A New Map, Old Shareholders

There’s an old trick governments in poor countries never seem to tire of: when you can’t afford to fix a problem, you open an office for it instead.
I think of this every time I remember a morning in 2020, when a brand-new secretariat opened its doors in Multan. There were garlands, a motorcade long enough to stop traffic for half an hour, and the usual speeches about a historic day and the long-overdue end of southern Punjab’s neglect. A few miles away, in some village nobody’s motorcade was passing through, a farmer was still standing in line at the same old revenue office, trying to get a plot of inherited land transferred into his name under a law written in 1967 — a law that, on inspection, still runs on the same discretionary logic the British left behind. The secretariat got its ribbon cut. The law under which it operates did not get touched. Five years on, nobody has published anything resembling an audit of what actually changed for ordinary people in health, schooling, or access to justice in that region. I’ve looked. I haven’t found one.
That gap between the ceremony and the ledger is, I think, the whole story of how Pakistan’s new-provinces debate has been quietly rerouted onto cheaper, safer terrain. Creating an actual province means clearing Article 239 of the constitution — a two-thirds vote in both houses of parliament plus the relevant provincial assembly, a threshold high enough that any government attempting it has to answer for it in public, for years, on the record. Creating a secretariat means one signature on one notification. And what one signature creates, another signature — from a different government, with a different agenda — can just as easily erase. So the pressure that builds up around a genuine demand for provincial status gets vented off through something smaller: a building, a commissioner, a handful of new job titles for local politicians to hand out. Nobody ever has to actually answer the harder question of whether the province should exist. This isn’t a new script. Lord Curzon reached for exactly the same word — “administrative” — when he split Bengal in 1905, and reached for it so unconvincingly that the decision collapsed within six years under the weight of its own pretext. The difference now is that nobody imposes this from a viceroy’s desk anymore. It arrives wearing the language of democratic process, which if anything makes it harder to challenge, because you can’t easily accuse a notification of bad faith when it was signed by an elected minister rather than a colonial governor.
Here’s the question that tends to get skipped in polite conversation about all this: who is actually lining up for these new offices? Pakistan has grown, over the last two or three decades, a fairly specific kind of new money — men who turned agricultural land into housing schemes almost overnight, chains of private schools that rebranded themselves as universities somewhere around their third campus, media groups whose owners arrived from construction and property rather than journalism. None of this is wealth built on manufacturing or export or anything that shows up as productive capacity in an economic survey. It’s wealth built on being close to whoever controls a stamp, a permit, or a zoning decision. And people who make money that way eventually want something money alone can’t buy: a formal seat at the table. A secretariat, a development authority, a new divisional office — each one is really a small factory for producing exactly what this class wants. Postings to hand out. Land files that need new signatures. Contracts that need new approval. None of it requires winning an election. It only requires being in the room when the paperwork is drafted. Power, in this arrangement, isn’t being decentralised at all. It’s just being repackaged, and everyone claps at the unveiling.
The obvious objection here is fair enough: doesn’t a closer office at least count for something? Sure — but proximity and reform aren’t the same achievement, and it’s worth being honest about the difference. If your bank opened a branch two streets from your house but kept the same manager, the same interest rate, and the same habit of turning down your loan application without explanation, you haven’t gained a better bank. You’ve gained a shorter walk to the same rejection.
It also helps to remember who has historically drawn Pakistan’s internal boundaries, because it’s rarely been parliament acting alone. From the One Unit scheme of 1955 through to today’s secretariat-building, the country’s administrative map has consistently been shaped by hands that don’t stand for election, and the newly wealthy classes described above have tended to grow up in the shade of those same hands. So when those circles turn out to be enthusiastic sponsors of a new administrative unit, coincidence isn’t the first explanation that comes to mind. It looks a good deal more like a mechanism for converting capital into formal status without disturbing the authority of provincial assemblies or established political parties in any serious way. It’s also not entirely coincidental that certain television channels, run by owners who made their first fortunes in real estate and construction, cover every new secretariat launch with an enthusiasm that never quite extends to, say, a village still waiting for a functioning school.
That mismatch — between how loudly a province gets promised and how quickly the promise disappears the moment its promisers leave office — is not an accident either. Whichever party tables a resolution for a new province while campaigning walks away from it within a year of losing power, as though the subject had never come up. The slogan did its job at the ballot box. It was never designed to survive contact with governance.
None of this means there’s no honest way forward — only that nobody with the power to take it has been in a hurry to try. The provincial autonomy granted by the Eighteenth Amendment mostly stopped at the doors of provincial capitals; district and tehsil governments are still starved of both money and authority years later. The actual fix isn’t another secretariat. It’s rewriting the revenue law that still runs on colonial discretion, giving local governments real budgets they don’t have to beg for, and making sure a new government job is filled on merit rather than connections or cash. These reforms would close the exact door the newly rich keep walking through — a door the current system has left open for decades, quite possibly on purpose.
Drawing new lines on a map will always be the easier move, which is presumably why it keeps happening. Rewriting the law that every office, old or new, ultimately answers to is the harder job, and it doesn’t come with a ribbon to cut or a photograph for the next morning’s papers. But it’s probably the only version of this reform that would actually be worth the fuss made over it.