Let’s be honest: Pakistan’s system of government currently resembles a family WhatsApp group where everyone has admin rights, nobody agrees on anything and the group keeps getting renamed after every crisis. We’ve tried parliamentary democracy, military rule and democracy-with-a-military-chaperone and somehow we always end up in the same place, a handful of powerful men deciding the fate of 240 million people over tea.

Maybe it’s time to try something else. Here’s the pitch: a presidential system, fourteen provinces instead of four, performance-based autonomy, a muscular local government, a bureaucracy that remembers it’s supposed to serve people and a federal referee independent enough to stop chief ministers from running their provinces like personal kingdoms.

The Problem With Four Big Provinces

Four provinces sounds neat on a map, but in practice it’s like giving four people the keys to a house with forty rooms and no floor plan. Punjab alone has more people than most countries, which means whoever runs it isn’t really a Chief Minister, he’s basically a head of state with better security and worse accountability.

Breaking the country into roughly fourteen provinces isn’t about drawing new lines for fun. It’s about making governance........

© Pakistan Observer