Mohsin Naqvi's declaration that Pakistan's governance system has collapsed was not a diagnosis. It was a confession. At the Pakistan Economic Summit on 30 July 2026, the Interior Minister said what millions of Pakistanis live daily: the state cannot solve its own basic problems. Shehbaz Sharif's marathon work schedule, in Naqvi's own words, is firefighting, not governance. His solution: new provinces, carved out by locking political parties in a room until they agree. He also warned that a generation denied merit and opportunity — his now-notorious "cockroaches" line — could one day overturn the whole order.

What matters is not what Naqvi said. It is who said it. He is not a critic outside the system. He is the Interior Minister, a central figure in the hybrid arrangement that has run Pakistan since April 2022. Najam Sethi has noted that even the DG ISPR now concedes governance has failed. The admission has moved from the op-ed pages into the power structure itself.

That is a serious contradiction. Naqvi is not observing state failure from a distance. His ministry sits at the centre of it. Balochistan remains a battlefield. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa continues to bleed from militant attacks and cross-border instability. The former tribal districts are still not integrated into the state. After decades of operations and billions spent, the state still cannot secure or administer these areas. If the model has failed, Naqvi cannot just diagnose it. He has to answer for it.

The responses from PPP and PML-N exposed the real problem: the parties that govern Pakistan depend on the very system that has failed it. The PPP treated the new-provinces idea as a threat to Sindh's political turf, not as a governance question. That is not an accident. Any honest reckoning with state failure threatens the patronage networks PPP has run in Sindh since 2008.

PML-N's response was quieter but........

© The Friday Times