It’s also not entirely coincidental that certain television channels, run by owners who made their first fortunes in real estate and construction, cover every new secretariat launch with an enthusiasm that never quite extends to, say, a village still waiting for a functioning school.

It’s rewriting the revenue law that still runs on colonial discretion, giving local governments real budgets they don’t have to beg for, and making sure a new government job is filled on merit rather than connections or cash.

Rewriting the law that every office, old or new, ultimately answers to is the harder job, and it doesn’t come with a ribbon to cut or a photograph for the next morning’s papers.

There’s an old trick governments in poor countries never seem to tire of: when you can’t afford to fix a problem, you open an office for it instead. I think of this every time I remember a morning in 2020, when a brand-new secretariat opened its doors in Multan. There were garlands, a motorcade long enough to stop traffic for half an hour, and the usual speeches about a historic day and the long-overdue end of southern Punjab’s neglect. A few miles away, in some village nobody’s motorcade was passing through, a farmer was still standing in line at the same old revenue office, trying to get a plot of inherited land transferred into his name under a law written in 1967 — a law that, on inspection, still runs on the same discretionary logic the British left behind. The secretariat got its ribbon cut. The law under which it operates did not get touched. Five years on, nobody has published anything resembling an audit of what actually changed for ordinary people in health, schooling, or access to justice in that region. I’ve looked. I haven’t found one. That gap between the ceremony and the ledger is, I think, the whole story of how Pakistan’s new-provinces debate has been quietly rerouted onto........

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