With five advisers and 18 special assistants to Prime Minister (SAPM), all of whom are unelected, in addition to 27 elected ministers, the PTI’s federal cabinet is no doubt a little overcrowded. Although there is no restriction as such on the PM appointing his advisers and special assistants, it can be frowned upon when the number almost equals that of elected members. The inclusion of three advisers in the Cabinet Committee on Privatisation (CCoP) was…
Posts published in “Pak Media comment”
It seems that the government has been forced to learn the lesson that, when an issue is being hotly contested in the public sphere, it is better to err on the side of caution when making public appointments. The federal government must have counted it as a loss to the privatisation process when on Monday, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) set aside the notification regarding the formation of the Cabinet Committee on Privatisation (CCoP) and…
The writer is former governor Sindh and former minister for privatisation.If we start comparing the overall economic environment between the PML-N’s last government and the PTI’s current regime, we see that the PML-N’s five-year period could be summed up as a period of high growth, increasing per capita GDP, low inflation, low interest rates, unemployment decreasing consistently, poverty reduction on a consistent basis, increasing tax revenues, and a booming stock market and higher investments. This…
Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), a think-tank established at Karachi in 1957 and accorded the status of an autonomous research organization by the Government of Pakistan in 1964, has projected some rather disturbing trends due to Covid-19: job losses of 18.5 million subject to the intensity of the pandemic in an earlier bulletin and more recently upping the job losses in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa relative to Sindh and Balochistan. Vice Chancellor Nadeem ul…
AS expected, the country’s consolidated fiscal deficit — the gap between the government’s income and expenditure — is increasing by the month. It expanded to 1.7pc of GDP in the first four months (July-October) of the present fiscal year, up by 17pc from a year ago, according to new economic data released recently by the federal finance ministry. The size of the deficit would have been a bit higher at around 2pc had the provinces…
Had the same incident occurred in some other country, it would have made front-page leads and led to a national outcry. But we are a people that are almost immune to the loss of life of our own citizens. This is what we saw at the Khyber Teaching Hospital in Peshawar on Saturday night, when six patients died due to a failure in the supply of oxygen and a decline in oxygen levels available to…
It is rare for Prime Minister Imran Khan to take note of any social problem other than corruption. After spending half his tenure, Mr Khan suddenly realised on Monday that there are seven million drug addicts in the country and there is a need to devise a strategy to check drug abuse among youth. However he again unnecessarily bracketed the issue with corruption. “Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) and National Accountability Bureau (NAB) alone cannot curb use…
The Prime Minister recently said the government would soon introduce a tough new anti-drug policy. While he gave no definitive timeline for when the new policy would be presented, some details were on offer. These included taking the input of the education and health ministries, and very likely the Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) — since he was speaking at the inauguration of the ANF’s new headquarters. A positive detail was that the government would focus on…
What can be seen as a major accomplishment by the armed forces in keeping our borders secure, the Army is now only two months away from completely fencing the Durand Line. This was a mammoth task; over 2600 kilometres of tough terrain had to be canvassed, with a consistent issue of having to contend with both the treacherous mountain area and the threat of militants crossing over from the western front. This has taken three…
The writer is a former senator and currently adviser to CM Sindh.On my first day of law school in September 2004, the professor for Public Law informed us that there are three pillars of government: executive; legislature and judiciary. And that, for a functional democratic state, there has to be separation of powers within these three pillars. This appeared to be a pedantic concept in 2004, when General Musharraf’s hybrid regime was in power and…
Unelected aides: Editorial in Dawn, 09 Dec 2020
THE judiciary on Monday threw a spanner in the works of the privatisation process. But the principle on which it based its decision is a sound one that embodies the spirit of democracy. In a short order, the Islamabad High Court ruled that unelected advisers and special assistants could not head government committees. It thereby set aside the notification of the formation of the cabinet committee on privatisation headed by Adviser to the Prime Minister…