By Aflatoon
I had assumed this would be a column about a U-turn. It is not. It is something better.
Last week the interior minister said the system we live under has collapsed, that problems cannot be solved through it, and that we should consider new administrative units. This week he says the system is not going anywhere and will complete its full constitutional term of five years.
The obvious reading is that he was told to sit down and did. But when he was asked about it directly, he did not withdraw a word. He said he stands by the statement that the system has been completely destroyed. He merely clarified that he meant destroyed over eighty years.
So the position, stated in full, is this: the system is completely destroyed, and it will now govern us competently until 2029.
He is not retreating. He is holding both ends of a rope and calling it a bridge.
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I want to be fair, because there is a coherent argument buried in here and it deserves to be said out loud rather than smuggled past us.
It is roughly: the machinery is bad, the people currently operating it are good, and therefore the answer is not to change the government but to fix the machinery. He said the prime minister works fourteen to sixteen hours a day. He said that if the system improved, results would improve a thousand-fold. He said he would not indict his own government because he is part of it.
That is a real position. It is the position of every reformer who has ever wanted credit for the diagnosis and immunity from the prognosis.
The difficulty is the arithmetic. If eighty years of accumulated ruin can be governed around by a sufficiently diligent cabinet, then the ruin is not the binding constraint and last week’s speech was theatre. If the ruin is the binding constraint, then no amount of sixteen-hour days will help and the five-year term is not a solution but a sentence.
You may have the collapse or you may have the confidence. Charging for both is how we got the eighty years.
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The genuinely interesting sentence has been buried under the argument about the U-turn, as the interesting sentence always is.
He has asked the prime minister to commission a third-party performance review of all federal ministries, with the results made public.
Third party. Not the ministries grading their own homework, which is the exercise already familiar to anyone who has read a Pakistani annual report. Somebody from outside. Published.
That is a serious proposal and I would like it to happen, which is a reliable indicator that it will not. An external assessment measured against outcomes would produce a document nobody in the building could have written about themselves. That is exactly its value and exactly why it will be commissioned slowly, scoped narrowly, and released never.
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In the same interview he volunteered that his own attendance at federal cabinet meetings runs at around seventy per cent.
I have read that sentence several times to be sure I was not being unkind, and I do not think I am. He offered it himself. A man proposing that every ministry be graded by an outsider has pre-emptively disclosed his own attendance record, and it is a C.
I find this endearing rather than damning. It suggests he genuinely believes the exercise is about measurement rather than punishment, which is a naive and rather decent thing to believe, and which is why the review will be strangled long before it reaches anybody’s grade.
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His colleagues were less generous than I am being.
The defence minister suggested he begin the reform inside his own ministry, observing that he has held some of the most powerful offices in the country for three and a half years and could have started earlier. “Better late than never,” he said, which in the PML-N is not a blessing.
Rana Sanaullah made the sharper point: that those who have done well out of the existing system are now the ones announcing it cannot function.
And the minister, asked about the observation that he has covered a thirty-year political journey in three years, said he was “grateful”.
I thought that was the most honest sentence of the week, and I do not believe he intended it as one. A system that carries a man thirty years in three is not a collapsed system. It is a system working extremely well, for a very small number of people, which is a different complaint entirely — and the one he has not made.
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Aflatoon is a satirist and observer of the Pakistani condition. His column, Intellectual Voices, appears in The Pakistan Daily.
