The world is heading toward an era of economic development and prosperity. The third countries are changing their policies to keep up pace with the developed economies, but the governments in Pakistan, whether the federal or the provincial, have failed to take revolutionized approaches to deal with emerging situations. The aged-old colonial legacy is dominating in every government department where the senior officials are only interested in drawing hefty perks and salaries without fulfilling their official responsibilities while the lower staff is underpaid and lethargic and has no ability to work in proper manner.
The political leadership has its own merits and demerits as well as limitations. What Pakistan needs to do is to overhaul the entire official system and engage educationists, technocrats and economists to encourage holding of regular workshops and seminars for the capacity building of the government officials. A comprehensive reforms programme is the need of the hour, covering social, political, economic and industrial sectors. In the current situation, the government only works to comply with the IMF and World Bank conditionalities. The worst part of the situation is that, it wants to meet the requirements of the donor agencies through official circulars without devising a proper mechanism to implement its policies.
According to newspaper reports, referring to a vast pool of natural resources, a strategic geographical location and a large number of population comprising young generation, World Trade Organisation (WTO) Deputy Director General Frederick Yonov Agah says that the country needs to introduce reforms and adopt appropriate policies to utilize all its potentials. He says that the challenges before the government are to improve business climate, liberalize trade regime and try to make a close liaison with the global economic community. He says though it is up to the member states to remove non-tariff barriers, a number of tariffs have been reduced all over the world and even some countries have opted for unilateral liberalization of their economies.
As a matter of fact, all the problems can be described in one sentence. Pakistan needs to enhance capacity building of the government officials through rigorous reforms not only for business, trade and investment activities, but also for the official hierarchy. If there is security problem, it needs to enhance capacity of the civil law enforcement agencies such as police department while capacity of the civil intelligence agencies also needs to be enhanced. Most of the terrorism incidents occurred due to intelligence failure. Therefore, apart from enhancing capacity of the officials, all the forces are needed to be depoliticized.
