Pakistan has been installing investment windows since 1989. Each arrived with an announcement, a mandate, and the implicit promise that the previous window had been the wrong shape. The Board of Investment was the window of 1989. The CPEC Authority was the window of 2019. The Special Investment Facilitation Council was the window of 2023. The BOI–SIFC merger is the window of May 2026, announced on a Saturday, timed to a Prime Minister’s flight to Beijing.

Here is what a window does. It frames a view. It does not create one. You can install the most elegant window imaginable — single-pane, double-pane, arched, with or without a council name engraved on the glass — and what you will see through it is whatever was already there.

Each body was created in response to the inadequacy the current moment had identified, and each carried in its founding logic the seeds of the inadequacy the next moment would identify. This is not a cycle of reform. It is a cycle of reframing.

What the reframing has never touched — what persists, unchanged, beneath each new institutional surface — is the room on the other side of the window. It contains institutions that do not coordinate with one another. Not because no one has thought of co-ordination — co-ordination has been thought of many times, and the co-ordination mechanisms have themselves become bodies that do not co-ordinate with the other co-ordination mechanisms.

After the 18th Amendment devolved regulatory authority to the provinces, an investor who obtains federal approval still requires separate clearances from four provincial governments, each with its own land records, its own environmental authority, its own timeline, and its own political economy of who gets approvals and when.

This province-centre misalignment was, in fact, one of the stated premises of SIFC. An Apex Committee meeting convenes the people who have failed to build provincial capacity and asks them to make faster decisions in the same environment that produced the failure in the first place. The Constitution does not bend for Saturday announcements. SIFC’s enabling legislation empowers it to direct federal bodies only. Provinces can decline — and do. The coordination problem is solved by a legislated Federal–Provincial Investment Co-ordination Framework with defined timelines and shared revenue incentives that give provinces a financial stake in investment attraction. That instrument has not been built.

Projects that would attract Gulf capital — in agriculture, minerals, logistics — require provincial land clearances and regulatory consistency that the current framework cannot reliably deliver

Projects that would attract Gulf capital — in agriculture, minerals,........

© The Friday Times