institution of the state accepts, without reservation, what the people say there.